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

by Burleigh, Michael

  8. PARACHUTE THE ESCARGOT: INDOCHINA

  France’s Vietnam War

  In the late 1940s the Viet Minh made the arduous transition from a hit-and-run guerrilla force into a regular army capable of sophisticated conventional operations. They ultimately outgunned, and outfought, their French opponents, culminating in May 1954 with victory at Dien Bien Phu, which broke France’s will to remain in Indochina. The Viet Minh had much help. From 1950 onwards the Chinese afforded the Viet Minh crucial advantages, not counterbalanced by mounting US financial assistance for France’s flagging war effort. Ho Chi Minh joined the Sino–Soviet alliance talks in Moscow, where Stalin deftly palmed responsibility for the Asian revolution on to the willing Chinese. Mao was more indulgent towards Ho than was Stalin, who harboured suspicions about Ho’s ideological reliability after his wartime flirtations with the OSS. In January 1950, Communist China formally recognized Ho’s northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam, followed shortly by the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. Mao agreed to supply the Viet Minh with armaments, opening Chinese military training facilities to Vietnamese volunteers and conscripts.

  In August 1950 some seventy-nine PLA commanders, including Chen Geng of the Twentieth Army, were sent to Vietnam, where they played a vital role in shaping the strategy and individual battle plans of their less experienced Vietnamese comrades.1 By October 1951 the Chinese had built a direct rail link across the border, over which flowed the first shipment of 4,000 tons of munitions, including howitzers, anti-aircraft batteries and ten million rounds of rifle ammunition. By 1954 they would be delivering the same tonnage of armaments every month. What the Chinese or Soviets could not supply was bought on the open market, using the $1 million which accrued to the Viet Minh annually from the sale of opium produced by Meong tribesmen.2

  Nonetheless the war was fought by Vietnamese rather than Chinese. As eventually constituted, Giap’s forces had a pyramidal structure. The base consisted of a vast part-time peasant militia, called the Dan Cong, which acted as Giap’s local eyes and ears, as well as being a part-time pioneer corps available for up to fourteen days’ service away from their home hamlets. Then there were full-time guerrilla forces which operated within a circumscribed region. Those who distinguished themselves then joined Giap’s regular force, which consisted of divisions of around 10,000 men, organized into regiments, battalions and companies. Each division had its own staff officers and specialist sections, including battalions of artillery as well as intelligence units. Careful staff work meant that these regular forces could be on the move for months, with the part-time pioneers putting in place the food and munitions they needed to survive. Chinese influence resulted in the omnipresence of political commissars, with every third soldier acting as their eyes and ears among the ranks, and interminable self-criticism sessions so rigorous that suicide often resulted.

  Facing them were 160,000 French Expeditionary Corps troops, only 42 per cent born in France itself. They were mostly regulars, for young national-service conscripts had to volunteer to serve in Indochina, which a decreasing number of them did as metropolitan Radicals, Socialists and Communists turned against this remote ‘dirty war’. Communist trade unionists sabotaged supplies destined for Indochina, while high-placed sympathizers within the civil service informed the Viet Minh regarding key shifts in government policy. The war eventually became so unpopular that, when French people donated blood, the health service had to specify that it was not destined for the army in Indochina.

  The main French forces derived from the (North) African Army, that is Algerian and Moroccan Berbers and Arabs, colonial regiments (sub-Saharan African and Indochinese), and the multinational but French-officered Foreign Legion. The Legion and the parachute regiments, which included Moroccans and Vietnamese, were the hard-core warriors. The Legionnaires were bludgeoners and brawlers, as slow and sure as their strange formal march, while the wiry little Paras – who had to jump out of narrow aircraft doors carrying a huge weight of equipment – specialized in going fast and hard into any fight.

