Embers of War (51 page)

The agent’s emphasis on the timing is important. A few years thence, as we shall see, at about the time the novel was published, U.S. officials
were
in close contact with Thé and
did
promote him as someone who could play at least a supporting role in a Third Force movement in Vietnam. In 1954–55, none other than Edward Lansdale had contact with Thé and worked to keep him supportive of U.S. policy. In one recently declassified memorandum from the period, Lansdale speaks of Thé’s charisma and political strength and calls Thé crucial to achieving America’s aims in Vietnam.
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That was later. In February 1952, as he readied to leave Saigon and Vietnam, Graham Greene had yet to begin writing his novel. His
Paris Match
article would not appear for another five months. But he had already made certain determinations about the Franco–Viet Minh struggle that are of particular interest here. For one thing, Greene’s anti-Communism and sympathy for the French cause did not keep him from appreciating the skill and commitment of the Viet Minh and the corresponding weakness of Bao Dai’s regime, with its chronic tendency toward lassitude and incompetence; he grasped already that France faced long odds against success. For another thing, he saw with his own eyes how entrenched the United States was becoming in the anti–Viet Minh effort (he opens
The Quiet American
with Fowler seeing “the lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes”), and how much friction existed between the Americans and the French, with whom they were ostensibly allied. Greene spent significant time only with one side in this dispute, which no doubt colored his perceptions, but there’s ample additional evidence that in the early months of 1952, relations between French and American officials in Vietnam were more strained than ever.

The seemingly relentless Americanization of South Vietnamese urban culture had something to do with it. More and more, young Saigonese flocked to American films, listened to American popular music, even dressed in the American style they picked up from Hollywood movies—shorts with angled pockets, loose short-sleeved shirts, Bata cotton shoes. Try as colonial officials might to convince themselves and one another that these developments were natural and to be expected, it wasn’t always an easy sell, even if there were also continuities: Privileged Vietnamese still preferred French food and French perfume, still used Français as their second (in some cases first) language, and still thought
colons
were more generous tippers than Americans.
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Howard Simpson, who arrived in Saigon in January 1952 to take up his post as a press officer for the U.S. Information Service, had barely set foot in the city when he experienced firsthand the French mistrust of all things American. At their first encounter, Jean-Pierre Dannaud, the director of the French Information Service, was cool and condescending toward Simpson and fairly oozed resentment at what he considered American interference in the war effort. Simpson initially brushed this tension off as unrepresentative and as stemming from his own lack of experience in the Far East, but he quickly changed his mind. It dawned on him, he later wrote, that “the two so-called allies saw the future of the Indochinese peninsula from entirely different optics.” True, Harry Truman and his top advisers in Washington preached the need to back the anti–Viet Minh struggle, and they matched their rhetoric by sending more and more aid to the French; also true, Donald Heath insisted in his first meeting with Simpson that France was “fighting the good fight” and as such deserved the legation’s full support. But neither these high-level convictions nor the diplomatic language and soothing official declarations offered by both sides could mask, Simpson determined, the mutual suspicions and growing rivalry.
³⁴

