Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Kennedy asks what the Vietnamese think of the United States. Not much, Topping replies. At the end of the Pacific War in 1945, Americans had stood supreme, immensely popular throughout Southeast Asia for their vanquishing of Japan and for the steadfast anticolonialism of the just-deceased Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Their esteem grew when they followed through on a pledge to grant independence to the Philippines. But that was then. Now the United States is resented and even hated by many Vietnamese for her vigorous backing of the French colonial war effort.

The interagency discussion yielded, in late April, a State Department recommendation that the United States not oppose a French return to Indochina but merely seek assurances from Paris that it would grant more self-government and increased local autonomy to the Indochinese people. Though termed a compromise, the recommendation in fact marked a sharp departure from previous U.S. policy. As such, it stands as a pivotal moment in the long history of American involvement in Vietnam. “The recommendation,” historian Ronald Spector has written, “was a long step away from Roosevelt’s unwavering insistence on creating a trusteeship.”48 The differences, to be sure, did not go away. As we shall see, there were still those in Washington who were convinced that the United States was on the wrong side of history in supporting French colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia.

A decision by the Truman administration to support Vietnamese independence in the late summer and fall of 1945 would have gone a long way toward averting the mass bloodshed and destruction that was to follow.

“One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution. Any hope of imposing such a solution would require a vastly larger French fighting force, which Paris was in no position to provide, now or in the foreseeable future.

As 1946 progressed, more than a few observers, including some who shared the desire to reclaim French control over Indochina, would comment on this rigidity of mind, this lack of intellectual dexterity. As one wag on his staff quietly put it, d’Argenlieu had “the most brilliant mind of the twelfth century.” The problem was that he was about to be faced with one of the most delicate political and historical problems of the twentieth—decolonization—and he didn’t have the breadth of mind to understand the forces against him.

The blackmail tactic worked. In the afternoon of March 6, the two sides, under intense Chinese pressure, signed a “Preliminary Convention,” wherein the French recognized the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state” (état libre) within the Indochinese Federation and French Union; the Vietnamese agreed to welcome twenty-five thousand French troops for five years to relieve departing Chinese forces; and France in turn agreed to accept the results of a future popular referendum on the issue of unifying the three regions.18 The new National Assembly in Hanoi, which had been elected in January, approved the deal, with the understanding that it was preliminary and that additional negotiations would follow in short order. Some Vietnamese militants condemned the accord as a sellout, but Ho reiterated his conviction that the first order of business was to be rid of the dread Chinese. “As for me,” he told aides, “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

1946

Whatever date one chooses for the start of the First Vietnam War—September 1945, with the outbreak of fighting in Cochin China, or November–December 1946, with the conflagration in Tonkin—by the start of 1947 there was fighting throughout Vietnam.34 Both sides had taken the necessary steps toward war, and in hindsight it’s tempting to see the whole thing as inevitable, especially after the failure of the Fontainebleau talks. But wars are never inevitable; they depend on the actions of individual leaders who could have chosen differently, who had, if not a menu of options, then at least an alternative to large-scale violence. Yet if it takes actions by two sides to make a war, both sides are not always equally culpable. And if it’s true that the Vietnamese fired the first shots on December 19, ultimately France bears primary responsibility for precipitating the conflict.

The real problem for the government, in terms of managing opinion on Indochina in 1947, was not at home but abroad. Neither the Soviet Union nor Great Britain nor the United States had tried hard to prevent the outbreak of war in late 1946; in 1947, all three continued to tread warily, a reality that worked to the general advantage of France. To the relief of Paris leaders—and to Ho Chi Minh’s intense disappointment—Joseph Stalin remained primarily concerned with keeping Soviet relations with France on a smooth plane, and he avoided expressing any open support for the DRV. The British too could be counted on to continue to affirm French sovereignty over Indochina; London officials might urge restraint, might recommend that Paris avoid undue provocations and work toward a “political solution,” but they would not do more, concerned as they were with maintaining dominion over their own colonial holdings. They indeed faced growing turmoil of their own in the region: In Malaya, postwar economic and political dislocation had generated labor unrest and a deep sense of alienation among the Chinese community. The United States was another story. French mistrust of American intentions ran deep, both among colons and among officials in the metropole. There was the suspicion, expressed in the March parliamentary debate and in the press, that Washington sought to displace France and incorporate Indochina within its growing economic empire. There was the persistent fear that the U.S. mi...

