On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  I called on Gullion not long after his arrival at his office in the small consulate building just off Rue Catinat. Gullion, a polished thirty-six-year-old bachelor, son of an army officer and a career diplomat, received me in a friendly but guarded manner. He told me he thought American correspondents who had covered the Chinese Civil War were “defeatist” in their attitudes toward the anti-Communist struggle in Asia. Vietnam was not China, he said, and the French Army was not the Chinese Nationalist Army. The Truman administration was convinced that the French-supported Bao Dai government with American material support could bring about a military victory against the Viet Minh. Most important, the French Army would be an effective weapon for the containment of Communist China.

  I left stunned by what Gullion had told me. I asked myself: Didn’t we learn anything in China? Despite enormous American aid, the Nationalist government had been defeated by the Communists, who rode to power in part because of the ineptitude of Chiang Kai-shek but also because Mao Zedong had succeeded in rallying the peasant masses. Now we were plunging into another Asian bog by supporting a colonial regime that was struggling against an evidently popular nationalist movement.

  It was also from Gullion, who was to play a pivotal and sometimes controversial role in the long-term development of Indochina policy, that I first heard of what in the State Department was called the domino theory. Four years later, President Dwight Eisenhower would articulate the theory publicly—that the loss of Vietnam to Communist control would lead to the loss of other Asian countries like a row of dominoes. This evolved into the rationale for U.S. intervention at the side of France.

  What Gullion told me did not, in fact, square with what actually had transpired in the high councils of Truman’s administration prior to his Indochina commitment. As Dean Acheson, who later became Truman’s secretary of state, recalled in his memoir: “The U.S. came to the aid of the French in Indochina not because we approved of what they were doing, but because we needed their support for our policies in regard to NATO and Germany. The French blackmailed us. At every meeting when we asked them for greater effort in Europe they brought up Indochina. They asked for our aid for Indochina but refused to tell me what they hoped to accomplish or how. Perhaps they didn’t know.”

  Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, elaborating in his 1999 book Argument without End on the Acheson recollections, added: “In this way, with almost no thought given to the fate of Vietnam itself, Truman, Acheson, and their colleagues in Washington struck a Faustian bargain by which the United States would eventually become the guarantor and underwriter of the unsuccessful French effort to reclaim its prewar colonies in Indochina. This was how U.S. involvement with Vietnam began: absentmindedly, almost as a kind of ‘throwaway’ in a grand bargain for the heart of Europe, to appease its defeated, temperamental, and proud French ally.”

  The Truman administration began as early as 1945 to yield to de Gaulle’s pressure for restoration of French control of Indochina. Truman amended President Roosevelt’s proposal for the transformation of Indochina into a United Nations Trusteeship leading to independence by adding a stipulation that it would be done only with French consent, something Paris refused to do. Early in 1946 American and other Allied naval vessels began transporting French troops, newly outfitted with American equipment, to Vietnam, where they took control of the cities.

  The Truman commitment was made on the basis of scant information about what was actually transpiring on the ground in Indochina. The small American Consulate in Saigon, circumscribed by French suspicions, had provided only limited information to Washington. The Office of Strategic Services was withdrawn from Indochina in 1945 when the organization was dissolved by Truman to make way for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since then the CIA had made its assessments based largely on French and British intelligence.

  The last American intelligence officer openly posted in Saigon was Lieutenant Colonel Peter A. Dewey, leader of a team of OSS agents. He was killed on September 26, 1945, in an ambush at a roadblock near the Ton Son Nhut Airport. In compliance with a British order, Dewey’s jeep was not displaying an identifying American flag. Dewey was to have left Saigon that day, having been declared persona non grata by Major General Douglas D. Gracey, commander of the British occupation force for Indochina. These events stemmed from decisions taken in 1945 at the Potsdam Conference of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, when it was decided that following the defeat of Japan Vietnam would be divided at the sixteenth parallel, with Chinese troops in control in the north and the British in occupation of the south, embracing Cochin China and its capital, Saigon. The arrangement was provisional with the understanding that the final disposition of Indochina would be decided after the war.

  Dewey arrived in Saigon on September 4, technically in command of Project Embankment, an operation to free 4,549 Allied prisoners, including 214 Americans held in Japanese prison camps near Saigon. However, Dewey had also been instructed by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the OSS, to represent American interests generally in Cochin China. He was there when one of the great blunders of the postwar era took place. General Gracey’s British occupation force began arriving on September 12. Unexpectedly, and without Allied authorization, in addition to his Gurkha troops, Gracey brought with him a small French infantry unit. The presence of the French troops immediately excited wild Vietnamese fears that the British were restoring French colonialism. Violent clashes erupted between the Vietnamese and French colons. Gracey almost immediately came into conflict with the Committee of the South, the representatives of Ho Chi Minh, who had taken over administration of Saigon from the Japanese prior to the arrival of British troops. Dewey raised the ire of the British commander by being in covert contact with the Vietnamese and openly manifesting support for their interests. He was then declared persona non grata by Gracey and told to leave Saigon. Before going to the airport and his death, Dewey sent a final message to Donovan: “Cochin China is burning. The French and British are finished here, and we [Americans] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.” It was a prescient message, which, if heeded, might have spared the United States and the Vietnamese people enormous grief.

