Embers of War (29 page)

Even Léon Blum, a broad-thinking humanist and fundamentally decent man who genuinely despaired at the onset of war, could say at once on December 23, less than a week into the Battle of Hanoi, that the old colonial system was finished
and
that renewed negotiations were possible only once “order” was restored. Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet likewise said there could be no talks without an “end to terrorism.”
³⁷

Most important of all in this constellation of voices on the French political scene was the MRP under Georges Bidault, which opposed not only negotiations with Ho but the granting of independence to
any
Vietnamese regime. Thrust into the heart of government not long after liberation, the MRP would maintain a tight hold on foreign and colonial policy for years to come and as such would hold extraordinary sway over the speed and complexion of imperial reform. As a group, the party’s leaders lacked experience in colonial affairs, and its senior figures—Bidault, Robert Schuman, and René Pleven—adhered to a rigid and intransigent colonial policy that stood in marked contrast to their often supple and forward-thinking approach to European affairs.
³⁸

French public opinion, meanwhile, did not register significant opposition to the use of military force in Indochina. Information, for one thing, was hard to come by. In 1946, French newspapers did not have their own correspondents in Indochina, which left journalists dependent on the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse (AFP) for news. D’Argenlieu, deeply suspicious of independent journalism, maintained strict control over the AFP, making it in essence a government propaganda arm. Not surprisingly, therefore, the six main Paris dailies did little in-depth reporting in November and December and generally blamed the Vietnamese for the outbreak of violence. On November 28, after the French bombardment of Haiphong had leveled parts of the city and killed thousands,
Le Monde
’s Rémy Roure assured readers that, from the French side, “not a single shot had been fired, except in defense.”
³⁹

Looming large over the entire process was one man: Charles de Gaulle. Though technically absent from the political stage after January 1946, his influence remained enormous, as historian Frédéric Turpin’s careful research makes clear. As leader of the Free French, he had possessed the power in 1944–45 to foil the plans of his country’s colonial lobby; he did not do so. Indeed, the general’s policy during and after World War II had been to reclaim Indochina for France, on the grounds that French grandeur demanded it. The choice of Admiral d’Argenlieu for high commissioner had been his. He, no one else, instructed d’Argenlieu and Leclerc to be uncompromising in their dealings with Vietnamese nationalists and to prepare to use force. During the conference at Fontainebleau, de Gaulle pressed Bidault to resist giving in to Vietnamese demands, and he announced publicly his conviction that France must remain “united with the territories which she opened to civilization,” lest she lose her great power status. Throughout the autumn, he stuck firmly to this position, and in the November-December crisis, he maintained staunch backing for d’Argenlieu’s uncompromising posture. On December 17, de Gaulle hosted the admiral for more than three hours at his home in Colombey-fes-Deux-Églises and assured him that as far as Indochina was concerned, it was d’Argenlieu and not the government that represented France.
⁴⁰

A week later d’Argenlieu, now back in Saigon, expressed satisfaction with the turn of events. “Personally,” he wrote in his diary, “I have since September 1945 loyally executed the policy of agreement in Indochina. It has borne fruit everywhere, except with the Hanoi government.
It’s over
.”
⁴¹

It was anything but.

CHAPTER 7
WAR WITHOUT FRONTS

T
HE FIGHTING WAS FIERCE FROM THE START. BY THE MIDDLE OF
January 1947, less than a month into the hostilities, large portions of Hanoi were reduced to rubble, and public buildings such as the Pasteur Institute and numerous hospitals suffered major damage. Elsewhere in the Red River Delta the clashes were likewise intense, notably in Nam Dinh, forty-five miles southeast of Hanoi, and Bac Ninh, nineteen miles to the northeast. The Vietnamese used artillery and mortars as well as sabotage—they repeatedly cut vital roads, including that between Haiphong and Hanoi, and they set off bombs to sever rail lines and destroy bridges. The French responded with tanks and Spitfires. Food supplies grew scarce, especially in Hanoi. By early February, after six weeks of combat, the French reported 1,855 men killed or severely wounded. Vietnamese casualties are harder to determine but were far higher.
¹

