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Your ties with France are strong and durable and you have great influence in this country. I urge you to report to your people the need there is to swing the balance toward peace and independence before it is too late for all of us. Do not be blinded by this issue of Communism.”
France.” Just why the veteran revolutionary chose to sign is somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps he simply sought to buy time, both to prepare for war and to see if the November elections in France might produce a government dependent on Communist and Socialist support and more likely to make concessions.
overall the city and its culture undoubtedly stirred something deep in his soul. An intangible but real connection to the colonial overlord remained, despite his decades-long campaign to win independence for his country, and despite his sense that all-out war was drawing ever closer. Nor was he alone in this feeling. It’s a fascinating thing about many Vietnamese nationalists of the period, the degree to which they possessed complex and conflicting feelings about France.
The question looms: Did Ho’s Paris sojourn in mid-1946 represent the great lost chance for a genuine and far-reaching accord, one that could have defused the growing crisis before it devolved into large-scale war, one that could have prevented thirty years of indescribably bloody and destructive war on the Indochinese peninsula? What if the French had really put Ho’s conciliatory words to the test? He was not staking out a maximalist position, after all—he was not demanding full and complete independence. He sought compromise and indicated a willingness—maybe even a desire—to maintain an
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It was an awesome responsibility for the young Giap, but he proved equal to the task. Of medium height and with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he had about him a reserved and unassuming air that masked a steely determination.
He proved spectacularly adept, in particular, at using the often-limited means at his disposal as well as the terrain, which he knew better than his adversaries because it was his own.
His father, who instilled in the young boy a respect for education, died in a French prison after being arrested for subversion; an older sister died the same way. These tragedies fostered in Giap a hatred of the French,
ICP leaders took notice of this smart and educated comrade, who seemed to possess boundless energy.
Giap served as minister of the interior in Ho’s first government and over time made himself more and more the indispensable man—capable and efficient and ruthless in equal measure. It surprised no one when he assumed leadership of the DRV during Ho’s sojourn to France.
Giap was the more cold and calculating of the two, a man who stirred awe and admiration in his underlings but not the kind of devotion Ho generated. When Giap speaks in his memoirs of the fabulously persuasive force of his master, Tønnesson remarks, he does not see the importance of Ho’s sincerity. “Uncle Ho had an extraordinary flair for detecting the thoughts and feelings of the enemy,” Giap writes. “With great shrewdness, he worked out a concrete treatment for each type and each individual.… Even his enemies, men who were notoriously anticommunist, showed respect for him. They seemed to
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During the first phase, insurgents, facing a foe of superior power, avoid major engagements and rely on small-scale guerrilla tactics to sap the will and strength of government forces. They raid when possible and fall back when necessary. As the guerrillas build up their strength and achieve rough parity, they enter the second phase of the struggle, launching a mix of guerrilla and conventional operations to keep the enemy off balance. In this phase, a sense of futility begins to permeate the thinking of the government’s troops as casualties and costs mount, with no decision in sight. As the
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Its many limestone caves could be used as offices and workshops; its terrain—for the most part heavily forested and mountainous, and poorly suited to food growing—was relatively easy to defend; and its sparse population was broadly sympathetic to the Viet Minh cause. The second base area was more problematic, Giap acknowledged.
position. In May the Chinese forces under Lu Han began to withdraw across the Sino-Vietnamese frontier. The French sought to move in quickly but were for the most part stymied. It was the wet season, and Giap’s troops were nimbler at navigating the difficult conditions and establishing control of the evacuated areas. Adept at sabotaging roads and bridges, they continually frustrated the road-bound French, delaying them long enough to take scores of important towns and villages out of play. Inevitably, there were military clashes.
squeezed: There seemed to be no real way of resisting Communism except by the unpalatable means of accepting French control or the formation of a government inspired by and beholden to the Paris master.
All the while Giap sought to maintain the official cease-fire with the French. Notwithstanding periodic clashes that continued to occur in the early autumn, he still wanted to delay the outbreak of major hostilities. The cease-fire still held as Ho Chi Minh reentered Hanoi in late October, but neither he nor any other close observer could mistake the heightening animosity. Both sides girded for war.
“The guerrillas,” he wrote, “operate in a familiar atmosphere. Secrecy and surprise are the general conditions for their success in confrontations with a clumsy adversary who is badly informed and operates in an unfavorable climate.”
