On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  18

  HANOI

  In late October 1951, after two years in Saigon, we were packing to leave for London, my next assignment. The Council on Foreign Relations had offered me a one-year fellowship in New York, but Frank Starzel, the general manager of the AP, refused a leave of absence. In compensation, he allowed me to choose my next foreign post, and I elected to go to London. Larry Allen, a distinguished correspondent, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his courageous wartime coverage of the operations of the British Mediterranean Fleet, arrived in Saigon to replace me.

  I had just turned over news coverage to him when the Saigon correspondents were invited to an important news conference that General de Lattre would be giving in Hanoi. There were rumors of an impending major French offensive. Allen pressed me to accompany him. I demurred, having had enough of Indochina, but finally agreed reluctantly, swayed in part by a perceived need to back him up. He was new to Vietnam and of late had taken to partying too much. He was to become the model for the carousing American correspondent in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. Audrey, of course, insisted on coming along to Hanoi, intent on not missing the action and also because she would not be left alone on our second wedding anniversary. Leaving our infant Susan with the Chinese amah, we took off for Hanoi aboard the plane of a French admiral with other correspondents. When on takeoff the aircraft tipped and a wing just about scraped the ground, I appealed to the Lord—please not on these last days after so many close calls in this benighted country. The plane miraculously righted itself.

  In Hanoi, we checked into the Metropole Hotel, not far from the small charming Restored Sword Lake. Hanoi was a vigorous, bustling city, but without the sophistication, luxurious languor, and brilliant tropical color of Saigon. The people were sturdier, more peasantlike in appearance. The buildings of crumbling yellow plaster bore the scars of the vicious street fighting between the French and the Viet Minh in 1946 which ended with the flight of Ho Chi Minh’s government to his northern jungle retreat. With de Lattre in command, there was a new sense of confidence among the French.

  At the Metropole, we encountered Graham Greene, with whom we had become very friendly. Our friendship began on the day of his arrival in Saigon in October. He had been in Malaya, where he did an article for Life magazine on the Communist guerrilla insurgency. His brother, Hugh Greene, who was with the BBC, was there on loan to the British government to develop an information program designed to inspire greater support among the Malayan population for the counterinsurgency campaign against the local Chinese guerrillas. The Anglo-American community in Saigon was easygoing and hospitable to newcomers, and Audrey went to Graham’s door at the Majestic Hotel on the day following his arrival to welcome him bearing two dog-eared paperbacks of his novels—The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter—to be autographed. Laughing, he invited her in and scrawled his autographs, noting with satisfaction that the condition of the books indicated that they had been well read. He then accompanied her by pedicab back to our apartment to meet me. Thereafter he became a frequent visitor to our apartment, usually in the morning, when he would sip our excellent French cognac with his coffee. Our apartment was a way station for visiting correspondents—Marguerite Higgins of the Herald Tribune and Homer Bigart of the New York Times among others taking time out from the Korean warfronts—and there Greene met Elaine Shaplen, the estranged wife of Bob Shaplen, of the New Yorker. Elaine was en route to Singapore, and he suggested that she meet his brother, Hugh. The meeting led eventually to marriage. The couple lived in London, where Hugh became director of the BBC.

  When we joined Greene in Hanoi, he had just returned from Phat Diem, a Catholic community on the delta, ruled from a towering baroque cathedral by a Trappist bishop, Le Huu Tu. Greene had been in Phat Diem just after a French paratrooper battalion had retaken the coastal enclave from Viet Minh occupation. The Phat Diem episode was something of an embarrassment for Greene. In his July article for Life magazine, “Malaya, the Forgotten War,” reporting on a brief visit to Phat Diem in January, he had described in glowing terms the bishop’s militia as dedicated Christians capable of defending Phat Diem against the Viet Minh. “You see I wanted to say to my friends in Malaya, ‘it can be done. An idea fighting an idea,’” Greene wrote. He did not know at the time that the bishop had been playing Ho Chi Minh and the French against each other, making a pretense of close ties with both. When the Viet Minh attacked Phat Diem, they met virtually no resistance from the bishop’s vaunted Christian militia. The town remained briefly in Viet Minh hands until the French paratroopers reoccupied it.