  Apart from aggressive mobile formations of Legionnaires and paratroopers, the French external intelligence service, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage (SDECE), experimented with deep-penetration units modelled on Orde Wingate’s Second World War Chindits. There was a special forces training base at Ty-Wan where anonymous Americans, Britons and Nationalist Chinese contributed to the instruction. French NCOs led groups of Cambodians, Meong or T’ai tribesmen (who were known as Black or White T’ai after the colour of their women’s shirts), in sowing murder and mayhem behind Viet Minh lines. At Coc-Leu in late 1953 one unit was joined by French paratroopers, and together they killed 150 Viet Minh.3 The Meong attached only one condition to their contribution to the French war effort: that the French should replace the Viet Minh in marketing their opium crop. Although the French had banned opium in 1945, the SDECE arranged for secret flights which took the opium from Laos to Saigon, where General Binh Xuyen processed it inside his stronghold of Cholon and returned part of the profits to the Meong.

  Under US pressure there was a growing effort to Vietnamize the war, called jaunissement – yellowing – through the creation of a Vietnamese National Army. Recruitment was a slow process and the VNA numbered no more than 38,000 by the end of 1951, although it grew rapidly thereafter. The war was waged mainly in the north, but there were constant grenade attacks on those Saigon bars and cafés that failed to pay protection money to the Communists. After 10 p.m. the suburbs were hit by desultory mortar fire from the countryside, with return tracer fire arcing through the darkness. In many places, which the French or Bao Dai’s troops seemed to control by day, the Viet Minh took over as darkness suddenly fell and all traffic halted on the roads until sunrise.4

  French strategy in Tonkin was to control the major roads and the populous rice paddies of the Red River Delta, while interdicting Viet Minh supply routes from China. The frontier forts on the Chinese border north of where Laos indents into Vietnam were a tempting target for the Viet Minh. Low cloud, fog and dense jungle foliage neutralized French air power, while the jungle terrain made relief laborious. In October 1950, twenty-three regular Viet Minh battalions, equipped with American artillery from KMT stocks left on the mainland, smashed the French defence lines along the Chinese border, shrinking the French position in northern Vietnam to a perimeter around the Red River Delta. The Viet Minh now held a continuous band of territory from the Chinese border to within 100 miles of Saigon. The overwhelming victory led Giap to believe that with one bold push in 1951 he could take overrun the Delta, including Hanoi and Haiphong, where French staff officers were evacuating their families and burning documents.

  The First Indochina War coincided with the ‘police action’ in Korea. In one amusing incident a French colonel called Wainwright – his English grandfather had been captured by Napoleon and remained in France – had the strange experience of trying to call in an air strike as his mobile group came under heavy attack. Due to peculiar atmospheric conditions his radio operator could hear nothing but an American sergeant dully enumerating equipment required at a supply depot in Korea. Eventually, an American colonel attached as an adviser to Wainwright’s force shouted, ‘Get the hell off this radio channel! There’s a war going on here.’5

  The Chinese intervention in Korea was the reason why an American adviser was serving with the imperialist French forces. Truman, Marshall and Acheson lumped the Chinese Communists, North Koreans, Huks and Viet Minh into one Soviet-inspired global conspiracy, ignoring the possibility of exploiting divisions between the Soviets and the Chinese, and between them and the insurgent forces. As we saw with the Huks, their relationship with the Communists was not exactly straightforward. The US gave France $133 million, with conditions attached to how the French might improve their performance in Indochina.6 A key recommendation was coldly spelled out by a State Department official: ‘Much of the stigma of colonialism can be remove
d if, where necessary, yellow men will be killed by yellow men rather than by white men alone.’7

  What they were looking for, and never found, was a Vietnamese Magsaysay or Sukarno. They wanted France’s puppet ruler Bao Dai to be given enough latitude to function as a rallying point for all non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists. But Bao Dai was a hopeless choice, his support derived from southern landowners and the Cao Dai religious sect with its Disneyland cathedral and armed militia. He was also a sybaritic playboy, preferring his yacht or French Riviera villa to his Norodom Palace, which was inhabited instead by French generals. It is most unlikely that he would have exercised meaningful power even if it were not circumscribed by a book-length document that listed the areas of policy that France reserved to itself.

