Embers of War (48 page)

VIII

DE LATTRE SOUGHT TO PUT SOME OF THAT EQUIPMENT TO IMMEDIATE
use upon his return to Saigon. He did not have much time left, he knew. He was dying. Doctors had operated on him in Paris in October and had told him his final stay in Vietnam would be brief. Visibly weakened upon landing in Saigon but encouraged by the banners of support along the road as he drove from the airport to the Residency (“Vive le Général de Lattre”), de Lattre sought to show both Paris—where lawmakers prepared to debate the Indochina budget for 1952–53—and Washington that France could regain the ascendancy in the field.

Major military engagements had been few since Giap’s return to guerrilla warfare in the summer. Attacks on convoys continued, and there were frequent hit-and-run attacks and assassinations: Most notably, in late July, in a rare example of a suicide bombing, a Viet Minh youth had unloosed from his jacket a grenade that killed himself along with Brigadier General Charles Marie Chanson, the French commander for South Vietnam, and Thai Lap Thanh, a Vietnamese local governor, during a public reception in a town southwest of Saigon. For de Lattre, it was another bitter blow. He considered Chanson—who had earned plaudits for his work in Tonkin in 1946–47 and more recently for getting the better of his Viet Minh counterpart in the south, Nguyen Binh—one of his ablest generals and had watched over and pushed his career for many years.
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In the Red River Delta in the north, tension remained high in the late summer and fall, as Giap used regional troops to harass the French to considerable effect. The French answer in the delta was to conduct continual sweeps, using both static battalions and
groupes mobiles
. When these units located a fortified Viet Minh village, its inhabitants were given notice to quit; if they refused to comply, air support was called in to raze the village, usually using napalm. These operations achieved considerable short-term tactical success, and—these being rice-producing areas—caused the DRV’s food situation to grow worse. But the old problem remained: The French, undermanned as always, could not long stay in the conquered areas; as soon as they departed, the Viet Minh flowed back in. There existed no civil service organization to stay on the scene to try to work with the peasants, few of whom were in any mood to cooperate with those who had attacked their village.
⁵⁵

De Lattre determined that his forces had to take the offensive, to extend their line outward on ground the enemy would have to defend, accepting a pitched battle. He chose the area around Hoa Binh, in the mountains to the west of the delta. An important river and road junction, Hoa Binh was reached by the RC6 from Hanoi and by the Black River, so transport should not be a major problem for French units. Sparsely populated, the area was also likely to suffer few civilian casualties in the fighting. Most important of all, de Lattre reasoned, success at Hoa Binh would cut the main line of communication by which the Viet Minh had drawn rice supplies from the south and sent down Chinese military equipment from the north. An added bonus: Hoa Binh was the capital town of the Muong tribe, whose hostility to the Viet Minh and potential loyalty to the French cause de Lattre sought to cement.
⁵⁶

At dawn on November 14, three French paratroop battalions descended on the town, encountering almost no resistance. Simultaneously, some twenty-two infantry and artillery battalions and two armored groups, along with engineering forces to repair sabotaged roads and bridges, began moving up the narrow Black River valley. By the afternoon of the fifteenth, the French had achieved their objectives with virtually no losses and almost no enemy opposition. Giap, sensing he had neither numerical superiority nor an adequate route of withdrawal, had refused battle, pulling his troops back into the forested hills, content to fight another day on his own terms. In December, he was ready. He ordered his 304th, 308th, and 312th Divisions to close in on Hoa Binh and the RC6, while back in the delta he had elements of the 316th and 320th infiltrate from the north and south to harass French rear areas. Although unsuccessful in taking Hoa Binh, the Viet Minh were able to cut first the water and then the land routes into the town. French attempts to reopen communications exacted heavy cost in lives and equipment, and meanwhile the security situation in the delta deteriorated. “We shall never give up Hoa Binh,” de Lattre vowed, but he was wrong. In February 1952, General Raoul Salan ordered the post’s evacuation.
⁵⁷
The Viet Minh duly took it and began to push a north-south trail toward central and southern Vietnam, the beginning of what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The decision was Salan’s because by then de Lattre had died. On November 19, 1951, he had left Vietnam, ostensibly for a high-level Paris meeting. On the eve of his departure, there had been a cocktail party in his honor, attended by, among others, Graham Greene, the novelist, who spent the first of several consecutive winters in Saigon in 1951–52. Greene had visited Vietnam briefly early in the year and had been impressed then by de Lattre’s fierce dynamism. Now, the novelist observed, “the changes were startling.” De Lattre was an altered man, weary and morose, “his rhetoric of hope wearing painfully thin.” Even some of his subordinates criticized him, Greene went on, tired as they were of his constant references to his own loss—“others had sacrificed their sons too, and had not been able to fly the bodies home for a Paris funeral.”
⁵⁸