Despite the fact that the State Department saw no evidence of mass popular support for Communism within Vietnam, and further that it was not ideology but a desire for independence and a hatred of the French that drove the unrest, the principals in U.S. decision making proceeded on the basis of worst-case assumptions. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state and a figure of growing influence at Foggy Bottom, said that while the Viet Minh had never acknowledged any connection to the Kremlin, neither had they explicitly denied such a tie. Other U.S. analysts noted Ho Chi Minh’s training in Moscow in the 1920s and speculated that the Soviet government was cleverly concealing its involvement in Southeast Asian nationalist movements. Here again the lack of evidence for such involvement did not seem to matter, as skeptics were given the impossible task of proving a negative, of proving Soviet noninvolvement.

1949 would prove to be pivotal. The astonishing developments in world politics during that year would influence his cause no less than the French. After years of diplomatic failure, of international isolation, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam would taste her first real success, though with implications that he could not foresee. The war was about to change. Up to now largely a Franco-Vietnamese affair, resulting from Paris leaders’ attempt to reclaim colonial control and Vietnamese nationalistic determination to thwart them and define a new postcolonial order, it would become something else, something more. The great powers were coming to Vietnam.

“HAVING PUT OUR HAND TO THE PLOW, WE WOULD NOT LOOK back.”1 Such was Dean Acheson’s characterization of the American decision to effectively abandon her neutral policy and back the French war effort with substantial economic and military aid. It was an apt characterization, not only for 1949 but for many years to come. For the better part of twenty years, it would be the mantra of American administrations on Vietnam: Don’t look back; keep pressing ahead. Not until 1968, when Lyndon Baines Johnson curtailed the bombing, agreed to negotiations with Hanoi, and announced he would not seek reelection, did the direction change. Even then, the war had another five years to run.

Paris officials had made the sale: They had brought the Cold War to Vietnam. Just like the Viet Minh, they retained their age-old ambivalence about opening Indochina to foreign influence; and, like the Viet Minh, they had nevertheless chosen to bet on the internationalization of the war, to take the struggle to the diplomatic front. France had convinced her principal Western allies that she was bearing the brunt of an international struggle between East and West, between the forces of Communism and the forces of freedom. French colonial power was no longer the only thing at stake in Indochina, each of these governments in effect now agreed, and because France was fighting her allies’ battle, she was entitled to a generous measure of military and political assistance.27 Which meant, ultimately, American assistance.

Here Dulles summarized perfectly the position the Eisenhower administration would take in the all-important (as it turned out) first eighteen months after Inauguration Day. Never mind Eisenhower’s conviction that no military victory was possible “in that kind of theater”; never mind the low and sagging support for the war in metropolitan France; never mind that informed observers inside and outside the U.S. government had for years warned that the anti–Viet Minh cause was fraught with peril. For Dulles and Eisenhower both, Vietnam was a vital battle in the larger Cold War, one that had to be waged.

By the time the secretary spoke those words, more than 139,000 metric tons of U.S. equipment had been delivered to the French, including some 900 combat vehicles, 15,000 other vehicles, 2,500 artillery pieces, 24,000 automatic weapons, 75,000 small arms, and almost 9,000 radios. In addition, the French had received 160 F-6F and F-8F fighter planes, 41 B-26 light bombers, and 28 C-47 transports plus 155 aircraft engines and 93,000 bombs.18 It was a massive amount of matériel, but the new administration offered to do substantially more if Paris would only provide a plan for winning the war.

