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

by Fredrik Logevall

Though the Viet Minh would face their own difficulties adapting to this diversity, they nevertheless proved far more adept at doing so than the French.

The pervasive anti-French animus enabled Viet Minh forces to assemble undetected, to withdraw when the enemy appeared in force, to hide their weapons, to expand their ranks, and to gather excellent intelligence concerning the strength, the maneuvers, and often even the plans of the French. And when the enemy, unable to determine who was a fighter and who was not, reacted to the guerrilla attacks by killing civilians, the main effect was to deepen the hatred for the French and to bring new guerrillas into the fold.18

“It is clear,” a postwar French study would conclude, “that a distinction must be made here between the precise, deep intelligence which was always available to the High Command, and the immediate and local intelligence that was almost never obtained by subordinate units. Thus it was written: ‘It was the Commander in Chief who kept the battalion commander informed while the latter was never able to reciprocate.’ ”20

For the Expeditionary Corps, as for the Americans two decades later, it was all intensely frustrating—the enemy’s elusiveness, his capacity for surprise and for striking at any moment, and the impossibility much of the time of telling friend from foe. It was a war without fronts, where the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Time and again French units would move into a target area in force, only to find no one there; the adversary had vanished, as if vaporized. So the French would pull out—for they had not nearly enough troops to occupy permanently the sites they had taken—and the Viet Minh would return, as swiftly as they had left. Whenever a French commander did choose to occupy a locale, he invariably found it isolated and hard to supply, his troops doomed to defensive action or to no action at all, and limited in their control to the small area immediately surrounding their base. Not only that, each soldier used for such occupations was one fewer combatant available for large-scale action against the main centers of Viet Minh power.

A French Foreign Legion officer who refused to be identified told The New York Times in the same week that France faced an unwinnable war against an elusive adversary. He echoed Leclerc’s claim that Paris had far too few boots on the ground in Vietnam, and he noted that “the Annamese are better organized than is the French Army for war in Indo-China.” The same sentiments were expressed by midlevel British and American officials. Abbot Low Moffat of the U.S. State Department, for example, told a senior British diplomat over dinner in Singapore that France was headed for disaster.

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.

Even in domestic political terms, there were questions. It was not yet certain that Ho and his colleagues would be able to fully harness the seething anti-French opinion prevalent among large majorities of Vietnamese and turn it into deep and lasting support for the DRV. The embryonic state launched in 1945 remained in many respects just that: embryonic. How to create a state apparatus that would enable the center to direct and coordinate regional affairs remained, in many ways, a problem to be solved.

None of the Parisian dailies had a correspondent anywhere in Indochina in those early months, and colonial officials in Hanoi and Saigon therefore found it easy to transmit only an official version of events—one that emphasized Viet Minh perfidy and French restraint, and that blamed Ho Chi Minh both for the outbreak of fighting and for the failure of diplomacy.

Most politicians too were united around the proposition that France must not quit Indochina—such a course, many parliamentarians declared, would only cause the Americans to come in and establish an economic stranglehold over the territory. France, many on both the left and the right declared, still had a mission civilisatrice to play in the region.22

In this “atmosphere of imperial paranoia” (as historian Martin Thomas calls it), local administrations acquired increased latitude to suppress any dissent.23 Often they took full advantage.

and ordered a staggeringly brutal military retribution, much of it administered by the Expeditionary Force bound for Indochina. The massacre, combined with extreme deprivation, killed an estimated one hundred thousand Madagascans, a figure acknowledged and then withdrawn by French officials in 1949.

The government’s aggressive posture prevailed in the March parliamentary debate in good part because hard-liners occupied the key positions in the French policy-making structure—as they would for much of the war.

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. military would tighten restrictions on the Paris government’s ability to transfer American-built military equipment to the Far East. And most of all there was the worry that American leaders would act on their deeply held anticolonial instincts and promote a settlement of the war that would force a French departure from Indochina.

