Embers of War (43 page)

The announcement was of course an admission of weakness, tacit acknowledgment that the Expeditionary Corps as presently constituted was not up to the job. But the move gave desperate war planners in Paris a reason to hope both that their great and growing military manpower needs could be met and that Bao Dai’s anemic government could, by fielding its own army, enhance its popular support. The ordinary villager was weary of the war, French analysts believed, and wished for nothing more than peace and security. If Bao Dai could exploit this desire, if he could convince the peasantry that he would provide that security, he might be able to swing public opinion in his favor. But for that argument to have any chance of working, he needed to be his own man. And to be his own man, he needed Vietnamese troops. Far too many villagers were reluctant to enter areas held by the Expeditionary Corps. Many of them chose instead to back the Viet Minh, not out of ideological conviction but because they were Vietnamese.

It was a disingenuous argument, of course, inasmuch as France was still unwilling to
let
Bao Dai be his own man, still unwilling to grant his government real independence. But certainly Paris officials were right to see a Vietnamese national army as essential; without it, there could be no hope of weaning significant non-Communist Vietnamese support away from Ho Chi Minh’s cause. And if the creation of such a force could cause the Americans, who had long favored the proposition, to boost their military and other assistance to the war effort, so much the better.

On that score too, many French officials saw some reasons for hope in the midst of their late-autumn gloom.
³⁰
The pivotal U.S. decision to provide aid to the French military effort had preceded the outbreak of fighting in Korea, but the war there shaped the nature of the U.S. aid program in key ways. On the first day of the North Korean attack, June 25, 1950, President Truman ordered that assistance to Indochina be increased and accelerated; on the thirtieth, the day U.S. troops were committed to combat in Korea (as part of a UN force), eight C-47 transport planes arrived in Saigon with the first shipments of American matériel for the French.

The Korean fighting also formed the backdrop for a July mission to Indochina headed by John Melby of the State Department and Major General Graves B. Erskine of the Marine Corps. Their report, though critical of what Erskine in particular saw as the defensive posture and mind-set of the French, concluded that the war could be won with an infusion of American material assistance. (It was a standard feature of such U.S. “survey missions” during the war: They almost always returned with a “can-do” recommendation for positive action, no matter how intractable the problem might seem to outside observers.) By early August, military supplies sufficient to equip twelve infantry battalions were en route by ship to Vietnam. To oversee the delivery of this expanded American assistance, and to “evaluate French tactical efficiency in the use of U.S. equipment,” the administration created the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), whose first contingent of officers and enlisted men arrived in Saigon in September, and the Special Mission for Technical and Economic Assistance (STEM), which began its work the same month. Significantly, the French ruled out any kind of training role for MAAG and made clear they would allow no American interference in the conduct of the war.
³¹

UN forces in Korea reeled under the onslaught in those early weeks. But General Douglas MacArthur’s bold landing at Inchon in mid-September stopped the North Korean advance, and his counterattack in the following weeks drove them back almost to the Chinese frontier. In mid-October, however, the first Chinese units crossed into Korea, and on November 25 they began a vigorous offensive, driving U.S. troops before them. For Truman and his advisers, Chinese entry was a body blow. It raised the stakes in all of Asia. Mao’s China had to be contained, not merely on the Korean peninsula but anywhere it seemed to threaten. Sniping at the French for their colonial policy in Indochina, though it did not cease entirely, suddenly seemed to many in Washington a self-indulgent luxury. As one high-level internal document put it, the military situation in Vietnam “is so grave as to require the very highest priority of the United States.” In October, a shipment of forty Hellcat fighter aircraft arrived in Vietnam, and in November, the administration accelerated deliveries to Indochina of ninety Bearcat fighters and forty-one B-26 bombers, as well as transportation equipment and bulldozers. These commitments made the size of the military assistance program for Indochina second only to the support for U.S. combat forces in Korea.
³²

A subtle but crucial shift in American thinking had occurred. Washington strategists still emphasized the need for a successful political response to blunt Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist appeal, but they now connected this ambition more closely to the military struggle. Hence their vociferous support for the French plans for a new Vietnamese national army; it would, after all, serve both ends. Was there a risk that this new army could be “turned against us”? Yes, a joint State-Defense report acknowledged in early December. But that possibility had to be considered alongside the prospect of ultimate defeat if things continued on their present course. “The former is a risk, the latter well-nigh a certainty.… Much of the stigma of colonialism can be removed if, where necessary, yellow men will be killed by yellow men rather than by white men alone.” The inclusion of the word
alone
was telling, for the report’s conclusion left no doubt that a French presence was vital for the foreseeable future and that the Paris government should get the military assistance it needed. For France’s cause in Indochina was also America’s. “America without Asia will have been reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precarious foothold on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent,” the authors concluded, but “success will vindicate and give added meaning to America and the American way of life.”
³³

In time, as we shall see, French leaders would have second thoughts about this internationalization of the war effort. Inevitably, the growth in U.S. involvement gave Washington officials increased leverage in the decision making and lessened France’s freedom of maneuver. For now, though, only one thing mattered: The struggle demanded an infusion of resources, which only the Americans could provide.

Vietnamese non-Communists likewise saw their leverage reduced with the Americans’ arrival. Whereas in Indonesia non-Communist nationalists under Sukarno won U.S. backing in their struggle against the Netherlands and secured independence via an international negotiated settlement in 1949, in Vietnam a different dynamic prevailed. Here the non-Communists were allied with the French against the Viet Minh and thus had far less chance to play the Americans—who saw this as a Cold War struggle first and foremost—against the colonial overlord. With each passing month, it seemed, non-Communist nationalist groups such as the Dai Viet and VNQDD saw their influence recede.

At Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters in the Viet Bac, the hope as 1950 drew to a close was that the hour had passed for the new measures to affect the course of events. It was too late now for the enemy to raise a legitimate Vietnamese fighting force, too late for the mighty Americans to make a meaningful difference on the ground. Following the glorious victory in the Border Campaign, red bunting appeared in villages all over Tonkin to welcome the victorious soldiers. Resistance committees proliferated throughout the north. By midautumn, recalled one Viet Minh soldier who took part in the Cao Bang fighting, army political officers were assuring troops that they would be “in Hanoi for Tet,” and there was a pervasive sense that “the general counteroffensive had begun.” The soldier described a typical mass rally that he and his unit came across as they marched from the frontier ridge to the delta: “The propaganda sections were already in place and had installed an information room where a phonograph played military tunes. A propagandist on a box decorated by the red flag with the yellow star harangued the crowd and the young people. ‘The People’s Army will be in Hanoi for Tet. This is the present that the army will give President Ho for the new year.’ ”
³⁴

Ho Chi Minh would get no such gift for the Tet holiday. Unbeknownst to the party propagandists who made their pitch, and to the cheering crowds who heard them, change was coming to Vietnam, in the form of a new French commander with a different conception of how to wage the struggle and the strength to realize that vision. And unbeknownst to them, Vo Nguyen Giap was about to make his biggest blunder of the war.

CHAPTER 11
KING JEAN

F
OR ONE YOUNG FRENCH LIEUTENANT, THE SITUATION IN
VIETNAM
in autumn 1950, following the disaster on the RC4, approached the point of no return. Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny, age twenty-three, an infantry lieutenant in the French Expeditionary Corps, had been in Indochina for a year, commanding a post some twenty miles southeast of Hanoi. He was a remarkable young man. At fifteen, he had helped his father escape from a wartime prison in daring fashion, then had joined the Free French Army and become the youngest soldier to be decorated with the Médaille militaire. Still a teenager in the campaigns of 1944–45, he was wounded in battle and received commendations for his bravery and dedication. In Indochina, he quickly won praise from his superiors, one of whom wrote, “He is one of the few officers who has really given thought to the problem of our presence here, and he has resolved it in a concrete manner.”
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Specifically, de Lattre had determined that the key to success lay in capturing the active support of the rural population; in the phrase of a later era, French soldiers and officers had to win the “hearts and minds” of the peasantry. The war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all, and that meant striving to meet the needs of people where they lived, whether in the form of providing security, or building schoolhouses or athletic fields, or improving sanitation. If killing had to be done—and the young lieutenant didn’t doubt it—it should be done as quietly as possible, with a knife or rifle, not with heavy artillery or aerial bombardment.

From the start, de Lattre immersed himself in the often-mundane tasks of pacification. Judging from his letters home and the reports of his superiors, he had success: One report exulted that de Lattre “has captured the hearts of the local population.”
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Over time, though, his letters began to take on lugubrious tones, especially as news reached him of the calamity in Cao Bang. He despaired at the “fear psychosis” gripping some fellow officers, and at the louche lifestyle led by others, and he complained of the absence of firm, purposeful command. “Tell Father we need him, without him it will go wrong,” he wrote his mother on October 23.
³

The son got his wish. In early December, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was appointed commander in chief of the Expeditionary Corps and high commissioner for Indochina, with complete control over the conduct of military operations as well as governmental affairs. Paris authorities, convinced that the conflicts of authority had impeded essential action at critical moments, chose to give both military and civilian powers to one individual. The elder de Lattre’s appointment did not come as a surprise, but neither was it entirely expected. Bernard was overjoyed. “What we need,” he wrote his father after the appointment was made, “is a leader who leads, fresh blood and new machinery, and no more niggling, no more small-time warfare; and then, with the morale that we still have in spite of it all, we could save everything.”
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We could save everything
. Those words would resound often in the months ahead. A savior had come, or so for a time it seemed. Jean de Lattre, one of France’s great military leaders of the twentieth century, with a string of accomplishments already under his belt, would have perhaps his biggest success in Vietnam. Born in 1889 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, a village in the Vendée whose other famous son was Georges Clemenceau, young Jean went to Saint-Cyr and from there to the trenches of World War I. Five different times he was wounded, swiftly earning a reputation for courage and calmness under fire. Once, during a German cavalry charge, an enemy lance pierced de Lattre’s chest; unmounted but undaunted, he killed two of the enemy with his sword, then escaped.

Between the wars de Lattre served under France’s famed Marshal Lyautey in Morocco and at the outbreak of the Battle of France led the Fourteenth Infantry Division as it tried valiantly to hold the German Panzers near Rheims. Later jailed by the Vichy regime for defying orders to keep his troops in barracks rather than fight the Germans, he escaped with the help of his wife and the young Bernard, who smuggled into his cell a small saw hidden in a bouquet of flowers and a ten-yard rope stuffed in a bag of laundry. De Lattre joined the Free French and in 1944–45 led the First French Army (which landed with the Americans in Provence on August 15, 1944) in its glorious march from the southern coast to the Rhine and the Danube. Among his prizes after crossing the Rhine were Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Freudenstadt. At one time, his command included 125,000 American troops.
⁵

Even then, de Lattre’s temperament was the stuff of legend. Like Douglas MacArthur, to whom he bore a strong physical resemblance and was often compared, he could be impatient with superiors’ instructions; like MacArthur, he was vain and had a flair for the intensely dramatic. “General de Théatre,” some called him. A brilliant mimic, he was excellent company, and even detractors acknowledged his extraordinary personal magnetism. More than one observer compared him to Churchill for his singular ability to dominate any room he entered, to attract all attention to himself, and to keep listeners enthralled with his magnetism, his self-deprecating wit, his eloquence.