He got a fuller taste of that rivalry as soon as he ventured into the field. Although the French High Command had final say on the distribution of American military matériel, a stipulation in the bilateral agreement allowed the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to make suggestions regarding that distribution. In addition, MAAG had the right to conduct “end-use” inspections in the field to determine how the U.S.-supplied equipment was being utilized. Simpson’s office, meanwhile, had the task of publicizing the aid program’s effectiveness in the United States and abroad. He consequently accompanied the end-use missions—or, as U.S. officials came to call them, “end-use charades.” Typically, the visits would take months to schedule, due to “operational requirements” claimed by the French. On the appointed day, French drivers would arrive hours behind schedule and then inexplicably get lost en route to the post. When at last the U.S. officers arrived on scene, they would be told that for “security reasons” the inspection would be limited to service and support units. An elaborate lunch table would be laid for them, with four courses, red and white wine, and cognac toasts offered by the senior French officer present. When Simpson and his colleagues at last emerged into the afternoon sun, it would be too late to visit the outlying posts.
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“The flowery mess toasts may have referred to ‘our gallant American allies,’ Lafayette, and the Normandy landings,” Simpson recalled, “but to a majority of the French, both military and civilian, we were
‘Les Amerloques,’
a derogatory slang phrase for ‘crazy Americans.’ They felt we were muscling in on their territory, spreading wild ideas about freedom and independence among the local population, and showing a dangerous tendency toward criminal naïvete in a region we knew little about.”
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Little wonder Graham Greene in early 1952 found so much to talk about with the French officers in Saigon: “Dangerous” and “criminally naïve” could be Fowler talking about Pyle. Simpson in fact met the novelist on two or three occasions, during which the “aloof and dyspeptic” Greene “made no secret of his basic anti-American feelings” and his misgivings concerning the deepening U.S. involvement in the war. Early on Simpson thought Greene might ask him to help arrange an interview with Donald Heath, but it never happened. The Englishman “remained with his French and Vietnamese contacts, observing the
Amerloques
at a disdainful distance.” On a later occasion, Simpson and Greene, both of them hungover from a late night of carousing, found themselves seated side by side on an early morning flight to Laos. They exchanged a cool acknowledgment but, Simpson remembered, “it took no great receptivity to sense Greene’s displeasure at being paired with an ‘official’ American.” They passed the flight in silence.
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Bemused though he was by the depth of the French mistrust, Simpson acknowledged that the brash behavior of many Americans in Saigon didn’t help. The phrase “ugly American” was not yet in use, but the phenomenon could be observed on any given day. Moving through the streets in their large black sedans and new Jeep station wagons, hitting the bars and restaurants en masse sporting crew cuts and aloha shirts that they left untucked, these Yanks never made a pretense of blending in. Even those who were more low-key and subtle tended to separate themselves from everyone but fellow Americans—a point Congressman John F. Kennedy, it will be recalled, had noted on his visit the previous autumn. Each day Simpson and other Americans from USIS and the Aid Mission met for pre-lunch beers at the Continental’s terrace café, “a symbol of the old colonial Indochina.” He recalled of these sessions: “We were a boisterous group, playing the match game for drinks and laughing loudly at inconsequential jokes, well aware of the disapproving
colons
who left a
cordon sanitaire
of empty tables around us.”

“In retrospect,” a rueful Simpson concluded, “I can understand some of the French resentment.”
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Greene, for his part, departed Saigon somewhat sadly on February 9. “I left Saigon yesterday—with certain regrets. I had one or two good friends there. Especially during this last stay. Perhaps I’ll write the ‘entertainment’ I thought of and go back and film it one day. People have been nice to me.”
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CHAPTER 13
THE TURNING POINT THAT DIDN’T TURN

D
ETERMINED THOUGH THEY WERE TO MAINTAIN A
CORDON SANITAIRE
between themselves and the Americans—not just on the Continental’s fabled terrace but everywhere, in figurative as well as literal terms—the French in Indochina in early 1952 understood that they were utterly dependent on U.S. economic and military and diplomatic support. They could work to disrupt the MAAG end-use inspections and thwart all American efforts to cultivate a nationalist, anti-Communist Third Force. They could ignore U.S. recommendations regarding specific military operations and overall strategy, and they could turn a deaf ear to Washington’s persistent call for greater efforts at building up the Vietnamese National Army. At the end of the day, however, they needed the United States, needed what only the Truman administration among the West’s governments could bring: massive monetary and material support, and international legitimacy.

