Embers of War (30 page)

And so, 1947 would be a year of strategic defense from the Viet Minh perspective. The main force regulars—the
chu luc
, who numbered roughly thirty thousand early in the year—would bide their time in their Viet Bac strongholds, which were mostly remote, cloaked by forest, and largely inaccessible to the French. These main units lacked a ready arms supply and moreover needed to undergo additional training. On Giap’s orders, they were not to be committed to military action if it could possibly be avoided, leaving the task of harassing French Union troops to the regional forces. To build up support in the countryside, the Indochinese Communist Party—which, though supposedly dissolved by Ho Chi Minh in late 1945, continued to operate at the district level and below, and to control the corresponding Viet Minh government administration—created village committees and militias and established a comprehensive and popular literacy program. Indoctrination was carried out at evening meetings held two or three times per week, during which cadres expounded the Viet Minh philosophy and anticolonial propaganda. To support the armed forces, the party collected taxes—cash extortion in the towns and rice levies in the villages—and recruited porters to serve in the clandestine logistical network. When the situation demanded, the cadres reinforced education and propaganda with terror tactics, including assassination of village leaders.
¹¹

The terror had to be carefully calibrated, Giap understood, for it was a double-edged sword. There were just so many bombs you could toss into homes and theaters, only so many throats you could cut. If you went too far, if you killed too many village notables, you risked a vigilante reaction, in which people rose up and declared, “To hell with it. We’re going to get killed regardless; we might as well band together and take a few of the gangsters with us.” Terror would be a part of the Viet Minh arsenal, used when it suited their operations, but always handled with precision. It would be utilized selectively, not only in the military sense but in the sociological sense, targeting only those people who by virtue of their positions or their extensive landholdings weren’t very popular anyway.
¹²

In time it would become clear that Giap had formidable advantages that the French, in seven years of war, would never overcome. One was the physical environment. Vietnam is a vast and varied country, running from the rugged and mountainous north to the populous rice lands along the coast, to the jungles and grasslands of the south, like the marshy Plain of Reeds (Plaine des Joncs), which creeps from the Cambodian frontier to the very outskirts of Saigon. Though the Viet Minh would face their own difficulties adapting to this diversity, they nevertheless proved far more adept at doing so than the French. Valluy had hoped in the spring of 1947 to continue his gains from the early months, but the arrival of the monsoon season, which runs from May to October and typically sees at least sixty inches of rain, ruined this possibility and forced him to call a halt. During the monsoon, valley floors turn into swamps, hillsides become saturated and treacherous, and many single-track roads turn into rivers.
¹³

A FRENCH UNION TRUCK BOGGING DOWN IN THE MUD ON ROUTE COLONIALE 4 IN NORTHERN TONKIN ON THE CHINESE BORDER.
(photo credit 7.1)

Even in dry weather, as Valluy would discover to his sorrow, the road network was primitive, an object of neglect by a succession of colonial administrators. In the Viet Bac, which for the duration of the war would remain the main headquarters, supply base, and training ground of the Viet Minh, to speak of
roads
was really a euphemism. Cart paths and trails were numerous, but even the grandly named Route Coloniale 3 (RC3), the main thoroughfare in the area, which appeared as a thick line on the map, was a one-lane dirt road, seldom more than twelve feet across, with weak bridges and countless ambush sites. Such was its state of repair most of the time that the fastest-moving convoy could not average more than eight miles per hour. The same was true of Route Coloniale 4 from Cao Bang to Tien Yen, and the road from Tien Yen to Hon Gai. The “highway” linking Hanoi and Haiphong consisted of little more than a series of ruts, though it did permit two-way traffic. Nor were the bridges and causeways elsewhere in the country much better—with some exceptions, such as the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, few were built to allow passage by heavy trucks and armored vehicles. As for passage off the roads by wheeled vehicles, this was usually impossible. Tanks and half-tracks frequently bogged down in the saturated earth of the deltas, and even amphibious tractors often were halted by vegetation clogging their tracks.
¹⁴

Already in 1945–46, in the early fighting in Cochin China, French Union officers learned that they were prisoners of the roads. They learned it again when hostilities commenced in the north. Theirs was a European army, whose great advantage was in its heavy weapons but that needed roads and bridges to bring those weapons to the battlefield. Very quickly the guerrillas and regional forces proved adept at sabotage, often by digging “piano-key” ditches from alternate sides of the road. Crews would be sent out to repair them, whereupon they were dug up again; inevitably, some of the villagers recruited by the French to refill the trenches were those who, come nightfall, returned to dig them up again. The process repeated itself endlessly, but the overall effect was to seriously hamper French mobility—and, of course, leave convoys dangerously exposed to ambush. Typically the guerrillas would establish themselves on both sides of a narrow pass and then drop grenades onto the slow-moving convoy almost directly beneath them. Simultaneously they would open up with machine-gun fire from close range. When one truck was forced to halt, blocking the road for the vehicles behind, the guerrillas would charge down the hillside, using more grenades and more gunfire. Antivehicle mines, fashioned from unexploded French shells and bombs that were ingeniously (and courageously) re-fused, were another constant danger to the convoys, as were snipers hiding in the often dense brush along the roadways. Bridges, so vital to French mobility, were subject to frequent sabotage and would often be booby-trapped to explode when French engineers arrived to rebuild them.
¹⁵