  Giap’s 1951 offensive coincided with the appointment of the sixty-two-year-old General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who from December 1950 combined the roles of high commissioner and theatre commander-in-chief in ways that anticipated the British proconsul Gerald Templer. He was a Vendéan Catholic who had fought in the First World War and in the North African Rif, and had escaped from Vichy captivity using a saw smuggled to him by his wife; he went on to join the Free French in the liberation of France from the Nazis, with the future US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge as his US liaison officer. During his stellar career de Lattre had been wounded eight times, receiving forty-six decorations, on the first occasion for killing two Prussian lancers with his sabre. On arrival in Hanoi, accompanied by his redoubtable wife, he promised to win the war inside fifteen months. ‘From now on you will be commanded,’ he told his men, who nicknamed him either ‘King Jean’ or ‘DDT’ after the highly effective pesticide. On arrival he scrapped his predecessor’s plans to evacuate the north, obliging all French women and children to remain in Hanoi too. Whiners were awarded ‘the order of the steamship’ – a ticket home. His twenty-three-year-old-son Bernard was serving as an army lieutenant in Indochina and was to be killed at Ninh-Binh within the year, one of the twenty-one sons of senior French commanders killed in this savage war.8

  Fighting in Indochina had its ebb and flow, determined by the monsoons which oppressed different parts of a country shaped like an elongated letter S. From January 1951 Giap focused his main attack on the town of Vinh Yen, thirty-two miles from Hanoi. De Lattre rushed in reinforcements from Cochin China and sent every available aircraft to support them, many of them British or German surplus from the Second World War. The aircrews hurled high-explosive bombs and canisters of napalm out of the doors and loading bays. A Viet Minh officer described the effects on the ground:

  I order my men to take cover from the bombs and machine gun bullets. But the planes dived on us without firing their guns. However, all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending to over a hundred metres, it seems, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire which falls from the skies. Another plane swoops down behind us and again drops a napalm bomb. The bomb falls closely behind us and I feel its fiery breath touching my whole body. The men are now fleeing and I cannot hold them back. There is no way of holding out under the torrent of fire which flows in all directions and burns everything on its passage. On all sides flame surrounds us now . . . I stop at the platoon commander . . . His eyes are wide with terror. ‘What is this? The atomic bomb?’ ‘No, it is napalm.’9

  From January to June Giap launched repeated attacks, led by suicide teams to flatten barbed wire and to detonate explosive satchels against French bunkers, but each was repulsed at very great human cost on both sides.10 One attacker, whose badly wounded arm was trapped in barbed wire, ordered a colleague to hack off the limb before crawling with his explosive satchel charge to blow up a bunker. When the battle ended, the Viet Minh had been defeated with at least 5,000 casualties. The Chinese correctly anticipated that de Lattre would strike next at Hoa Binh, which straddled the main Viet Minh supply routes between North and South Vietnam, and Giap reinforced it. French attempts to take the town were all repulsed.11

  After Vinh Yen and further victories at Mao Khe and Yen Cu Ha, the craggy-faced ‘French MacArthur’ was given the full American media blitz, culminating in his visit to the US in September 1951. In Washington, doubts about French colonialism were smoothed with talk of a Soviet-inspired ‘red colonialism’, as much of a menace in Indochina as in Korea or Malaya. De Lattre spoke darkly of the red legions occupying North Africa to lunge at southern Europe in a variant of the increasingly influential domino theory.12

  Assured of US support, the General built a chain of fortresses called the De Lattre Line to defend the Red River Delta. The Line consisted of two concentric rings, but the whole project exuded the same nervous hubris as the interwar Maginot Line along the French border. A subordinate once questioned the cost and the manpower needed to garrison these positions. De Lattre replied, ‘Fuck the cost. As for the men, we’ll put the real cons [politely: useless fellows] down there.’13 The outposts were supported by long-range artillery, and mobile units, with light tanks and armoured cars, acted as a fire brigade. One such group consisted of the French battalion which had fought with distinction in Korea; it would prove useful in calling in a debt of honour from the US as it stepped up funding for the war in Indochina.