The tactics consist of avoiding well guarded positions, attacking posts where the garrison is weak, advancing if the enemy retreats and retreating if the enemy advances, organizing ambushes where the enemy will be overcome by numbers in spite of his value.… One of the guerrilla tactics consists in making the enemy “blind.” Our soldiers do not wear uniforms, they don’t concentrate in barracks, and they slip through the crowds that hide them if necessary. In that way, the French soldiers are incapable of detecting their presence.11
Though the telegrams flowing into Paris invariably reported that the “rebels” were suffering the vast bulk of the casualties in the clashes, taken in aggregate the reports show a gradual strengthening of the Viet Minh position in the south.
Politically too, the French position in the south grew steadily weaker. In August 1946, Dr. Nguyen Van Thinh, the avowedly anti-Communist president of the French-backed Cochin Chinese Republic, complained privately that d’Argenlieu’s administration seemed hell-bent on making him look like a puppet. What kind of entity did he lead, he asked bitterly, a colony or a republic with genuine authority? The French claimed the latter but acted otherwise. Thinh’s frustration continued to grow in the weeks that followed.
D’ARGENLIEU AND HIS COLLEAGUES NEEDED SOMETHING NEW AND dramatic, a game changer. Their hope of securing firm control of Cochin China as a means of forcing Ho Chi Minh’s regime to come to terms had plainly come to naught—an honest appraisal would have to conclude that the French position in Cochin China was slipping away, while in Tonkin, Ho’s administration retained a powerful grip on much of the populace.
Moreover, the cease-fire in the south agreed to in the Ho-Moutet Modus Vivendi would only make things worse over time, by giving the Viet Minh a free hand to quietly expand their control in the countryside.
That French and Viet Minh troops controlled different sections of the city added to the tension, and the two sides also squabbled over the right to collect customs duties. By the end of October, rumors were rife in the city of a coming French attack on Viet Minh–held sectors, and the local French commander issued secret orders for the use of tanks and artillery should hostilities erupt. By holding Haiphong and other ports, Valluy optimistically declared in his war plans submitted to d’Argenlieu on November 9, France would “put the Tonkinese authorities and populace at our mercy through the
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But what if Haiphong could not be held? Valluy shuddered at the thought. All other goals must be subordinated to the task of securing the city. To facilitate the objective, Valluy, long convinced that his forces were too dispersed, advocated the evacuation of French garrisons in several important towns—Nam
D’Argenlieu, whose sense of urgency was strengthened by Thinh’s suicide as well as by the outcome of parliamentary elections in France, in which the Communists made major gains (thereby threatening the medium- and long-term prospects for an unyielding French posture on Indochina, and perhaps the admiral’s own job), did not reject wholesale Valluy’s plan but overall considered it too cautious. Evacuations of the type the general wanted were neither wise nor necessary, he determined, and there could certainly be no question of withdrawing from Hanoi. Above all, France must gird for battle: “If,
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Only by dealing forcefully with Ho Chi Minh’s regime could France stem the rapid decline that had occurred since the Japanese coup of March 1945.
There the matter might have ended had French officers not sought to exploit the incident to secure a strategic advantage.
It seems clear that we are facing premeditated aggression, carefully planned by the regular Vietnamese army which seems no longer to be following its Government’s orders.… The moment has arrived to teach a hard lesson to those who have so treacherously attacked us. By every possible means you must take complete control of Haiphong and force the Vietnamese government and army into submission.”22
Moffat was noncommittal. He reported to Washington that Communists were indeed in control of the Vietnamese government and that for now a French presence would be required, so as to ward off both Soviet and possible Chinese encroachment. Moffat’s superiors took that as evidence that they should reject Ho’s overtures and steer clear of any formal role. They paid less attention to the other part of Moffat’s report, in which he expressed sympathy for the nationalist cause and a conviction that France had no option but to compromise.
Some observers despaired at this policy decision, seeing it as a missed opportunity to avert major conflict. Lauriston Sharp, a Cornell University anthropologist who had served in the region during the war and who still consulted for the State Department, complained bitterly that by its feckless lack of leadership Washington had helped create the present “vacuum” in Vietnam.
“There is one way, and one way only,” he wrote, “to maintain in Indochina the prestige of our civilization, of our political and spiritual influence, and of our legitimate interests: We must reach agreement on the basis of independence, we must keep confidence and preserve friendship.” A leader of France had, at long last, uttered the magic word: independence.
But it was too little, too late. Blum presided over a weak government, a kind of stopgap regime meant to serve out the final weeks of the Provisional Government until the constitution of the Fourth Republic would go into effect. He was in no position to quickly reverse the aggressive Indochina policy that had taken shape over the previous months.
The French were further slowed by the proliferation of hastily built barricades on Hanoi’s streets, many of them rigged with crude mines.