The lack of leverage went both ways, or so most American officials believed. It didn’t matter that the U.S. presence in the war was now growing seemingly on a daily basis, and that Washington’s contribution to overall French expenditures in Indochina by the middle of 1952 topped 40 percent; American influence was nevertheless frustratingly limited. The reasons had not merely to do with Southeast Asia. In Europe, the administration sought to bring France firmly into the structure of the fledgling European Defense Community (EDC). Proposed by France’s René Pleven in response to Washington’s desire for the rearmament of West Germany, the plan called for a common European army, under joint control, that would help counter the Soviet threat while not re-creating a sovereign German army. U.S. analysts fully understood that the ultimate ratification of the EDC treaty depended inordinately on attitudes in the house of its originator—where Charles de Gaulle, always a force to be reckoned with, immediately denounced it for allowing the dilution of the French army into an intra-European amalgam—and they were loath to do anything in Indochina that could anger Paris officials and journalists and thereby threaten passage.
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One fear was that France would be unable to meet her obligations to the EDC and to NATO and at the same time fight a war halfway around the world. Early in 1952, Paris planners calculated that, even with projected American assistance of all kinds, the cost to France of meeting these two requirements would likely rise to over $4 billion—roughly $1 billion for Indochina and the remainder for Europe. Had senior U.S. officials cared only or mostly about the EDC and NATO, they would have insisted that France rid herself of the Indochina burden by promising complete and total independence for Vietnam, and by a specific date. But the Truman administration in 1952 still wanted desperately to keep France in the fight against Ho Chi Minh. As French officials well understood, their military effort in Indochina served American interests at least as much as it served theirs. If U.S. advice became too meddlesome, or if the administration sought to tie strings to its aid, what then? Might the Paris government simply withdraw from Indochina entirely?
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It seemed all too possible. Said one American official in Paris in early 1952: “We’re approaching now the same situation we faced in the spring of 1947 when things got too much for the British and they dumped Greece and Turkey in our laps. The French can barely hold with what they have here now.… If they pull out [of Indochina], the question is put to us.” In the same vein, the British ambassador in Paris cautioned: “I fear we may be near a point where the French may turn round and say to us, ‘Is this war in the interests of the Western powers, as France can no longer maintain it alone as a French war? Unless you can join us, we shall be obliged to pull out.’ ”
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The possibility of a French withdrawal seemingly grew more real that January, as Paris lawmakers prepared to begin a full-dress debate on Indochina in the National Assembly. De Lattre’s death on January 11, just a few days before the start of the debate, set a somber mood for the proceedings, and it was soon clear that a broad cross section of delegates questioned France’s continued commitment to the war. Views that a year earlier would have been labeled “defeatist,” or “unpatriotic,” were openly expressed, and not merely by the left. How could France afford, many delegates asked, to continue a struggle that in 1952 would consume between one-seventh and one-sixth of the entire budget? Answer: She could not, certainly not if she was also to build up a large army in Europe, which alone would enable her to pull her own weight in the organization of Western defense. “I am asking for a change of policy in Indo-China,” declared Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party.

I have never advocated capitulation, but I have asked and am still asking that every avenue be explored for an agreement with the Viet Minh. I am told one cannot negotiate with Communists, with Moscow agents. But what else are the Americans doing in Korea? … [A]s long as we go on losing all these officers and men in Indo-China, as long as we go on spending 500 billion francs a year, we shall have no army in Europe, and only 500 billion francs worth of inflation, poverty, and fuel for Communist propaganda.
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Influential voices in the French press said in essence the same thing;
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
both noted that, absent dramatically increased U.S. aid, France would soon have to choose between fulfilling her European responsibilities and seeking a rapid diplomatic solution in Vietnam. At the U.S. embassy in Paris, a despondent David Bruce saw French hopes for victory dashed and the public eager for peace. “A snowball has started to form,” the ambassador warned Washington. Absent greater American assistance for the war effort or some kind of “internationalization”—meaning U.S. and British guarantees to defend Indochina militarily—public sentiment for withdrawal would continue to build. The CIA, for its part, said that a full-fledged French reappraisal of Vietnam policy was at hand, with potentially major implications for the United States.
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