On 30 March Giap launched attacks on the Dominiques and Elianes, and bitter fighting continued throughout April. The Viet Minh suffered appalling casualties, not least when the defenders of overrun positions called in artillery strikes on their own positions, sheltering in their bunkers while the enemy in the open outside were shredded by air bursts and by fire from the French anti-aircraft guns. The few tanks also proved to have a combat weight of gold. Time and again the hard core of the defence, the French, Foreign Legion and Vietnamese Paras, cobbled together shattered units to beat off attacks and to retake lost positions, fighting beyond exhaustion with the aid of Benzedrine-like stimulants. And all the while incredibly brave soldiers without parachute training volunteered to jump into the shrinking perimeter, which was too small for the defenders to be able to collect more than a fraction of the supplies dropped to them, at terrible cost to the French and American transport aircraft pilots. On 29 April the defenders went on half-rations.
It is no great mystery that the Viet Minh prevailed: including auxiliaries, the Viet Minh outnumbered the French by six or seven to one. The only hopes were that a relief force might punch its way north from Laos, or else that a massive US intervention might be launched. Equivocal French evidence of increased Chinese military involvement led the US to consider sending in B-29 Superfortresses from the Philippines, picking up jet fighter escorts from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin for their final run. In the event they did carry out covert bombing raids. There was also loose talk – notably from Vice President Richard Nixon – of using tactical nuclear bombs, but even if the weather conditions had not been so unfavourable, mass bombing from high level was unrealistic in a battle where the Viet Minh were ‘holding the enemy by the belt-buckle’, a tactic they were to refine in battle with US airmobile units in the 1960s.
Eisenhower’s view of Dien Bien Phu was unsentimental: ‘Who could be so dumb as to put a garrison down in a valley and then challenge the other guy, who has artillery on the surrounding hills, to come out and fight?’ When the CIA Director Allen Dulles tried to discuss the matter further Eisenhower waved him away, saying, ‘Do you think I have to be bothered with that god-forsaken place?’27 When his Chiefs of Staff brought up the nuclear option the President angrily rounded on them: ‘You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in ten years. My God!’
Many Americans were vocal in opposing any involvement in Indochina. Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway was a paid-up member of the ‘Never Again Club’ and strongly resisted embroiling US ground forces in another Asian war so soon after Korea. Vice Admiral Lawton Collins made a lapidary remark about limited US military intervention: ‘one cannot go over Niagara in a barrel only slightly’ – a view shared by the Senate Minority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who pounded a desk to make his opposition forcefully. When a senator worried that defeat at Dien Bien Phu would represent a Western loss of face, another senator rejoined: ‘I’m not worried about losing my face – I’m worried about losing my ass.’28
There were, anyway, insuperable obstacles in the way of US intervention, even before the CIA noted shortly after the lost battle that Dien Bien Phu had involved only 4 per cent of overall French forces, and that it need not result in a complete collapse of their position in Indochina. There had to be Congressional approval (no chance), joint commitment by allies (British premier Winston Churchill declined to send troops) and a firm French commitment to Vietnamese independence (which would not be given). That left the French to dig their way out of their own mess. Operation Condor, the hastily cobbled-together relief force from Laos, never really got under way, crippled by the logistical problems of crossing the rough terrain dominated by the Viet Minh between the Laotian plain and Dien Bien Phu. The truth was that the French in Laos were barely able to hold their own.29
When Giap’s troops launched their final offensive on May Day 1954, their gunners had won the artillery battle and their sappers had covered what was left of the French position with a dense network of assault trenches, while at Eliane 2 former coal miners dug a tunnel to put tons of TNT under French defenders who could hear them excavate their doom. Inside the main camp, facilities for dealing with the mounting number of wounded were overwhelmed, and the survivors would never forget the heroism of the little Ouled Nail prostitutes, now nurses, who comforted the dying. To the end, extraordinary heroism was commonplace on both sides, most poignantly among the colonial paratroopers who insisted on being dropped by night to join their comrades battling to the last.
Before nightfall on 7 May the fighting gradually stopped, with men who had fought more or less continuously for fifty-six days succumbing to exhaustion. Wary Viet Minh soldiers checked each remaining bunker to make sure the scarecrows inside no longer wished to fight on. Nine thousand men surrendered, of whom half would die over the following four months, including virtually every Vietnamese soldier the Communists captured.
The Agency Invents a Country
The day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, formal peace talks opened in Geneva with delegations from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, China and the US, as well as representatives of Bao Dai and the Laotian and Cambodian monarchies. Though the Viet Minh appeared to hold all the cards after Dien Bien Phu, they had not reckoned on the overriding concern of the Soviets and Chinese to keep the US from filling the vacuum left by the departing French. Zhou Enlai and Molotov closely co-ordinated their negotiating strategy and imposed it on Pham Van Dong, the chief Viet Minh negotiator.
Pham wanted independence for the whole of Indochina and elections which the Viet Minh believed they would win. Molotov and Zhou Enlai favoured the division of Vietnam between the Democratic Republic and Bao Dai’s southern government, and rejected Pham’s wish to include the Laotian Pathet Lao and Cambodian Khmer Rouge in the talks, calculating that neutralist monarchies would be enough to keep the Americans from intervening.
