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With increased American assistance as well as a buildup of the VNA, and with French devolution of sovereignty to the non-Communist governments, “only an outright invasion by the Chinese communists would be likely to rescue the Viet Minh from defeat.” The report acknowledged the breadth of Ho Chi Minh’s popular appeal and took note of the “current of nationalism [that] runs strong throughout Indochina,” but its author was not willing to characterize Ho as a genuine nationalist. The Viet Minh leader’s objective, Mansfield wrote, was merely to use a “form of misdirected nationalism” to gain the
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For Eisenhower and Dulles, the Mansfield Report was a godsend, providing just the kind of bipartisan legitimacy they wanted at a critical time in the war, when the U.S. aid effort was ramping up massively. He was a junior senator but a respected one, especially on Asian issues, and he was from the opposition party. His claim that the military outlook was good and getting better served to further strengthen the consensus on Capitol Hill that this was a battle that should be waged.
If someone as steady, sober-minded, and seemingly knowledgeable as Mansfield—a former professor of Asian history!—could voice this kind of unwavering support for the French cause, many lawmakers must have asked themselves, who am I to disagree?
THAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT REMAINED STEADFAST WAS LOST ON none of the principal actors in Vietnam—not the French, not the Viet Minh, and not the non-Communist nationalist groups who picked this time to begin clamoring more loudly for major concessions from Paris. “We’ll fight, but only for independence” was the new refrain among these groups.
Paris, it was clear, still called the shots. At official ceremonies, French representatives still sat in the front row, relegating the Vietnamese to the back; on Saigon streets, French officials still rubbed in their presence by tearing around with screaming motorcycle escorts.
Seemingly indefatigable, he rose early and often worked past midnight and in his spare time wrote poetry. His hatred of the Viet Minh ran deep—he had had a hand in putting down Communist insurrections prior to and during World War II, and two of his sons were killed by Giap’s forces in 1946.
“The most important thing is winning the village populations over to the cause. Our nationalist fervor has got to match the Viet Minh’s, and once we take over from the French, Ho Chi Minh could well be forced into making a deal on our terms.”36 To underlings, however, Tam always stressed the need to be patient and to not press the French too hard, too fast.
Going considerably further than Bao Dai wanted (thereby showing his weakness, even within anti–Viet Minh circles), the congress declared that all treaties with France be approved by a national assembly, to be elected by universal suffrage, and it passed a resolution refusing to join the French Union.
But when they sought U.S. backing for the resolution, its sponsors found none. On the contrary, after the vote Ambassador Donald Heath summoned several key delegates, including Bao Dai’s cousin Prince Buu Loc, to his residence and castigated them for adopting a measure that could only hurt the fight against Ho Chi Minh. The United States supported Vietnam and favored independence, he said, but it was also allied to France. The resolution went too far and must be softened.
Heath did not come away impressed, stressing in his report to Washington the delegates’ ”emotional, irresponsible nationalism”: “It was apparent that [the] majority of the delegates had honestly no idea of [the] import of [the] language in [the] resolution they had just passed.” And in another cable: “It is a matter of extraordinary difficulty to convey [the] degree of naiveté and childlike belief that no matter what defamatory language they use, the Vietnamese will still be safeguarded from [the] lethal Communist enemy of France and [the] United States.”
In Paris, the reaction to the congress was even more caustic, as newspapers and politicians of various stripes demanded to know what France was fighting for in Indochina. Ho Chi Minh and his Communists were evidently not the only foes. “Let them stew in their own juice,” President Vincent Auriol thundered. “We’ll withdraw the expeditionary force.”
Meanwhile, Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier, together with former colonial governor of Indochina Albert Sarraut, called for a full-fledged reevaluation of policy, while in the National Assembly the clamor for pulling up stakes and getting out of Indochina grew louder than ever before. Just how to manage the withdrawal remained a source of friction:
The only thing that will lead to an armistice is negotiation with Ho Chi Minh.”40
Intellectuals too increasingly clamored for an end to the war. Many had rallied around the cause of Henri Martin, a Communist activist who served in the French Navy in Indochina and witnessed the violent clash in Haiphong in November 1946.