  The death of Dewey, a decorated officer who had served also in Europe with distinction during World War II, parachuting in covert operations behind German lines, evoked an angry outcry in the United States. Dewey had become the first American fatality of the Vietnam wars. An OSS investigation into his death concluded that Dewey had been ambushed and killed through being mistaken of a nationality other than American. The report stated: “If the jeep in which he was riding at the time of the incident had been displaying an American flag, we feel positive that the shot would not have been fired. A flag was not being displayed in accordance with verbal instructions issued by General Gracey.” The general had insisted that flying an American flag would be an impingement on British authority. The foreboding in Dewey’s final message to Donovan was realized within weeks after his death. On October 16, under attack by British and Japanese troops as well as French troops, released from their prisoner-of-war internment, the Committee of the South and its Viet Minh guerrilla forces withdrew from the Saigon area, and the war in Cochin China was on. General Gracey was later reprimanded by Lord Mountbatten, the Allied theater commander, for his unauthorized turnover of Saigon to the French.

  For years speculative reports circulated that French or British agents might have been involved in Dewey’s death. Dewey’s body was never found after the ambush despite an intensive search. In March 2005, when Audrey and I revisited Vietnam, the mysterious circumstances were finally clarified. We returned in the company of Nancy Dewey Hoppin, the daughter of Colonel Dewey, and her husband, Charles, a lawyer. Nancy had been investigating the circumstances of her father’s death tirelessly over the years and had sought unsuccessfully the location of his grave. The long-sought answers were obtained unexpectedly by he
r at a meeting near Saigon. Nancy was introduced by John McAuliff, director of the American Foundation for Reconciliation and Development, to Tran Van Giau, a historian and a former senior official, on the chance that he might provide more definitive information about Dewey’s death. At the meeting, Tran Van Giau, who had been in command of Viet Minh military forces in the south during September 1945, cited a report he had received just after Dewey was killed. On September 26, Tran said, fighting was in progress around Ton Son Nhut Airport following a French attack three days earlier on the forces of the Committee of the South. Viet Minh guerrillas were forced to fall back after a failed attempt to take the airport. It was a band of those guerrillas that ambushed Dewey in his jeep at the nearby Chu-la T-junction. Tran said the guerrillas shot Dewey, thinking he was a French officer, and made off with the jeep and Dewey’s body, which they threw into a river at Go Vap. Tran said he conducted an investigation upon receiving a report of the ambush and found that the officer who was killed was not French but was a member of the American OSS. Having provided the first definitive account of Dewey’s death, Tran expressed condolences to the colonel’s daughter, ending her long quest. In Hanoi, a Vietnamese historian and former diplomat handed me a photocopy of the letter sent to President Truman by Ho Chi Minh expressing condolences on the death of Dewey and friendship for the American people.

  When I arrived in Saigon in 1950, the French were still unforgiving about the OSS operations, particularly about the activities of Lieutenant Colonel Archimedes L. A. Patti, who served as chief of OSS operations for Indochina in 1945. They accused Patti of undermining French authority and working to bring Ho Chi Minh to power, something that Patti vigorously denied in his memoir, Why Vietnam? written in 1980 after declassification of the OSS files. Patti did meet on a number of occasions with Ho Chi Minh and forwarded the Viet Minh leader’s repeated appeals for friendship and support of Vietnamese independence to Donovan and the White House. In his conversations with Patti, Ho repeatedly emphasized that he was more the Nationalist rather than the Communist. In a clandestine operation on July 16, 1945, OSS agents designated the Deer Team parachuted into Ho Chi Minh’s jungle camp near Kim Lung, where they trained and armed a cadre of Viet Minh guerrillas for action against the Japanese. One of them, a medic, Paul Hoagland, saved Ho’s life by injecting him with quinine and sulfa drugs when he was critically ill with malaria and dysentery. OSS assistance was provided in return for intelligence information on Japanese operations and Viet Minh help in rescuing downed American airmen. When the war with Japan ended in August, the Deer Team accompanied Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi, joining Patti there as sympathetic observers of a mass rally on September 2 at which Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnamese independence and established the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). In his inauguration speech in Hanoi, Ho quoted from the American Declaration of Independence. Earlier, Ho Chi Minh made use of the OSS radio network to transmit a proposal to the French government calling for Vietnam to enter into the French Union under a French president provided “that independence be given to this country in not less than five years and not more than ten years.” The French ignored the proposal.

  These overtures to the French were criticized by members of Ho’s party who were agitating for more militant policies. Ho replied: “You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese stay? Don’t you remember your his-tory? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed one thousand years! The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying out. Nothing will be able to withstand world pressure for independence. They may stay for a while but they will have to go because the white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never leave. As for me, I prefer to smell French shit for five years, rather than Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

  The Chinese were in occupation of North Vietnam under the terms of the Allied agreement at the Potsdam Conference when Ho made this retort to critics. Chinese Nationalist occupation troops, many of them under the command of notorious warlords, had descended like locusts after the end of World War II on famine-stricken North Vietnam, systematically looting the country. In replying to his critics, Ho evoked historical Vietnamese fears of Chinese domination.

