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

by Fredrik Logevall

No doubt the foregoing litany of obstacles in the path of success stands out more sharply in retrospect than it did at the time. Hindsight can distort; prophets become prophets only in time. Alongside the gloomy prognostications of Abbot Low Moffat and other skeptics could be placed other contemporaneous judgments, also plausible, that emphasized the precariousness of the Viet Minh’s position. Ho Chi Minh himself succumbed to such concern on occasion, as did Giap. The French, after all, had scored big victories in the first months of 1947, and they could conceivably have had more, had not the monsoon season intervened and compelled Valluy to lie low for the summer months. Their firepower vastly exceeded that of the Viet Minh, who also lacked supplies and medicines, and whose commanders had woefully little battlefield experience. Internationally, the sympathy that many felt for the Vietnamese revolutionary cause had not translated into tangible—whether material or diplomatic—support.