  Greene’s classic novel on Vietnam, The Quiet American, which he completed in June 1955, was based on considerable field reportage by Greene in 1951–52. Its plot brilliantly captured the atmosphere of embattled Vietnam and the character of many of the players in the struggle. Generations of Americans have read the book as a faithful historical account of the French Indochina War. In truth, however, the reader desirous of a factual political and military history of the war must look elsewhere.

  De Lattre had a large and attentive audience of correspondents, diplomats, and French officials for his much publicized news conference at the Hanoi military headquarters. Gesturing theatrically before a large map, he described how his troops were launching an enveloping maneuver on a key Viet Minh center at Hoa Binh, the capital of the Muong tribe, about forty miles southwest of Hanoi, on the fringes of the Red River delta. The town dominated routes by which the Viet Minh were receiving rice supplies and manpower from the south and central parts of the country. It was also the key to the control of positions along the Black River to the north and east.

  After de Lattre’s press conference I left Allen to do the story and spent the evening in a large, noisy Vietnamese nightclub with Audrey and Graham Greene. When we returned to the hotel, I noticed a light under the door of Allen’s room and knocked. He welcomed me enthusiastically and showed me the dispatch he had just filed. His lead said: “General de Lattre de Tassigny today launched a major offensive to end the eight-year old French Indochina War.” I was horrified. I had seen too many such French operations end in frustration, and even if the offensive succeeded, it would have hardly put an end to the Indochina conflict. There was nothing to be done immediately to put the forthcoming de Lattre operation into reasonable per spective.

  Escaping the company of Allen the next day, Audrey and I accepted Greene’s invitation to a picnic. Greene mobilized a rickety taxi and gave directions to the Vietnamese driver. As we headed out, I struggled to contain my anxieties, since I realized that Greene had chosen a picnic site on the Red River delta where Viet Minh guerrillas operated quite often. Sprawled out on blankets, we munched chicken sandwiches and drank white wine while Greene talked about his latest book, The End of the Affair. Publication of the book had just put him on the cover of Time magazine. He spoke of being un-happy about the last thirty pages and said: “Every author has a right to one bad book.” Brighton Rock, he felt, was his best book. We strolled to a nearby Buddhist temple. Having paid the guardian monk the required sum, Greene took a hammer and struck a gong to drive away the evil spirits. “I thought you were Catholic,” Audrey said, laughing. “I’m taking no chances,” Greene replied.

  During the picnic Greene’s pale blue eyes lit up when we told him we had once been to a fumerie in Saigon with a senior French official and his wife and smoked a few pipes of opium for the experience. He was all for trying it himself. On the following evening we rounded up an acquaintance, a young American who worked for the local office of the U.S. Information Service, and the three of us followed him down back alleys to a door where a rap-ping code brought forth a Vietnamese woman in a white gossamer gown. She led us up a narrow stairway to a large open room with double-decker bunks and individual divans arranged between bamboo partitions. Reclining on the beds were both French and Vietnamese smokers. One could see that Greene, the eager novelist, his pale blue eyes alight, was devouring ev
ery detail. The four of us lay down on divans while attending girls heated opium paste over candles, kneading the paste into balls and tamping them into the bowls of long wooden pipes. We demonstrated to Greene how to inhale an entire smoke with a single draw, and he joined us in four pipes, a safe number for the occasional smoker. Enamored by this first experience with opium, Greene smoked thereafter on several occasions as noted by his biographer, Norman Sherry. Exhilarated, we returned to the hotel, where, although Audrey and I had a plane departing early the next morning for Saigon, we drank and talked until it was time to leave for the airport. Audrey recalls that in the last hours of our drinking bout, Greene was lecturing to me about journalism and I was commenting outrageously on the art of novel writing. Greene confided that for him writing a novel was something like squeezing a boil to empty it. He had to get it out.