  In February 1946, Ho Chi Minh wrote to Truman asking for support of Vietnamese independence in a step-by-step process similar to that by which the United States granted independence to the Philippines after World War II. The letter was the eighth recorded appeal to the president for friendship and recognition. Truman did not reply to any of the messages. When I toured Vietnam in March 2005, Vietnamese officials and journalists reminded me of these rebuffs, which they historically term the first missed opportunity for peaceful settlement of the Indochina conflict.

  In March 1946, Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government signed an agreement in Hanoi with the French for the entry of Vietnam as a free state into the Indochina Federation of the French Union but without any guarantees of eventual independence. In June, however, the French, despite violent Vietnamese protests, unilaterally detached Cochin China as a separate state. Ho Chi Minh, nevertheless, persisted in attempts to reach an agreement, and in September he signed a modus vivendi understanding in Paris providing for a cease-fire in the guerrilla war in Cochin China and broad French rights throughout Vietnam. With the end of the British-Chinese occupation of Vietnam stipulated under the postwar Allied arrangements, French troops with American and British assistance took control of all major cities. In November armed clashes between French and Vietnamese forces erupted at Haiphong, and French naval vessels bombarded the city, killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Ho Chi Minh then rejected a French demand that all Vietnamese militia be disarmed, with security functions entrusted to French troops. When negotiations collapsed, Ho Chi Minh fled with his government into the jungles north of Hanoi. As the Viet Minh fell back on the Maoist strategy of protracted war, Ho appealed to Communist China and the Soviet Union for assistance. A founder of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, Ho had worked in the underground of the Comintern, the Moscow-based international Communist organization, on behalf of anticolonial movements since the 1920s. But in 1945 he had distanced himself from Stalin and Mao Zedong while seeking American recognition of his government and the possibility of economic assistance. Rebuffed by Truman and the French, he reentered the Sino-Soviet fold.

  In turning to Bao Dai as a leader who might attract the loyalty of the Vietnamese people, the French gambled on a personality very different from that of their enemy, Ho Chi Minh, an ascetic who had spent most of his career in the revolutionary underground and in prison while struggling for Indochinese independence. Bao Dai’s political career had been a checkered one. When the Japanese ruled Vietnam during World War II, he served as head of their puppet government and acquired a reputation as the playboy emperor whose interests resided more in female playmates and in hunting tigers than in politics. At the end of the war, when Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government was briefly in control of Hanoi in 1945, he abdicated as emperor and agreed to serve as supreme adviser, a title that the Viet Minh bestowed with more than a little irony. Not long after, he fled to exile in Hong Kong. In 1949, desperate for a symbol to give legitimacy to their emerging dependent Vietnamese government, the French brought Bao Dai out of exile to become chief of state. In according recognition, the Truman administration, like the French, was looking to Bao Dai to rally Vietnamese democratic forces against the Communist-led Viet Minh.

  Several weeks after our arrival in Saigon, Audrey and I traveled to Dalat, a beautiful mountain resort in Annam, to interview Bao Dai. The thirty-five-year-old French-educated emperor received us in his palace, a modern-istic country house built with granite blocks furnished in Western style. It was guarded by a cordon of Vietnamese sentries and within by the secret police of the French Sûreté. Although he had abdicated, Bao Dai was still being treated as a royal monarch. The emperor, a heavyset man with black hair combed straight back, dressed in a gray American
-style flannel suit, had just returned from a weekend hunt in the surrounding hills which abounded in tiger, elephants, and deer. I was the first reporter to be received since the founding of his government earlier in the month.

  “The Vietnamese people want as complete independence as possible,” Bao Dai told me. He said that the present status of his government represented a stage in its development and reflected the current political situation. Under the accords he had accepted, the French retained responsibility for defense and diplomacy, as well as legal, business, and cultural prerogatives for French subjects. The Vietnamese piaster was tied to the French franc. Bao Dai said he refused to recognize that a state of actual civil war existed within Vietnam, since his military forces were fighting “only against terrorism and banditry.” Although entertained in the palace, we did not meet the empress, who was in Cannes, France, with their two children. But the emperor did not seem bereft of companionship judging by the bevy of beautiful Vietnamese and Eurasian women who were in attendance. His French advisers had not been able to persuade him to leave the pleasures of Dalat for Saigon or shed his playboy image. The emperor hosted a parade of American officials who listened sympathetically to his political woes but were unable to draw him more deeply into Saigon politics.

  From the start, Bao Dai’s regime was doomed to failure by the accords, which the French compelled him to sign. The agreement fell far short of the dramatic act of liberal statesmanship that might have placed Bao Dai’s government on a solid political foundation and enabled him to attract support away from Ho Chi Minh. The French rejected the Vietnamese appeal for status in the French Union equivalent to that of a dominion in the British Commonwealth. In the grant of limited autonomy, there was no promise of independence or provision for the eventual withdrawal of French troops from the country.