The internationalization of the war, which had looked like such a good idea in 1949–50, when Paris leaders worked so hard to secure allied and especially American backing, had become a crushing burden from which there seemed no real relief.

THE KOREAN ARMISTICE, SIGNED ON JULY 27, HAD A DEVASTATING effect on French thinking, causing a further slackening of the will to continue the fight. Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, told British officials a few days later that his compatriots were nonplussed: They saw the United States securing a truce in Korea and Britain trading with China and could not understand why their allies should expect them to continue a war in Indochina in which there was no longer a direct French interest.

On December 3 Navarre, who knew of the advancing enemy divisions, issued a fateful order to Cogny, in the form of “Personal and Secret Instructions for the Conduct of Operation No. 949.” Following some opening formalities, he came to the point: He had decided to accept battle in the northwest. Dien Bien Phu would be the center of operations and must be held at all costs. Lai Chau was to be evacuated as soon as the threat to it became too great to resist, and ground communications with Lai Chau to the north and Muong Khoua to the south were to be maintained as long as possible. Navarre envisioned a battle involving a movement phase of several weeks while the Viet Minh marched up to the base, followed by a week or ten days for their reconnaissance, and culminating in a few days of battle, resulting in the enemy’s total defeat.21 It was a momentous decision, no less so for going against a core tenet of the Navarre Plan: the need to avoid a major engagement in the current campaign season. The French commander’s calculation, which he knew would be tested soon enough, was that Giap’s logistical problems so far from home would be too severe to overcome. He would not be able to maintain a large body of troops in the area due to the harshness of the terrain and the presence of the French Air Force. The Deuxième Bureau had made clear to Navarre that the PAVN was a real army with trucks and cannons, but how could it transport them as far as Dien Bien Phu? Answer: It couldn’t. Its inh...

That was the key question: Would Giap be able to put his major weaponry to effective use? Navarre and Cogny in January still clung to the belief that he couldn’t. If he followed the conventional practice of firing his guns from behind the crests, the trajectory would be wrong and he’d be too far away to do serious damage; if he fired them from the forward slope, he would be easily identified and destroyed. The garrison’s artillery commander, the one-armed Colonel Charles Piroth, encouraged them in this belief, insisting that he could handle easily whatever Giap threw his way. Cogny, increasingly fearful that the outlying strongpoints—especially Béatrice and Gabrielle on the north end—would be swiftly overrun in the battle and be almost impossible to retake, hoped he was right. Artillery would be decisive, he knew, one way or the other.

And on this point, available DRV internal sources are clear: At the start of 1954, it was American policy more than French policy that was of chief concern to Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo. The United States was now the principal enemy, not France.2 Should President Dwight Eisenhower choose to further increase his involvement in the French cause, perhaps by sending ground troops to the war theater, or by ordering air strikes on Viet Minh positions, it would have enormous implications for the balance of military forces. Conversely, should the American president alter his hostile attitude toward diplomacy and come out in favor of a negotiated settlement, that too would change the dynamics in a fundamental way. Yet again the question loomed, for Viet Minh leaders and for their counterparts in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, and London: What will the Americans do?

Late in the month the Smith committee recommended, and Eisenhower approved, the dispatch of two hundred uniformed U.S. Air Force mechanics to Indochina to service American-supplied aircraft, including the new B-26s, on the understanding that “they would be used at bases where they would be secure from capture and would not be exposed to combat.” The president also agreed to send U.S. civilian pilots hired by the CIA, using planes from the agency’s proprietary airline, the Civilian Air Transport (CAT), to assist the French with air transport. Within a few weeks, a squadron of C-119 transports based in Formosa, painted gray and manned by two dozen CAT pilots, began flying supplies into Dien Bien Phu. Their contribution would be crucial, for these “Flying Boxcars” had a six-ton capacity, as compared to the two-and-a-half-ton capacity of the French-piloted Dakotas. The supply of Dien Bien Phu would have been impossible without them.6 “Don’t think I like to send them there,” Eisenhower said in front of Press Secretary James Hagerty, with reference to the technicians. “But we can’t get anywhere in Asia by just sitting here in Washington doing nothing. My God, we must not lose Asia. We’ve got to look this thing in the face.”7