From Washington, Bonnet said that the Truman administration would likely stick to its policy of noninterference in Indochina in the short term, but he warned darkly that “circumstances could change,” on account of Americans’ innate “Puritanism” and overbearing sense of “superior moral duty.”

But just as in France, albeit for different reasons, the conservatives ultimately triumphed, in large measure because of senior officials’ growing tendency in early 1947 to see Indochina in the context of the deepening confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Soviet-American relations had deteriorated sharply by mid-1946; the wartime Grand Alliance was but a fading memory. Few close observers were all that surprised. Even before World War II had ended, perceptive analysts anticipated that the United States and the Soviet Union would seek to fill the power vacuum sure to follow the armistice, and that friction would result. The two countries had a history of hostility and tension, and both were militarily powerful. Most of all, they were divided by sharply differing political economies with widely divergent needs, and by a deep ideological chasm. Sure enough, in 1946 and early 1947, Moscow and Washington clashed over a range of issues: over European reconstruction, over the division of Germany, over Iran, and over the civil war in Greece.

Communism, the president declared, fed on economic dislocation and imperiled the world.

Truman’s globalism encountered prominent critics, among them former vice president Henry Wallace, isolationist senator Robert A. Taft, and columnist Walter Lippmann, who warned variously that the policy would bankrupt the Treasury and that it marked a misreading of both Soviet capabilities and intentions.30 The critique failed to find traction in the halls of power in Washington, for by spring 1947, Soviet hostility was a staple of both policy documents and much journalistic reporting.

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.

But he insisted—along with State Department liberals such as Moffat and Kenneth Landon—that the Vietnamese nationalists were motivated not by Marxist ideology but by a thirst for national independence. Should another government make a push for a UN diplomatic initiative, the general said, the United States would therefore have no option but to grant her support.

Ho Chi Minh would not have put it much differently. From the start, the veteran revolutionary had understood the importance of gaining foreign support for his cause; now, with the military situation developing into an uneasy stalemate and with the enemy still holding the advantage by many indices of power, he thought it more vital still. Thus far France had played her political hand better than his DRV, he knew—Paris had secured a hands-off policy from all the major powers and the tacit backing of some of them, while his government fought alone. This, he determined, had to change. Diplomacy, that is to say, was about to assume new importance, for both sides. It would do so, however, in the context of a deepening rift in the global arena between East and West, this new thing called the Cold War.

“The success of French arms is complete.” (But didn’t the Viet Minh control huge swaths of territory in Tonkin and Annam? a skeptical reporter asked. Yes, Coste-Floret allowed, but the territory in question was sparsely populated and would count for little in the end.) “Talks” with Ho Chi Minh were fine, he and others believed, so long as they concerned the modalities of the Viet Minh’s surrender.

A child of empire, Paul was then an unquestioning believer in France’s civilizing mission, and through the 1930s, he wrote nothing critical of colonialism in Indochina or the empire—nothing, for example, about the bloody repression of the peasant uprisings in Nghe Tinh province in 1930–31, which occurred while he was in Vietnam as an officer-reservist in the Indochinese colonial army.

Mus emphasized the profound sense of patriotism and national identity animating the Vietnamese. This moral fervor, he plainly implied, was as deep as that felt by Frenchmen living under the yoke of the Nazi occupation, and it had moved Vietnamese to resist foreign occupation throughout their history. “In short, what the Vietnamese have preserved, through all the vicissitudes of their history, is a community of blood, of language, of sentiment,” Mus wrote. “One can say that this is their essential milieu and one from which the Annamite never willingly distances himself for any length of time. For anyone who is familiar with this people, the background to this state of things, the model that is more or less unconscious, yet a concrete manifestation of this communitarian ideal, is the village. This is the form in which the Annamite lives as a social being, and the basis of his patriotism.”