They were almost right. President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, brother of Allen Dulles, believed that, with the French out of the way, the US could economically bolster Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam as bulwarks against the further spread of Communism in Asia, without getting involved too deeply and incurring the taint of colonialism. Together with Burma, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaya, Indochina was also vital for Japanese economic recovery, functioning collectively as substitutes for the vast lost market in China. American-sponsored reforms would ensure that Vietnamese nationalists would rally to South Vietnam, its prosperity discrediting the ‘false’ nationalism peddled by Ho Chi Minh. This was a momentous shift in US policy in Indochina since it meant commitment to the survival of the southern regime.30
With the future of Cambodia and Laos artfully subtracted from the discussion, efforts focused on finding an acceptable dividing line across Vietnam. The negotiators eventually agreed on a provisional division of the country at the 17th parallel, and national elections in 1956 to decide a government for the whole country. Free migration across the parallel was to be permitted for 300 days after the Geneva Accords were signed on 21 July 1954. As many as 800,000 people moved from north to south, the majority of them Roman Catholics, while 50,000–90,000 Viet Minh sympathizers went north.
On 9 October the Viet Minh took over from the French in Hanoi under the loose supervision of Canadian, Indian and Polish monitors. Amid wild cheering and with red and gold flags sprouting from every window and balcony, Giap’s troops marched into the city on sandals made from rubber tyres. Most of them peasants, they marvelled at multi-storey buildings for the first time. Ho Chi Minh modestly took up residence in the gardener’s cottage in the grounds of the former Governor-General’s Palace. Meanwhile, away from the international monitors, the Viet Minh security service rounded up long lists of people identified as collaborators, who were never heard from again.31
Peace of a sort was patched up in Geneva in 1954. The US took part a
s a grudging ‘interested nation’ and Dulles refused to shake hands with Zhou Enlai. While it suited the big powers to stop the fighting, the US declined to ratify what amounted to recognition of North Vietnam as a separate state. In September it called into being the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which included the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan. Burma, India and Indonesia refused to join and thereby significantly weakened the alliance. In an act that breached the terms of the Geneva Accords, which prohibited either Vietnamese state from contracting external alliances, SEATO’s mandate extended to Indochina.32 French politics was in such disarray following the loss of Indochina that the French Assembly voted against the creation of a supranational European Defence Community that France itself had proposed as an alternative to admitting a rearmed Germany to NATO, thereby bringing about precisely the outcome that Paris had sought to avoid.
Meanwhile in Saigon, Bao Dai reluctantly appointed Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist from a Hué Mandarin family, as prime minister. Ho had once offered Diem a post in a popular-front cabinet, which Diem had rejected because the Viet Minh had assassinated his elder brother and nephew. Bao Dai’s reluctance was understandable: Diem was a Cold War warrior and a militant Roman Catholic in a predominantly pacifist and Buddhist country. He owed his elevation to the fact that during a lengthy sojourn in the US he had been adopted by former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and Cardinal Francis Spellman, spending three years living in the Maryknoll seminary at Ossining in New York State. With an eye to helping fellow Democrats counter Republican jibes about being ‘soft on Communism’, Senators John F. Kennedy and Mike Mansfield became leading lights of an association that backed Diem called American Friends of Vietnam, and Kennedy declared that Vietnam was ‘the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dyke’.33
The Saigon Diem returned to was an Asian version of Roaring Twenties Chicago, with the police in the pockets of gangsters who openly ran casinos, opium dens and brothels. Prime Minister Diem set out to become the boss of bosses, favouring fellow northerners and making nepotism the basis of his rule. He depended on his megalomaniac librarian brother Nhu for advice, and his sister-in-law Madame Nhu for imperious glamour with her long red nails and tight ao dais. She may have banned both abortion and dancing, but her husband was an opium addict, heavily involved in the drug trade. Other relatives were given the ambassadorships to London, the UN and Washington. Thuc, the eldest surviving brother, became archbishop of Hué, outdoing his corrupt siblings with his own brand of genial clerical extortion.
The Eisenhower administration was divided about whether to back Diem, since he seemed to have such limited support amid the treacherous political shoals of what as yet lacked any identity as a distinctive country. ‘We are prepared to accept the seemingly ridiculous prospect that this yogi-like mystic could assume the charge he is apparently about to undertake only because the standard set by his predecessors is so low,’ wrote one US official. Initially, Eisenhower’s emissary to Saigon, General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins, thought Diem would not survive. He changed his own and Eisenhower’s mind when Diem struck hard at the sects, while the rebellious generals melted away. The Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects, and the shadowy Binh Xuyen gangsters, all had powerful paramilitary elements of the kind accurately depicted in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American. In this shadowy world, loyalties turned like quicksilver.