Arrested in 1950 and tried on charges of demoralizing the army, Martin was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. But his case continued to attract attention and supporters, not least Jean-Paul Sartre, who went to press in late 1953 with L’Affaire Henri Martin. By the time the book appeared, Martin had been discreetly released at the order of President Auriol.
Portentously, a perceptible anti-Americanism crept into the discourse, as commentators noted that, with the end of the fighting in Korea, France was the only Western nation shedding blood on a major scale to fight Communism. Why, critics asked, did Washington reserve for itself a course of action—negotiations, leading to a political solution—it denied to its allies? And why, some asked (especially on the right), did these self-righteous Americans feel free to lecture France on how to treat dependent peoples, given their discrimination against Negroes within America’s own borders? The signing
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The Eisenhower administration brushed off the criticism, but it looked again for ways to keep its allies in Indochina focused on the task of winning the struggle. To the Paris government, it insisted that seven years of war had not been in vain, that her cause was both just and essential, and that negotiations should be avoided until France and the West could dictate the terms.
The arrival in Saigon was preceded by a sudden squall that, sweeping across the tarmac in front of the taxiing plane, soaked both the honor guard and the reception committee. Nixon, his enthusiasm undamped, emerged and delivered a short impromptu statement, whereupon he was whisked away to meetings with Nguyen Van Tam and Henri Navarre.
The tide of aggression has reached its peak and has finally begun to recede. The foundation for decisive victory has been laid.”45
But what was amply evident even now, exactly a year after the Eisenhower-Nixon team’s election victory, was the administration’s determination to win in Vietnam, to keep the French fighting, and to rein in the Saigon nationalist groups.
Nixon’s confident pronouncements masked deep private chagrin. The Navarre Plan was sound and could succeed by 1955 as planned, he told the National Security Council a few weeks later, but the administration should not count on it. The Communists had a sense of history, they had determination and skill, and they believed time was on their side. Bao Dai and the non-Communist groups were weak entities, while in the French High Command there was legitimate fear that Paris would seek premature negotiations.
For the French commander Nixon offered mostly praise, but he lamented Navarre’s failure to utilize the VNA effectively and his reluctance to accept American advice regarding how the native army should be trained.47 Even here, though, the vice president was sympathetic to the French dilemma. He told a group of State Department officers:
There was candor here, but also a seeming unwillingness to face the obvious paradoxes. If the Communists had the motivation and the “sense of history” on their side, and the good guys didn’t, what did that say about the cause? And how could the French be induced to step up the war effort in order to hold Vietnam and at the same time commit to true independence for the Vietnamese? What would be the point of expanding their efforts to retain their colonial possession if they then had to give it up?
On negotiations, the vice president again spoke frankly, while again ignoring the contradictions.
“So what we end up with here is a hard choice. It is a real risk and a real gamble, but what we end up with here, with all that is at stake, it seems to me we have to continue our military aid and,
Hence Nixon’s determination, while in Vietnam, to strike only upbeat notes, to urge Navarre on, and to trumpet the robust health of the French Union. The stakes were huge, and victory must come.
Now was no time to give up. And indeed, though Nixon’s optimistic pronouncements did little to lift spirits in metropolitan France,
The new U.S. aid package, Nixon had promised them, would soon make itself felt on the ground. How soon was soon? Nobody knew for sure, but Navarre and the high command took satisfaction from the fact that the campaigning season was by now well under way and Giap had yet to launch a major attack anywhere. In past years, he would have moved sooner than this. French intelligence speculated that he felt insufficiently strong to attack in the delta, and that he would concentrate his attention on the highland region of northwestern Tonkin.
Navarre was determined to meet the threat. Rather than concede the highlands and husband his resources for the defense of the deltas and of Annam in the center, he moved to take on the enemy here, in the remote and menacing northwest. As part of that effort, he ordered the reoccupation of a post near the Laotian border. This seemingly innocuous action would trigger a series of moves and countermoves in several world capitals and ultimately bring the war to its climax.
A strategic position it certainly was. The Laotian border lay just over the mountains, ten miles to the west, and the basin was one of the few hollows in the vast and largely impassable highland region, with its dense vegetation and forbidding terrain.
Though Salan lacked the means to undertake this operation before he relinquished command to Henri Navarre, the idea took hold in the French High Command that Dien Bien Phu was key to the defense of northern Laos and especially the royal capital of Luang Prabang.