For Mus, it was no longer possible by war’s end to hold easy assumptions concerning the French Empire and its legitimacy. How, he wondered, could one justify a colonial system that placed some men above others, particularly when those others resisted it? More specifically, how could one support a French effort to reclaim control over Indochina—by force if necessary—in view of the nationalist fervor sweeping the land? The questions gnawed at Mus’s sensibility. Though he was not yet prepared to advocate an immediate and unilateral French withdrawal from Indochina, he began to imagine a new, postcolonial order, in which all men would have to be seen as equals, in which the Vietnamese demand for independence would be met.

He was despondent but could not help but admire the veteran revolutionary’s unshakable determination. The mission, he later recalled, taught him “more than in thirty years elsewhere about what a people could wish for and accomplish.”

His stature in Vietnamese studies would be enormous, perhaps unmatched anywhere in the Western world, and he would hold joint professorial appointments at the Collège de France and Yale University (alternating semesters between the two institutions).

The onetime playwright had shown again that he was a pretty fair actor—but his steely determination in the Frenchman’s presence that night masked deep trepidations about the road ahead. No doubt Mus was right that politics would win out, that people mattered more than territory, and that the revolutionary forces had inherent advantages at the local level, where the mass of Vietnamese lived, that the colonials could never hope to match. But would it be enough? What about the colossal French superiority in military firepower, so transparent in the fighting to this point? To overcome this element, Ho Chi Minh believed he would need political strength of a very different kind. He would need support abroad, in France and among the great powers on the world stage.

Yet here too the enemy was stronger. Ever since 1940, France had shown remarkable diplomatic prowess amid geopolitical weakness, first by maintaining day-to-day sovereignty in Indochina and then, after Japan’s defeat, gaining broad international backing to reclaim full colonial control. Most recently, during the fall crisis and the outbreak of war, she had convinced the great powers to maintain a hands-off posture.

The situation was much the same two years later. From time to time, the Soviet Union meekly advised Paris against reestablishing old-style colonialism in Indochina and urged the two sides to find “common ground,” but she would go no further.

expansion. Stalin needed no convincing by PCF leaders that they had to tread carefully on the Indochinese war, lest they be accused of treason for undermining the army’s efforts to restore La plus grande France. Only with the PCF’s expulsion from the ruling coalition in the spring of 1947 did party leaders begin to hum a different tune; but even then they could offer little more than internal party resolutions in favor of early negotiations and the withdrawal of French troops.

In July, having failed to elicit the desired American response, Thach turned still more pragmatic. “We recognize the world-politics of the U.S. at this time does not permit taking a position against the French,” he now acknowledged. But the Truman administration could nevertheless help by providing economic and cultural assistance to Vietnam, and by endeavoring to mediate the conflict either through tripartite discussions or through having the newly independent Philippines take the Vietnamese case before the United Nations.

Program), a massive loan program designed to help resuscitate the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and thereby check Soviet expansion. France occupied a key place in the plan, and U.S. planners were as disinclined as ever to potentially destabilize French politics by taking an aggressively anticolonial position vis-à-vis Indochina.

As summer turned into fall, the Truman administration chose to remain where it had been when the fighting began: on the sidelines, torn between a desire to buck up a crucial ally in Europe and a conviction that it must not associate itself closely with that ally’s colonial war. Paris officials, eager as always to head off any American “meddling” on Indochina, breathed a sigh of relief.

It was a bitter pill for Ho to swallow, not least because he knew the taste so well. He responded by redoubling his efforts to strengthen contacts with the French Communists and with Moscow. In September, the indefatigable Pham Ngoc Thach, fresh off his efforts with the Americans in Bangkok, traveled to Europe as Ho’s special envoy. He met with PCF leaders Jacques Duclos and Maurice Thorez, but he appears to have made no headway—Duclos impressed upon him the importance of Vietnam doing her utmost in the struggle for liberation, to which Thach replied that it was a shame the PCF had done so little to try to prevent the war. The Soviets too were more or less unresponsive. A measure of the importance they attached to Thach’s mission is that they chose not to bring him to the Kremlin to meet with senior officials; he got only an audience in Bern, with the Soviet ambassador to Switzerland. When Thach asked the ambassador if a later visit to Moscow might be possible, he received a noncommittal reply. No invitation ever came.12