With the odds on Diem’s survival improved to 50 per cent, the US would back him, with an annual subsidy of $250 million, which from 1955 to 1961 translated into 58 per cent of South Vietnam’s entire government revenue. In these years France’s influence diminished as US exports to Vietnam overtook French, and 20,000 bureaucrats returned to France. Although most educated Vietnamese spoke fluent French, the prudent started to learn English, which an ever greater number of US cultural agencies ensured was taught.34 The US embassy in Saigon became the largest such mission in the world. The Military Assistance and Advice Group (MAAG) quietly circumvented a cap on its personnel of 700 to grow to a total of 1,500, coexisting, for the time being, with General Paul Ely’s French troops, still responsible for maintaining order until France pulled out. They jointly trained the Vietnamese National Army, although in tactics which might have been relevant to Korea – where many of the Americans had fought – but which were ill suited to what these troops would have to face in their own country.35 Through a quiet process of osmosis, the US military displaced French training efforts, externally evident from the adoption of US-style insignia and the replacement of berets with steel helmets. The growing US influence was also apparent in street names changed from Rue Catinat to Tu Do (Freedom Street) and in stores called Chicago rather than Catinat.36
British advice, based on the experience in Malaya, was also beside the point, since the Viet Minh had a far larger basis of popular support than the CTs had enjoyed. Attempts to make the South Vietnamese wage a hearts-and-minds campaign among their own population were not a success. To have authority meant a right to beat people and steal. Instead of going about ‘with a guitar under the left arm, a sub-machine gun under the right’, as hearts and minds was poeticized, brutality and torture were the norm.37
Diem was adamantly opposed to democratic elections, rightly fearing that Ho Chi Minh would win. A CIA assessment concurred, claiming that Ho would receive 80 per cent support in a free election. Diem initiated a ‘Denounce the Communists’ campaign, in which thousands of southern Viet Minh sympathizers, or anyone who opposed him, disappeared into concentration camps. Newspapers which criticized him were closed. His brother Nhu supplied a political creed to bolster Diem’s reactionary desire to be a latter-day emperor, as evidenced by the little shrines which flourished around his photographed image. By October 1955, Diem was sufficiently sure of himself to hold an illegal referendum in the south, in which people could choose between him and Bao Dai. He was chosen, becoming president for five years under the October 1956 constitution. Diem’s political clients packed the new 123-seat National Assembly. Eighteen of its members were told to act as an opposition, while always voting with the government. They included Nhu, who won a seat as an Independent in an assembly he never graced with his presence.
That April, the last French troops withdrew from South Vietnam. The First Indochina War had cost the multiracial French forces 90,000 dead or missing in action. On the other side, the Viet Minh had lost maybe 200,000. Almost without a pause for breath, French veterans of this war found themselves transferred to Algeria, where their FLN opponents included Algerian Army of Africa soldiers who had been captured, and retrained in guerrilla warfare, by the Viet Minh.
New Dog, Same Tricks: Lansdale in Vietnam
In June 1954 a new assistant air attaché reported for duty at the US embassy in Saigon. The Air Attaché hated this confident fellow on sight, and so did the local CIA station chief, a querulous drunk who was soon replaced. For the new man was Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had automatic contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles and with his brother John Foster, the Secretary of State.
Lansdale took up residence in a spacious house with a swimming pool, trailed everywhere he went by a Filipino bodyguard called Proculo Mojica, who wore sunglasses all the time and visibly carried a large gun inside his jacket. Lansdale selected twenty men to join his new Saigon Military Mission, which operated in uneasy parallel to the Saigon CIA station. Their new premises soon overflowed with boxes of arms, ammunition and grenades. Some of these men were quiet scholarly types, proficient linguists with a background as wartime paratroopers; others were of a more buccaneering disposition, including Major Lucien Conein (pronounced Coneen). Conein was known as ‘Two Fingers Lou’ or ‘Black Luigi’, nicknames derived from different episodes in his vivid career. A former wartime OSS agent, he claimed to have lost two fingers while serving in the French Foreign Legion, although in fact they were cut off when he was repairing
the fan belt of a car in which he had been having sex with his best friend’s wife. But he was an honorary member of the Corsican Brotherhood, a criminal organization that made the Sicilian Mafia seem tame. Bo Bohannan also came along, because Lansdale’s essential task in Saigon was to repeat with Diem his success with Ramon Magsaysay. From then on a portrait of Magsaysay stared at Diem from his office wall, and from an autographed photo on his desk. But Magsaysay was a charismatic, dynamic leader admired by most Filipinos; Diem was an aloof religious zealot presiding over a regime riddled with corruption.
Still, Lansdale could but try. On the first day he simply walked into Diem’s palace and volunteered his memo ‘Notes on How to Be a Prime Minister of Vietnam’. Initially his help involved telling Diem the meaning of such arcane terms as ‘chain of command’ or ‘floating a loan’. The men grew close, although Lansdale declined Diem’s offer to move into the palace. Diem was encouraged to get out and about, if necessary allowing mud to splash on his white sharkskin suits. Peasants in need found themselves recipients of presidential largesse organized by Lansdale. Although Diem was an austere bachelor who had opted for celibacy, to counter rumours that he might be homosexual Lansdale had him shyly but publicly call on a woman who was supposed to be his one and only ‘girlfriend’, although the timid Diem never even knocked on her door.
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