If Giap could again be goaded into a major battle as at Na San, and could again be forced to sacrifice thousands of men in vain, in a region of supposed Viet Minh domination, it would enhance France’s position in the negotiations to come. It would also respond to American pressure for more aggressive military action.
The establishment of a strongpoint in northwestern Tonkin was advantageous for a third reason: It would provide crucial assistance to the Tai and Hmong tribal partisans who had operated with success against Viet Minh forces for some years. Navarre held a romantic attachment to this tribal “resistance,” likening it to the activities of the French Resistance against the Germans in occupied France, and he argued that strengthening the tribes militarily could free up regular troops for mobile operations. Herein lay also a fourth consideration: The tribes were a source of opium, which was important
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Beyond all this, perhaps there was yet another, final reason to make a stand here, less important to Navarre, who was after all still new to Indochina, than to his subordinate officers, many of whom had deep experience in the region. They felt a sense of attachment to this part of the world—to the sheer beauty of the landscape, to the tribal minorities whose leaders they had befriended, to the captivating young women with the swaying gaits who put leis of flowers around their necks. The peoples of these mountains and valleys were in peril and moreover had little love for the Viet Minh; France
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His personal dislike for Navarre, which was real and which would in time turn to a deep and abiding hatred, should not obscure the fact that initially the two men largely agreed. For Cogny no less than for Navarre, the concept had the virtues of being versatile and of having both a defensive and offensive purpose: It was a “hedgehog” that would thwart a major attack, and it was an “anchor point” that would support mobile operations in the enemy’s rear.
There were, to be sure, other potential sites for such bases in the highlands region. Na San was an obvious contender, but its location was not ideal, as the Viet Minh were now capable of easily outflanking it; in August, Navarre indeed ordered the evacuation of the Na San garrison for redeployment elsewhere.
In Paris, however, nerves were on edge. The civilian leadership was in no mood to launch a major military operation. On November 15, Marc Jacquet, minister for the Associated States, embarked for Saigon.
Colonel Jean Nicot, commander of the transport arm of the French Air Force, registered his opposition on November 11; he could not, he said, guarantee a steady flow of supplies to Dien Bien Phu. Navarre was unmoved. On the seventeenth, he met all of his major subordinate commanders, who one by one registered their concerns regarding Operation Castor. Cogny was among them.
THE NEWS OF THE FRENCH REOCCUPATION OF DIEN BIEN PHU CAUGHT Viet Minh commanders by surprise.
The plan had taken shape over several months and was the product of considerable high-level discussion, involving also Chinese advisers. At the Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party (formally, the Vietnamese Workers Party), held in January 1953, senior strategists had determined to strike where the enemy was weak, in order to force the French to disperse their troops to the greatest extent possible, as far away from the Red River Delta as they could be lured. That was a main motivation behind the Laos invasion in the spring, and it remained the operating assumption throughout the summer. Giap
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The Chinese too argued for a more cautious strategy centered on the northwestern highlands. “We should first annihilate enemies in the Lai Chau area, liberating northern and central Laos, and then extend the battlefield gradually toward southern Laos and Cambodia, thus putting pressure on Saigon,”
So sensitive were they to potential leaks that the party note taker was denied entry. By now reasonably well-informed about the details of the Navarre Plan—they were, as always, assiduous readers of the French press, and their intelligence network reached close to the French High Command—they formally agreed to concentrate during the coming campaign season on the northwest, where, as they saw it, the enemy was weak but would feel compelled to make a stand. In the process, he would spread his forces thinner and become more vulnerable to guerrilla and other attacks in his rear.12
Victory would still come in the end, the delegates assured themselves and one another, but the task was far from finished.
Ho Chi Minh, hinting at possible morale problems among troops in the coming operation, concluded the meeting by noting that some soldiers, after the previous campaign in the highlands, had put their hands together and bowed toward the mountains and the jungles in a gesture of thanks and respect.
The 320th, considered less well equipped and trained than the 308th and the 312th, had been mauled, but it was far from decimated. Yet again the Viet Minh had shown their maddening ability (in French eyes) to slip away from serious trouble.17
That force was still en route when word of the Castor airlift operation reached the Thai Nguyen meeting. Clearly taken aback by Navarre’s move, Giap told his assembled commanders: “This is an operation that works to our advantage.”