More and more, as 1947 progressed, they pondered a tantalizing question: What if you could win the people’s allegiance away from the Viet Minh? Many Vietnamese, after all, northern as well as southern, did not support Ho’s revolution, were anti-Communist, and loathed Vo Nguyen Giap’s capacity for ruthlessness and repression. Could they be persuaded to coalesce around another Vietnamese leader who, if not exactly pro-French, would be less hostile to France’s aims? Senior strategists, led by Léon Pignon, thought so. Even as they rejected genuine negotiations with the Viet Minh and disavowed full independence for Vietnam, they cast about for such a figure, who would simultaneously draw support away from Ho Chi Minh and win favor with the Americans, and in the process win greater support for the war effort in the French Assembly, where many Socialists and all Communists were clamoring for an end to the fighting through negotiations with Ho. The move could also alter views elsewhere in Asia, where many national leaders condemned France for engaging in what they saw as naked colonial aggression.13

The French cleared a sizable chunk of the territory and captured large stocks of supplies, but the major set-piece battle never occurred. Giap wanted no part of such an encounter. As would happen countless times over the next quarter-century—to the French and to the Americans—the enemy slipped through the lines, secure in the knowledge that he could fight another day.

It would be more accurate to say that the enemy had managed a draw, which in the circumstances was the same as a victory. Valluy now faced the reality of a long war and a Paris government that was not about to order national conscription for this faraway Asian colony.

Bao Dai sought a firm French commitment to independence, but he got nothing of the kind. Unaccountably, he agreed to put his name to a “protocol” that did contain the magic word but so hedged it with qualifications that it lost all meaning.23

The new government’s lack of credibility was starkly evident at its “grand” inaugural ceremony in Hanoi. Fewer than fifty Vietnamese were on hand—not including police and soldiers—and the event lacked any semblance of organization. General Xuan appeared in court dress and looked uncomfortable throughout. Masses of schoolchildren were herded in to wave flags and shout slogans, but this served only to accentuate the farcical nature of the event. Various receptions and dinner followed, but the air of unreality never dissipated.

The agreement soon generated more support for the DRV than for the ex-emperor, as the colons in Vietnam immediately denounced Bollaert’s “surrender” and said real power was and would remain in French hands, and as Paris leaders dithered over whether to extend formal ratification to the agreement.

As head of Admiral d’Argenlieu’s pet project, the Republic of Cochin China, he had actively worked against Vietnamese unity, and he developed a reputation for utter untrustworthiness.

Charming and articulate, he devoted most of his time to scheming and conniving and developed no mass following among the Vietnamese. For many anti–Viet Minh nationalists, the Bao Dai solution in which they had put so much faith and effort now seemed like no solution at all.

The new high commissioner, Léon Pignon, who unlike Bollaert was a genuine Indochina expert, had been a hard-liner on the war but now was given the pressing task of following this policy through.29

French commanders spent endless hours trying to find a way to thwart the ambushers. No

Bac Kan had no strategic value, but the French would lose face if they ever gave up Ho Chi Minh’s former headquarters. So they grimly hung on.

The French, with one eye on Mao’s advancing armies and the other on their own stalemated war, might now give him more of what he wanted, but they might also abandon him if he dithered; they

More important, under the Élysée Accords, Vietnam’s foreign and defense relations would remain under French control, and in various other ways too the accord showed that Paris retained ultimate sovereignty. Vietnam under Bao Dai, that is to say, would become independent only when French leaders decided she was good and ready.

In April, the Viet Minh issued a warrant for Bao Dai’s arrest on the charge of high treason. French efforts to drum up excitement among other Vietnamese, meanwhile, foundered on the widespread feelings of apathy (“it means no improvement in my life”) or cynicism (“the so-called independence is a sham”) or both.40

Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop argued likewise, notably in a quartet of columns he penned during a stay in Saigon in June, in which he excoriated the French for dragging their feet in the negotiations with Bao Dai.42 For Ho too, 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.