At the meeting in Paris, de Lattre was lucid and forceful but so weak physically that afterward he had to be carried in a chair up to his apartment. His real reason for coming to France was medical, and on December 18, he underwent major surgery. An additional operation followed on January 5. His condition worsened until his death, confirmation crucifix clutched in his hand, on January 11. In the final days, he confided to General Valluy: “There is only one thing that upsets me: I have never completely understood Indochina.” His last words, voiced during a moment of brief consciousness on the ninth, were “Where is Bernard?”
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So came to an end
l’année de Lattre
. His year had shown both the power and the limits of individual human agency in issues of war and peace. De Lattre indisputably demonstrated what a decisive contribution to events a leader can make, for without him the war in Tonkin might well have been lost in the early weeks of the year. The Viet Minh might have realized their propaganda claim “Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi by Tet.” Critics could reasonably respond that he would have been wiser to concede the north and center and focus instead on strengthening Cochin China, and it’s certainly the case that de Lattre faced deep structural problems in his vow to preserve all of Indochina within the French Union. He himself was aware of these problems, not least the lack of broad popular support for the Bao Dai regime and the unwillingness of anti-Communist Vietnamese to fight for the cause. More than his predecessors, he worked to build up the VNA and more broadly to mobilize the population in French-held areas to actively back the war effort.

At the same time, de Lattre’s dictatorial methods alienated many Vietnamese, who also found his definition of Vietnamese independence far too restrictive. In one breath, he would say he fully supported Vietnamese nationalist aspirations; in the next, he would demand full popular loyalty to the French Union and to himself as France’s representative. He had no patience for the political navigating that independence must involve or for the nationalist who appeared insufficiently grateful. In this way de Lattre, for all his military sagacity and dazzling leadership, for all his daring and élan, was cut from the same cloth as the high commissioners who went before. His parting comment surely is telling: Never did he fully comprehend Indochina.

His determination to keep Indochina within the French Union led him to expend great effort on a second objective: to boost the U.S. military involvement in the war. Here his legacy was of profound importance. De Lattre recognized immediately that only the Americans could supply the material assistance he needed, and over the course of the year he (along with his civilian counterparts in Paris) achieved great success in cementing America’s presence. Franco-American tensions remained considerable, but Harry Truman and his top aides bought the general’s argument that Korea and Indochina were the same struggle. Of de Lattre’s fifty-five weeks as commander in chief, none were more important than the two he spent in the United States. By January 1952 he was gone, but the Americans were more firmly committed to his cause than ever before.