  We were in Saigon on November 14 when French troops entered Hoa Binh in the first stage of de Lattre’s vaunted offensive. It was the general’s last hurrah. I had been told in confidence in Saigon upon my return from Hanoi that he was seriously ill with prostate cancer and would be returning shortly to France for treatment. Despite my occasional altercations with him about news coverage, I had come to admire the general. In the year that he had been in Indochina he had thrown himself totally into the war effort and by his genius given the French Expeditionary Force its proudest moments. He was in Hanoi, directing military operations on May 30, 1951, when he received word that his son, Lieutenant Bernard de Lattre, a twenty-three-year-old infantry officer, had been killed. While commanding a company in the defense of Nihn Binh on the Red River delta, he had been killed by a mortar blast during a Viet Minh attack.

  The general announced the death of his only child by saying simply in a brief communiqué that he had “fallen on the field of honor at four o’clock this afternoon.” It was a time in the Indochina war when each year the French were losing in officers the equivalent of an entire class of Saint Cyr, the French military academy. After the collapse of the frontier forts, Bernard de Lattre had written to his father from the field in Vietnam: “What we need is a leader who leads, fresh blood, and new machinery. And no more niggling, small time warfare; and then with the morale we still have in spite of it all, we could save everything.” His father did come, but he faced an impossible task after the fall of the frontier. While fighting a war already lost, he had to contend with a bitterly critical public at home, a government unwilling to give him needed reinforcements, and American critics whom he could not satisfy.

  De Lattre left Indochina for Paris on December 19. I preceded him by several weeks and on arrival in the French capital called at the Quai d’Dorsay to meet with an old friend, Jean de Lipkovski, the head of the Indochina Desk, whom I had known in China when he was a diplomat with the French Embassy. When he began to talk about de Lattre’s return to Indochina, I interrupted him to say that the general was critically ill with prostate cancer and I doubted that he would return. Lipkovski was stunned. “I must inform my minister at once,” he said. The French government apparently had not been told of de Lattre’s condition. When the general was operated on in Paris, there was no announcement of the nature of his illness. He died on January 11. Several hundred thousand people attended his funeral on January 15, many of them passing by his bier at the Hotel des Invalides. Under the Arc de Triomphe, France’s monument to its military glory, President Vincent Auriol placed a marshal’s baton on de Lattre’s coffin. Earlier, in the presence of Madame de Lattre, both the French National Assembly and the Council of the Republic approved without opposition—the French Communists abstained—the bill conferring the title of marshal.

  The offensive on Hoa Binh, de Lattre’s last hurrah, was intended to provide a dramatic victory at a time when the French government was pressing the United States for an increase in assistance and just as the French Assembly was entering into a budget debate on Indochina. But the capture of Hoa Binh was a hollow victory. The Viet Minh had withdrawn to fight another day on their own terms. Eventually, the Viet Minh counterattacked, in January 1952, along the Black River, and General Raoul Salan, to whom de Lattre had turned over the high command, was compelled to yield the Hoa Binh salient. It was a major reverse for the French that would lead to their eventual defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

  The climactic battle, which Viet Minh military commander Vo Nguyen Giap had sought vainly, came in the French surrender on May 7, 1954, at Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam after a fifty-six-day siege. Of the 13,000 French troops defending the fort, some 3,000 were killed and the others captured. According to Chinese archives, the envelopment of Dien Bien Phu was planned by Giap in consultation with Wei Guoqing, a top Chinese adviser, who was receiving instructions as the battle progressed from the Central Military Commission in Peking. Most of the Viet Minh units which over-ran Dien Bien Phu were trained in Chinese camps and armed with Chinese-and Soviet-supplied weapons. With their new 37-mm antiaircraft artillery the Viet Minh put up a wall of fire around Dien Bien Phu which blocked the French defenders from receiving many of the airdrops needed for survival. The 37-mm weapons, which the Viet Minh used with deadly effect, were twin-barreled guns, manned by crews of five to seven soldiers, which could fire explosive shells at 150 rounds a minute, up to ranges of nearly two miles. The network of trenches dug around the French fort which allowed the Viet Minh to move close in on the French defenses were constructed under the supervision of army engineers sent from Peking. In the final assault the Viet Minh deployed two battalions armed with 75-mm recoilless cannons and Katyusha rockets newly arrived from China. The fall of the fortress near the Laotian border marked the end of French military power in Indochina, an event predestined in October 1950 by defeat on R.C. 4 and the loss of the mountain passes to China.