Bit by bit, the superior French arms forced the Vietnamese back. By late February 1947, the French Expeditionary Corps had taken control of Hanoi, Haiphong, Hon Gai, and Hue, and by March it had gained a tenuous hold over the Red River Delta. By the start of April, the French controlled most of the main towns in Tonkin and Annam. The lightly armed local militia and regional fighting units, charged by Vo Nguyen Giap with the defense of key areas, were no match for General Valluy’s then-still-fast-moving mechanized columns. Ho Chi Minh was forced to withdraw his government to a shifting series of jungle headquarters in its long-standing stronghold in the region of Thai Nguyen–Bac Kan–Tuyen Quang.

In Cochin China, meanwhile, guerrilla activity increased in the weeks following December 19 and was effective enough to reduce the amount of territory the French controlled. In the urban areas, however, the French retained the upper hand; in these weeks, the region as a whole saw a lot less large-scale fighting than occurred in the north. Hopeful French commanders described a pesky but tolerable level of insecurity in the south and hoped to maintain it as they devoted primary attention and resources to the north.

Jean Étienne Valluy was the first in a long line of French generals who would take the battle to Giap; like all the rest, he possessed formidable credentials. Forty-six years old, a highly decorated officer who had joined the military as a private in 1917 at the age of seventeen, his courage and skill in the Great War had won him both a Croix de Guerre for valor and an appointment to Saint-Cyr, the French military academy. Following the war, he rose through the ranks, assuming a number of staff and command jobs, and at the outbreak of war in 1940 he was a major and operations officer with the French XXI Corps. Taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, Valluy was repatriated in 1941 and by 1944 had become a brigadier general and chief of staff of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army in Europe. In 1945 he assumed command of the Ninth Colonial Infantry Division and earned praise for his hard-driving command against stubborn German resistance.
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Like Leclerc before him, Valluy understood that he did not have the military capability to fight a long and costly guerrilla war against the Viet Minh. His problem was manpower. He knew he would not get any conscripts from France—no Paris government was deemed likely to survive a decision to send draftees (in part because of the tradition of using specialized corps of professional volunteers in colonial conflicts). So he had to rely on volunteers as well as colonial troops from Africa—Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Senegalese—and from Indochina herself (Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as assorted ethnic minority groups). Also available were a variety of paramilitary forces and an assortment of local militias and self-defense groups.

African troops were as yet few in number. In May 1945 Charles de Gaulle had prohibited their use in Indochina on the grounds that they might be unduly influenced by Vietnamese nationalist discourse and might seek to implement these ideas upon their return home. He also worried that their presence could sharpen American anticolonialist critiques of French imperalism. Now, however, the acute need for fighting men compelled a change in the policy, and during the course of 1947 more and more African conscripts were deployed.

In addition, Valluy had units of the French Foreign Legion, about which so much has been written, and which included within it a sizable number of ex-Nazis.
³
Most legionnaires in Indochina in 1947 were indeed Germans in their midtwenties who had gone into the Wehrmacht young and knew no occupation but war, who had helped conquer France in 1940, and who bore scars from wounds suffered in Russia, Poland, or Romania. The majority took a five-year enlistment as means to escape the French prison system; partly as a result of their experience with that system, they had no special love for the French. In most cases, the legionnaires assembled at Marseille for the long journey ahead, having already passed through security screenings in recruiting centers in Paris or Lyon or Lille. Fiercely jealous of its record as a stronghold against Marxism-Leninism, the Legion’s security officers took special care to weed out not just murderers, sexual offenders, and other felons but Communists as well.
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Occasionally a legionnaire with a more surprising nationality would turn up. One evening U.S. journalist Seymour Topping, during a tour of French installations in northern Tonkin, dined in the Foreign Legion officers’ club in Lang Son near the Chinese frontier; he bumped into a tall and slim lieutenant whose accent sounded familiar. He was Robert Fleet, a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II and a lover of arms and uniforms and battle. Drawn to the Legion for the chance to experience again the thrill of the fight, Fleet prevailed upon Topping not to reveal his name because of the U.S. law banning service by Americans in foreign armies.
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The French nationals in the Expeditionary Corps, meanwhile, numbered in the tens of thousands, but they essentially composed the officer corps for the colonial and Legion troops as well as the staffs of headquarters and administrative units. They trickled in at regular intervals in the early months of the year but never in the numbers that Valluy wanted to see.