Even when no ambushers were present, travel along many roads in Tonkin was treacherous. North of Lang Son, the notorious RC4, destined to bring nightmares to a succession of French commanders, became hair-raisingly difficult. At Dong Dang it passed within 750 yards of the Chinese frontier, then climbed over narrow passes and snaked along mountain ledges and innumerable hairpin bends, before plunging down steeply to more tight turns. Drivers, often alone in the cabin—manpower was too short for two-man crews—had to navigate the road in old beat-up American-made GMC trucks, many lacking spare tires or functioning springs. Usually the cabin would be baking hot, and the driver, swinging the steering wheel from lock to lock on the hairpins, had to strain to see through the mist to make sure he was a safe distance from the truck in front of him. Breakdowns were common and could halt the entire convoy for long, nerve-racking hours.
¹⁶

Much of the Viet Minh activity occurred at night, giving rise to one of the leitmotifs of the war: Areas controlled by the French during the day would become guerrilla territory after sundown. But this truism is also misleading, for even in daylight hours the Viet Minh in mid-1947 controlled as much as half the territory of Vietnam. The French were lords of the towns and the main roads; the Viet Minh of the countryside, the remote villages, and the walking trails. In Tonkin, Giap’s forces controlled the whole area northeast and east of the Red River and Hanoi, as well as the fertile provinces south of the Red River Delta down to northern Annam, including the towns of Thanh Hoa and Vinh. In northern and central Annam, between the towns of Vinh and Qui Nhon, the French held only a narrow coastal strip beginning just north of Quang Tri and ending slightly south of Tourane (Da Nang), in addition to part of the thinly populated highland; the rest of the territory, perhaps 80 percent of the total, was from the start of the conflict in Viet Minh hands. In southern Annam and in Cochin China, French control was more extensive. They held all the cities, including the distant highland towns of Pleiku and Kontum, and they had at least nominal control (though not at night) of the major roads. Even here, though, guerrilla action was frequent, and a few areas were under Viet Minh control—including Ca Mau in the extreme south, and the region around Ha Tien on the Cambodian border. Saigon, meanwhile, featured regular grenade attacks on cafés and bars frequented by
colons
, and French authorities felt compelled to maintain a strict curfew of eleven
P.M.
¹⁷

Which points to a more fundamental problem confronting the colonial power: the strong anti-French and nationalist feelings among the vast majority of Vietnamese. Seven years earlier, in 1940, France had been able to control all of Indochina with a few thousand troops; now Valluy had upward of a hundred thousand, and it was not nearly enough. The presence of Vietnamese regional forces and smaller guerrilla units (in addition to the regular army), many of whose members lacked uniforms and were peasants and laborers when not fighting, is evidence of the broad participation in the war against the French (though not necessarily of affection for the Viet Minh). The pervasive anti-French animus enabled Viet Minh forces to assemble undetected, to withdraw when the enemy appeared in force, to hide their weapons, to expand their ranks, and to gather excellent intelligence concerning the strength, the maneuvers, and often even the plans of the French. And when the enemy, unable to determine who was a fighter and who was not, reacted to the guerrilla attacks by killing civilians, the main effect was to deepen the hatred for the French and to bring new guerrillas into the fold.
¹⁸

Women, children, the elderly—all contributed to the common cause. The author Le Ly Hayslip recalls a song her mother sang to her during her childhood in a village in Central Vietnam:

In our village today

A big battle was fought
,

French kill and arrest the people;

The fields and villages burn
,

The people, they run to the winds;

To the north, to the south
,

To Xam Ho, to Ky La
.

When they run, they look back;

They see houses inflames
.
¹⁹

For the French, the problem was in part one of intelligence, though not in the way one might think. French military intelligence services in Indochina were generally highly competent and professional. Most of the time the French High Command could read, on charts and maps prepared by its various intelligence sections, the full order of battle of Viet Minh units, with an accuracy that was often greater than, and rarely less than, 80 percent. Almost never did the Viet Minh initiate an operation of major significance that had not been anticipated by these services. At the lower levels, however, battalion commanders and detachment commanders were often victims of the most brutal surprises—in the form of road mines, ambushes, and grenade attacks. When a French Union patrol would enter a village, it lacked the information that would have allowed it to screen the inhabitants and identify nonuniformed Viet Minh. “It is clear,” a postwar French study would conclude, “that a distinction must be made here between the precise, deep intelligence which was always available to the High Command, and the immediate and local intelligence that was almost never obtained by subordinate units. Thus it was written: ‘It was the Commander in Chief who kept the battalion commander informed while the latter was never able to reciprocate.’ ”
²⁰

The issue for these battalion commanders was in large part the political character of the war. To gather information by technical means—signal intelligence, aerial photography, and other technical collection systems—was a relatively straightforward task: The French had the means and the expertise to do it. Human intelligence, or “humint,” was another matter. It didn’t take French commanders long to realize that many Vietnamese agents had contacts with both sides; one could never be assured of their loyalty. At times, an agent might seem a little too eager to spout whatever information the French wanted to hear, particularly if he or she sensed that payment might follow. Prisoners, likewise, often were so anxious to please their interrogator that their information was unreliable, or they deliberately provided false information. Even in those instances when the information from an agent or prisoner seemed legitimate, it was often out of date before it could be confirmed.