They had succeeded in pinning down French forces in the capital, thereby buying the necessary time to move the government and main military force to their mountain base.
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.
had enormous power to formulate policy, often without consulting Paris, and as we have seen, he thwarted the prospects for a negotiated solution at several junctures in 1946; he seemed determined to provoke the Hanoi government into full-scale hostilities.
The Socialists, who dominated French politics in the crucial early postwar years, professed opposition to d’Argenlieu’s efforts to sabotage the March 6 Accords, but in practice they tolerated his actions, just as they tolerated Valluy’s provocations in Haiphong and Hanoi; at the Fontainebleau talks, the Socialist representatives were as intransigent as any on the French side.
Even Léon Blum, a broad-thinking humanist and fundamentally decent man who genuinely despaired at the onset of war, could say at once on December 23, less than a week into the Battle of Hanoi, that the old colonial system was finished and that renewed negotiations were possible only once “order” was restored.
As a group, the party’s leaders lacked experience in colonial affairs, and its senior figures—Bidault, Robert Schuman, and René Pleven—adhered to a rigid and intransigent colonial policy that stood in marked contrast to their often supple and forward-thinking approach to European affairs.38
D’Argenlieu, deeply suspicious of independent journalism, maintained strict control over the AFP, making it in essence a government propaganda arm. Not surprisingly, therefore, the six main Paris dailies did little in-depth reporting in November and December and generally blamed the Vietnamese for the outbreak of violence.
Throughout the autumn, he stuck firmly to this position, and in the November-December crisis, he maintained staunch backing for d’Argenlieu’s uncompromising posture.
THE FIGHTING WAS FIERCE FROM THE START. BY THE MIDDLE OF January 1947, less than a month into the hostilities, large portions of Hanoi were reduced to rubble, and public buildings such as the Pasteur Institute and numerous hospitals suffered major damage.
In the urban areas, however, the French retained the upper hand; in these weeks, the region as a whole saw a lot less large-scale fighting than occurred in the north. Hopeful French commanders described a pesky but tolerable level of insecurity in the south and hoped to maintain it as they devoted primary attention and resources to the north.
African troops were as yet few in number. In May 1945 Charles de Gaulle had prohibited their use in Indochina on the grounds that they might be unduly influenced by Vietnamese nationalist discourse and might seek to implement these ideas upon their return home. He also worried that their presence could sharpen American anticolonialist critiques of French imperialism. Now, however, the acute need for fighting men compelled a change in the policy, and during the course of 1947 more and more African conscripts were deployed.
This manpower shortage left the general with limited options, and his predicament worsened in March 1947, when an additional division of French colonial troops had to be diverted en route to Indochina to quell an insurgency in Madagascar. Yet there could be no question of turning back, not in his mind or that of other senior French officials. “It is impossible to negotiate with those people,” Overseas Minister Marius Moutet declared of the Viet Minh during a visit to Saigon in January.
IT DIDN’T WORK OUT THAT WAY. GIAP GRASPED RIGHT AWAY THAT he must deny the French the quick victory they sought. But he also understood that he had to avoid open and large-scale engagements if at all possible; his forces were simply too weak. He in effect ceded the major towns and lines of communication in Tonkin and Annam as he withdrew the bulk of his army to the Viet Bac.
Patience would be his main weapon as he plotted for a protracted war based roughly on Mao’s three-phase model of withdrawal (from major towns and cities), equilibrium, and general offensive.
In Resistance, he cautioned that the timing of the transition from one of Mao’s phases to the next could not be determined in advance; it depended on the relative strength of revolutionary forces, the degree of support for the insurgency in the general population, and the extent of demoralization among enemy forces. The struggle would certainly be long and difficult and would require maintaining solidarity with the Cambodian and Lao peoples and indeed with all those who suffered under the French Union.
Now, in early 1947, he set about following the strictures of the first phase: to preserve his forces, to withdraw into protected territory, and to be content with harassing the enemy’s convoys and bases. To skeptical subordinates who wanted to go right away to large-scale engagements, Giap offered a firm reply: Such an approach promised only defeat at the hands of the infinitely more powerful French.
Indoctrination was carried out at evening meetings held two or three times per week, during which cadres expounded the Viet Minh philosophy and anticolonial propaganda. To support the armed forces, the party collected taxes—cash extortion in the towns and rice levies in the villages—and recruited porters to serve in the clandestine logistical network. When the situation demanded, the cadres reinforced education and propaganda with terror tactics,
In time it would become clear that Giap had formidable advantages that the French, in seven years of war, would never overcome. One