This manpower shortage left the general with limited options, and his predicament worsened in March 1947, when an additional division of French colonial troops had to be diverted en route to Indochina to quell an insurgency in Madagascar. Yet there could be no question of turning back, not in his mind or that of other senior French officials. “It is impossible to negotiate with those people,” Overseas Minister Marius Moutet declared of the Viet Minh during a visit to Saigon in January. “They have fallen to the lowest levels of barbarity.” A few days later, after his entourage had been fired upon during a stop in Hanoi, Moutet added: “Before there is any negotiation it will be necessary to get a military decision.”
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Valluy expressed confidence that his troops could build on their early successes and complete the task. He hoped that a series of pincer movements combining air, land, and river-borne forces could finish off the enemy swiftly, before Giap had time to build up his forces. By cementing French control of the Red River Delta and Route Coloniale 4 (RC4), which ran close to the Chinese border in the far north, Valluy planned to contain the Viet Minh maquis, cut them off from all contact with the outside, and then exterminate them.
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II

IT DIDN’T WORK OUT THAT WAY. GIAP GRASPED RIGHT AWAY THAT
he must deny the French the quick victory they sought. But he also understood that he had to avoid open and large-scale engagements if at all possible; his forces were simply too weak. He in effect ceded the major towns and lines of communication in Tonkin and Annam as he withdrew the bulk of his army to the Viet Bac. Patience would be his main weapon as he plotted for a protracted war based roughly on Mao’s three-phase model of withdrawal (from major towns and cities), equilibrium, and general offensive. Already on December 22, 1946, a mere three days into the fighting, the DRV issued a proclamation stating that the war would be fought along these lines.
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The declaration was drafted by theoretician Truong Chinh, who elaborated on the essentials of this Maoist strategy in a publication titled
The Resistance Will Win
, which appeared in February 1947. Secretary-general of the Indochinese Communist Party until its ostensible dissolution in November 1945, Truong Chinh became head of the “Marxist Study Group” that formally took the party’s place, and he later led the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP, or Lao Dong), as the Communist Party was called after its revival in 1951. In
Resistance
, he cautioned that the timing of the transition from one of Mao’s phases to the next could not be determined in advance; it depended on the relative strength of revolutionary forces, the degree of support for the insurgency in the general population, and the extent of demoralization among enemy forces. The struggle would certainly be long and difficult and would require maintaining solidarity with the Cambodian and Lao peoples and indeed with all those who suffered under the French Union. More than Mao, Truong Chinh stressed the importance of international powers—in this case, principally the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—to the success of the insurgency, and he emphasized that French public opinion could ultimately prove decisive. Over time, declining morale and increasing public opposition to the fighting would seriously impair the French war effort.
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By relying on this three-phase approach, Giap hoped to retain the strategic initiative and control the tempo of the war. Not a major theoretician himself, he would nevertheless over the years leave his own mark on the Maoist strategy, as we shall see. Now, in early 1947, he set about following the strictures of the first phase: to preserve his forces, to withdraw into protected territory, and to be content with harassing the enemy’s convoys and bases. To skeptical subordinates who wanted to go right away to large-scale engagements, Giap offered a firm reply: Such an approach promised only defeat at the hands of the infinitely more powerful French. The Battle of Hanoi in December–January had shown the foolishness of trying to go at them directly.
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