But senior officials were loath to simply throw U.S. support behind Valluy’s war effort. They ruled out direct assistance to the military campaign and told Paris planners that any attempt to reconquer Vietnam by force of arms would be wrongheaded. At the same time, they knew full well that a sizable chunk of the unrestricted U.S. economic assistance to France ($1.9 billion between July 1945 and July 1948) was being used to pay war costs.