January 1954

Critics both in Parliament and in the press depicted a prime minister fawningly servile to Eisenhower, and a British government far too ignorant of America’s nuclear program—and her foreign policy generally. Inevitably, Indochina came into the picture, as Labourites said they would seek to quash any thought of joining a U.S.-led intervention to defeat Ho Chi Minh. Such an intervention, they said, could lead swiftly to a dangerous and uncontrollable escalation of the conflict, drawing in China and the Soviet Union and culminating in World War III.

Dulles himself, at this very Paris meeting, formally raised the matter of atomic weapons and their possible use, though without explicit reference to Indochina. In a speech to the NATO Council on the evening of April 23, he declared that Soviet advantages in manpower were too great—in military, political, or economic terms—for the West to overcome. Therefore, nuclear weapons must be considered part of NATO’s “conventional” arsenal. The secretary went on to assert that it must be “our agreed policy,” in the case of either general or local war, to use atomic weapons “whenever or wherever it would be of advantage to do so, taking account of all relevant factors.”43 Dulles sought here to speak to the furor in Europe resulting from the recent H-bomb tests, and he may also have been wanting to keep Moscow and Beijing guessing as to what the West might resort to in Indochina; but his language is a further indication that the use of the bomb in the jungles of Tonkin in the spring of 1954 was, from the administration’s perspective, decidedly within the realm of possibility.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.

That day, June 24, 1954, Pierre Mendès France did what Georges Bidault and Joseph Laniel had always refused to do: He formally agreed to seek the temporary division of Vietnam, as a means of bringing the long and bloody Indochina war to an end.

On June 24, Dulles told congressional leaders that any Geneva agreement would be “something we would have to gag about,” but he expressed optimism that the United States could “salvage something” in Indochina “free of the taint of French colonialism.” Specifically, Washington would assume responsibility for the defense of Cambodia, Laos, and southern Vietnam, with the first task the drawing of a line the Communists would not cross. Then, the secretary continued, the United States would “hold this area and fight subversion within with all the strength we have,” using economic and military assistance to the non-Communist governments as well as an American-led regional defense grouping modeled in part on NATO.34 It was a monumental decision, as important as any made by an American administration on Indochina, from Franklin Roosevelt’s to Gerald Ford’s. Its true import would become clear only with time, but even on that day the weight of the secretary of state’s words were hard to miss. The United States would thenceforth take responsibility for defending most of Indochina, he told the lawmakers, and without “the taint of French colonialism.”

For the Chinese as well as the Viet Minh, clearly, one thing mattered most of all: keeping the United States out.

Zhou Enlai in particular played a critical role in facilitating the ultimate agreement of July 20–21. Content in the conference’s early weeks to maintain a fairly low profile, his more activist posture from mid-June onward proved decisive, as the courteous elegance and diplomatic savvy for which he would in time be heralded came to the fore. “The godfather of the partition solution,” U.S. delegate Chester Cooper would call Zhou, and this seems fair. For although partition had been bandied about as a potential solution for many weeks prior to Geneva, it was the Chinese premier’s subtle but forceful advocacy, coming at a time when many predicted the imminent dissolution of the conference, that made all the difference.

FOR HO CHI MINH, THERE WERE OTHER, MORE IMPORTANT REASONS to temper the celebrations that mid-October day. To begin with, the price of victory over France had been enormous, in both blood and treasure. From 1946 to 1954, the Viet Minh suffered some 200,000 soldiers killed, and an estimated 125,000 civilians also perished, the majority of them in Tonkin.5 Much of the DRV zone, moreover, lay in ruins.