  My most valuable gift to Larry Allen when I turned over the AP’s Saigon Bureau to him in November 1951 was Max Clos, my French assistant, who one day would become one of France’s most celebrated journalists. Clos, twenty-five years old, a black belt judo enthusiast, born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, joined the AP as a local staffer only three months prior to my arrival in Saigon. His only previous journalistic experience was working as a news editor for a French-owned Saigon radio station. He filed in French to the AP office in Paris, where his copy was translated into English for the wire. He was green journalistically—I helped him in the shaping of his copy—but he mastered the techniques rapidly and served as an invaluable assistant, knowledgeable, courageous in the field, and independent in his reporting. Clos had had excellent French intelligence sources, and in one of his dispatches in 1952 he noted: “France is in her sixth year of war against the Viet Minh which is an armed nationalist group 20 per cent of which, according to neutral observers, is Communist while the politics of the other 80 percent relate only to their desire for independence from France.” The reaction in the AP New York office was amusing given Clos’s personal right-wing political bent. Questions were raised among executives as to whether he was “pinkish,” since the AP then habitually described the Viet Minh simply as Communist-led. Alan Gould, the executive news editor, stood firmly by Clos, and he continued to work for Larry Allen. It was Gould, one of the finest editors of his era, who gave me license to write lengthy interpretive articles from China and Indochina, going beyond the usual news agency hard-news format. He recognized the need to enlighten average Americans about those obscure parts of the world in which the White House was making far-reaching commitments. Clos left the AP in 1953 to join the staff of Le Monde. He became a prizewinning correspondent covering wars in Tunisia, Algeria, the Congo, and Cuba. In 1955 he went to the staff of Le Figaro, the leading conservative French newspaper, where he rose to serve as its top editor from 1973 to 1988. When he died of cancer at the age of seventy-eight on March 9, 2000, President Jacques Chirac in a formal statement hailed him as one of France’s most accomplished and eminent journalists. I mourned him as a friend and valued colleague who had given me unique insights into the thinking and behavior of th
e French colons at a turning point in Indochina history.

  19

  ON THE DIPLOMATIC BEAT AND THE KOREAN WAR

  When Audrey and I embarked for London after the difficult years in warring China and Indochina, we anticipated a somewhat more relaxed life. But there was no escape from the tensions of the Asian wars.

  We lived in London in a maisonette on Prince Arthur Road near Hamp-stead Heath. There, two new daughters, Karen, born in 1952, and Lesley in 1954, both in Queen Mary’s Nursing Home, entered the company of our Saigon daughter, Susan. Like the Britons, we suffered post–World War II food rationing and lack of central heating. We rented our maisonette from the Irelands, an elderly couple who lived on the top floor of the three-story townhouse. In doing her food shopping, wheeling a large English pram bearing two babies and leading Susan by the hand, Audrey would make the daily rounds with ration coupons in hand hoping to scare up some edibles. (Eating lunch at the AP canteen, I was developing a lifelong hatred for the only available vegetable, brussels sprouts.) One evening Mrs. Ireland clattered down the stairs, her long red hair flying, in pursuit of our black cat. As we looked on startled, she crawled under our kitchen table to snare the cat and emerged holding a lamb chop. She brushed it off and whispered to us: “Don’t tell Mr. Ireland.” Audrey unhesitatingly pledged secrecy, knowing how precious the morsel was given the limitation of one chop per week on the rationing coupon book. Then there were the penetrating fogs, commonly described as smogs. At the AP office on Farringdon Road, off Fleet Street, where I worked, the fogs sometimes forced their way through window apertures, leaving wisps hanging in the newsroom. One night, driving home through a dense fog, Audrey and I lost our way. It was one of the worst “killer smogs” of the time, a deadly mix of mist and soot mainly from coal hearth fires, which were causing hundreds of deaths from pulmonary diseases. Upon sighting a pedestrian, I stopped the car and, leaning out into the billowing fog, begged for directions to Prince Arthur Road. The man I hailed dashed from the sidewalk to the front of our car holding up a white handkerchief. Waving us on, our Samaritan ran ahead for several blocks guiding us to our street. I scrambled out of the car to thank him, but he had disappeared in the fog. He was typical of the way the British behaved in a crisis. Knowing them made up for the discomforts of those early days in London.