His passing cast a pall over the whole of France. Public mourning was decreed for three days, and for two days the body lay in state in the Invalides while a vast and reverent crowd filed silently past the bier. On January 15, the casket was placed on a tank beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and that evening mounted troops carrying torches escorted it to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where the president of the republic bestowed upon de Lattre the title of Marshal of France. He was the first in almost three decades to be so honored. The following morning the archbishop of Paris led a solemn mass in the cathedral in the presence of the president, the government, the diplomatic corps, and the top military leadership, together with a large contingent of the general public.
⁶⁰

For those who seek symbols, there were several. Charles de Gaulle, so crucial to the initial decision to reclaim Indochina for the empire after World War II, and (even though out of office by then) to wage war there, arrived alone and remained standing solitary for a long time before the coffin. General Eisenhower, soon to begin his campaign for president of the United States, and destined to face his own momentous decisions concerning war and peace in Vietnam, was one of the pallbearers as the casket was conveyed on a gun carriage from the cathedral through the silent crowded streets back to the Place des Invalides. And there was, finally, this: On January 17, the funeral cortège proceeded slowly from Paris to Versailles, Chartres, and Saumur, and on to Mouilleron-en-Pareds, where the coffin was placed in a grave next to that of Bernard, the only son, in the shade of two trees. A nearby windmill was made into a memorial chapel to perpetuate the memory of the father and son who, the citation said, gave their all for France.

CHAPTER 12
THE QUIET ENGLISHMAN

“R
EDS
’
TIME BOMBS RIP SAIGON CENTER: MISSILES KILL 2 AND
Injure 30 in Spectacular Viet Minh Strike in Indo-China.” So blared the headline in
The New York Times
of January 10, 1952. Later newspaper issues raised the dead to eight Vietnamese and two Frenchmen, and thirty-two injured.

Reporter Tillman Durdin had the story: “Agents here of the Viet Minh forces this forenoon staged one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism in Saigon. Two time bombs were exploded at 11 o’clock in the crowded center of two main downtown squares, killing two persons and injuring thirty. Thirteen automobiles were blasted and burned, walls were pitted, windows knocked out, and plaster jarred loose in buildings all around the scene of the explosions.”

The bombs had been left in two parked cars, Durdin continued. One blast went off at the Place de Théâtre, which was overlooked by the Opera House, the Continental Hotel, and a complex of shops and offices. The other blast occurred in the square in front of the City Hall, a block away. The two explosions occurred within two minutes of each other, and the police determined that the two automobiles, each bearing false license plates, had been driven up and parked only a short time before the bombs went off. The perpetrators had had time to flee the scene before the explosions occurred.
¹

Life
magazine published a photograph of the Place de Théâtre taken immediately after the explosion, and described the scene:

At 11 o’clock … a powerful bomb planted by the Viet Minh Communists, exploded in the trunk of an auto parked in the crowded, busy square. The bomb blew the legs from under the man in the foreground and left him bloody and dazed, propped up on the tile sidewalk with his broken left ankle twisted beneath him. It killed the driver of the … delivery truck as he sat at the wheel. It riddled and set fire to the truck, made a torch of a cloth-topped jeep, smashed and burned more autos and raked the square with fragments and flame.
²

Almost immediately doubts emerged that the attacks were the work of the Viet Minh. Their preferred terrorist methods were different: hand grenades thrown from a bicyclist or rolled down a movie aisle, or point-blank shootings, execution-style. To Donald Heath, the U.S. minister, this merely meant the Viet Minh had shifted tactics. “While feat selected is less [an] exhibition of strength than of VM willingness to indulge in cowardly and brutal acts of terrorism,” he cabled Washington, “exploit was carried out with grim efficiency and will undoubtedly be heralded as Commie triumph.”
³
But veteran journalists thought someone else must be the culprit, as did the French Sûreté. Speculation turned to Colonel Trinh Minh Thé, a flamboyant former Cao Dai chief of staff who had broken with the French in 1951 and, together with twenty-five hundred Cao Dai troops, had set up a headquarters in a swampy area past Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. His aim: to fight both the French and the Viet Minh, since any authentic nationalism had to oppose both sides. He would be a “Third Force.” In radio broadcasts, Thé’s operatives took credit for the January 9 blasts, and French officials concluded that he was indeed responsible.
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