  In 1952 de Lattre died at home of cancer, eight months after his adored only son was killed under his command. His successor, General Raoul ‘Chinese’ Salan, was probably the senior French officer with the most experience of fighting in South-east Asia and instituted a policy of building ‘hedgehogs’, strongly defended bases, each with an airstrip and ringed by smaller perimeter forts, from which the French could launch powerful raids into Viet Minh territory. On the other side of the hill Giap followed Chinese advice to stretch and thin French resources by maintaining pressure in Cochin China while opening a new front along the border between Vietnam and Laos. Between October and December 1952 the Viet Minh drove the French out of north-western Vietnam, and one of the many governments that came and went during the Fourth Republic replaced Salan in January 1953 with General Henri Navarre, an intelligence specialist with far less combat experience than his predecessors.

  The ending of the Korean War the following summer meant that both the Chinese and the US focused on the war in Indochina, ramping up support for their proxies. It is impossible to determine whether Giap or his Chinese advisers were mainly responsible for the Viet Minh’s successes on the battlefield. Certainly there were frictions between the two, since the Vietnamese had long memories of Chinese dominance of their country. The Chinese generals also had to refer all their major recommendations back to the Central Committee, where Mao took a keen interest in this campaign.

  Giap is frequently lauded as a military superman, but his principal strength was that his men were able to tolerate casualties akin to the trench warfare of the First World War.14 The Viet Minh had many merits from a strictly military viewpoint, but their greatest advantage lay in the part-time pioneers who made it possible for the regular army to fight. Each division relied on 50,000 porters. The gruelling nature of their work can be gauged from Giap’s calculations that a porter could carry fifty-five pounds of rice fifteen miles by day, or twelve miles in darkness, and half that amount over mountains, but only forty pounds of other stores because a rice sack conveniently moulded itself into the human body, whereas artillery shells or other hardware did not. Since the roads were too vulnerable to air attack, the Viet Minh pioneers laboriously cut their own alternative routes through the jungle, preserving the overhead canopy and surfacing them with whatever lay to hand.

  The Viet Minh also stoically endured conditions unthinkable to Western soldiers. The food consisted of cold rice, sometimes enlivened with pungent fish sauce, carried in a rolled towel around the waist. Their medical facilities were rudimentary, with men expect
ed to ‘sweat out’ bouts of endemic malaria, and quinine tablets, when they were available, were divided into therapeutically valueless ten parts. No time was wasted on badly wounded men and once, when a captured Algerian found his path obstructed by a dying Viet Minh, his guard ordered him to tread on him.

  Life among the Viet Minh was extremely regulated, akin to membership of a religious order in which everyone was ‘Brother’ except Giap himself. Cards, alcohol, sex and smoking were forbidden; instead there were communal singing and endless political indoctrination sessions. In a country where pre-colonial universal literacy (necessary for any civil service post) had sunk to 20 per cent under the French, the Viet Minh taught that illiteracy was unpatriotic. One needed to read to understand their propaganda.15 To neutralize French aerial surveillance each Viet Minh soldier carried a wire-mesh dish, regularly adorned with the varying foliage of the different areas of vegetation he traversed. Viet Minh militias were also adept at making even more lethal an environment which already had everything from tigers and panthers to poisonous snakes, ants, rats and scorpions. Concealed pits contained sharpened bamboo poles, smeared with excrement to make wounds fester, while every step through waist-deep water could mean a spiked caltrop piercing the sole of a soft boot and at least two men to take the wounded third away.

  The Viet Minh were supremely adept at tunnelling, in both defence and offence. Tranquil village ponds would sometimes have the equivalent of a modern washbasin’s siphon, concealed by undergrowth, beyond whose S-bend lurked tunnels and storerooms with concealed ventilation shafts. The sound of the Viet Minh digging proved almost as ominous as their massed cries of ‘Forward!’ Chinese engineers with experience of Korea taught the Viet Minh how to inch assault trenches almost up to French hill-top fortifications, using coal miners to tunnel under them and insert huge quantities of explosives. Unfortunately the Viet Minh also accepted Chinese advice on ‘human wave’ attacks to overwhelm defenders, which proved as needlessly expensive in Vietnam as they did in Korea. In part this was a self-perpetuating aberration, as experienced officers died early and their replacements relied heavily on written orders.