Eisenhower and Dulles had their own doubts about the prospects in Vietnam, and in particular about the Diem government’s long-term viability, but they did not waver in their determination. To do nothing would risk the loss of all of Indochina, and that remained anathema to them, for geopolitical as well as domestic political reasons. Accordingly, the administration moved energetically to reorganize and retrain the Vietnamese National Army, eventually winning the acquiescence of the Joint Chiefs in doing so.

THE IMPORT OF THE MOMENT WAS NOT LOST ON LEADERS IN HANOI. They understood only too well that with his victory over the sects in early May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem had achieved his long-sought objective: the consolidation of power in Saigon as well as staunch American backing for his government. French military and political influence in South Vietnam, meanwhile, had suffered a blow from which it would almost certainly never recover.

But the North Vietnamese could not ignore the increasingly desperate appeals of their southern comrades. Slowly they moved toward a more aggressive policy.34 A central figure in the shift was Le Duan, a former political prisoner of the French who had been a top Viet Minh leader in the south before being named acting secretary-general of the party in Hanoi. The son of a carpenter in Quang Tri province, Le Duan was small in build and plainspoken in manner, and he lacked the educational pedigree and elite family credentials of many party leaders, some of whom mocked his coarse accent and his early job as a railway attendant. But he possessed a formidable intellect, and he did not want for self-confidence. Beginning in mid-1956, when he penned a short report titled “The Path to Revolution in the South,” he nudged his comrades to do more to support the revolution below the seventeenth parallel, even as they continued to give primary emphasis to building socialism in the north.

As the decade drew to a close, American leverage with Diem, not high to begin with, had declined further. Try as U.S. officials might to get him to broaden his government, to show more sensitivity to the needs of his people, to show greater tolerance for the expression of political opposition, they got nowhere. Instead Diem, his utter confidence in his own political instincts wholly unimpaired, turned increasingly inward, relying almost exclusively on an ever-shrinking circle of confidants headed by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. More than ever, personal loyalty, rather than ability and efficiency, became the criterion for promotion and reward.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in belated acknowledgment that the principal and most immediate security threat came not from the North Vietnamese military but from the southern insurgency, now outlined a plan to fight an antiguerrilla, or counterinsurgency, war in the south. Finalized in late 1960, the strategy operated from several core assumptions, none of them new: that Diem’s government at present offered “the best hope” for defeating the Viet Cong; that Diem in fact could cope with the Communist threat provided that “necessary corrective measures were taken”; and that the United States had a vital stake in helping to eradicate the insurgency. The plan provided for an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese Army and the Civil Guard, to be financed mostly by Washington. In return for this assistance, the Saigon regime would implement a series of measures designed to achieve and maintain economic and political stability and thereby win the hearts and minds of the general population. Intelligence and counterintelligence operations would be better coordinated, and more resources would be devoted to psychological warfare and civic action programs. Overall, the scheme, which had White House support, gave continued priority to the military dimensions of the problem, much to the collective satisfaction of MAAG and the Ngo family.

It mattered here that Kennedy’s and Johnson’s freedom of maneuver was already constrained by the choices of their predecessors—by Truman’s tacit acknowledgment in 1945–46 that France had a right to return to Indochina; by his administration’s decision in 1950 to actively aid the French war effort; and by the Eisenhower team’s move in 1954 to intervene directly in southern Vietnam, displacing France as the major external power. LBJ had the added burden of Kennedy’s expansion of U.S. involvement in 1961–63. For more than a dozen years, the United States had committed herself to preserving a non-Communist toehold in Vietnam, and both men feared that to alter course now, even under the cover of a fig-leaf negotiated settlement, could be harmful in terms of “credibility”—their country’s, their party’s, their own. They weren’t willing to risk it.

The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina, and might well have succeeded, thereby changing the flow of history. But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years.

For as Fall once said, Americans were “dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps.”