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Such was Dean Acheson’s characterization of the American decision to effectively abandon her neutral policy and back the French war effort with substantial economic and military aid. It was an apt characterization, not only for 1949 but for many years to come. For the better part of twenty years, it would be the mantra of American administrations on Vietnam:
During the Second World War, he served as assistant secretary of state, and in 1945 he became undersecretary (the second-ranking position in the department), quickly earning a reputation for being orderly, efficient, savvy, and discreet.
He was also a staunch anti-Communist and was often brusquely impatient with, and suspicious of, the nationalist leaders of the colonial world.
To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this Acheson and Truman and other American leaders were loath to do. If, for example, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (whose break with Moscow had become public the previous year) really was a nationalist as well as a Communist, and if Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh were the same, then the world was altogether more complicated than most Americans—including educated, erudite ones like Acheson—preferred to believe. It was far easier to see these leaders as mere pawns of a hyperpowerful
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BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control.
Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled.
All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.
For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.
It was always an odd theory, and it became more so with the passage of time, as we shall see. Most egregiously, it posited that the countries of East and Southeast Asia had no individuality, no history of their own, no unique circumstances in social, political, and economic life that differentiated them from their neighbors. Yet the theory had a certain plausibility at the outset in 1949–50, while the regional implications of Mao’s triumph were unclear. Its simple imagery also perfectly suited the charged political atmosphere in the United States in the period.
Soviet spies, working with American accomplices, must have speeded Stalin’s atomic timetable by stealing U.S. secrets (they did). Truman must have “lost” China, must have allowed Chiang Kai-shek to be defeated when it was well within his power—with American assistance—to prevail (it wasn’t). Now all of Asia was ripe for Communist plucking (not exactly).
These were absurd charges against a principal architect of America’s Cold War strategy, a man whose aversion to Communism went down to his very bones. But in the context of 1949–50, such attacks on the administration left their mark, and the decision to aid France in Vietnam cannot be understood without consideration of the charged domestic political milieu out of which it emerged. Especially with the defeat in China, Acheson and Truman felt compelled to show America’s mettle somewhere, especially in that region, in part to insulate the administration against Republican charges that it was too
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Such a posture was unlikely to score points with a Soviet leadership already questioning Ho Chi Minh’s socialist bona fides. Nor was this declaration exceptional for the period—in his interviews in 1945–50, when asked about the broader international situation and the growing rift between East and West, Ho always took care to strike a neutral pose.
Any decision to assist the Viet Minh would exact a price, he told his colleagues, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing opt to recognize the DRV.
Mao was still there, having himself gotten his fill of both the bitterly cold Russian winter and Stalin’s vast reservoir of distrust.
The Kremlin leader had long thought Mao unreliable, an ersatz Communist whose motives were always to be questioned. As early as 1940, Stalin had complained that the CCP was largely a peasant organization that gave far too little role to the working class.
He now praised Mao as a “true Marxist leader” and during Mao’s visit agreed—though only after a delay of several weeks, during which the Chinese leader was left to seethe, half prisoner, half pampered guest, in Stalin’s personal dacha—to rescind the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty that Stalin had concluded with Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a new one with the PRC.20
It was hardly the reception Ho had hoped for, but Mao promised him (both there and in Beijing, to which the two leaders returned on March 3) that the PRC would do her best “to offer all the military assistance Vietnam needed in its struggle against France.” He soon set about making good on his word.
Now, a quarter of a century later, Ho could board the train for the trip home secure in the knowledge that he had Chinese backing for his cause. But he also must have had feelings of ambivalence as he looked out the window of his train car, contemplating what lay ahead.
AND THERE WAS ONE MORE REASON FOR HO CHI MINH TO FEEL APPREHENSION on that long journey home: His fervent hope of bringing American support for his cause, held with varying degrees of conviction since World War I, since he had tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, was now definitively and probably permanently dashed.
As neither security, democracy, nor independence could exist in any area “dominated by Soviet imperialism,” the United States, Acheson had declared, would extend economic and military aid to France and her allied governments in Indochina.25
“The situation has had the effect of internationalizing a problem which before this was a French problem,” one Foreign Ministry cable enthused.26
France had convinced her principal Western allies that she was bearing the brunt of an international struggle between East and West, between the forces of Communism and the forces of freedom. French colonial power was no longer the only thing at stake in Indochina, each of these governments in effect now agreed, and because France was fighting her allies’ battle, she was entitled to a generous measure of military and political assistance.27
A mere bluff? Possibly, but the Truman team was not willing to call it. In March, Secretary of State Acheson, with customary candor, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We do not want to get into a position where the French say, ‘You take over; we aren’t able to go ahead with this.’ We want the French to stay there.… The French have got to carry [the burden] in Indochina, and we are willing to help, but not to substitute for them.”
It all combined to limit Washington’s leverage over France, and it frustrated the secretary. On May 1, President Truman formally approved an aid program of $23.3 million for the Indochinese states. He did so on Acheson’s recommendation, yet the secretary was frustrated, telling associates that the French seemed “paralyzed, in a state of moving neither forward nor backward.” The only thing to do was to press on, in the hope that Carpentier and his Expeditionary Corps could turn things around and bring Ho Chi Minh to his knees.
Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist in the land, had tried some weeks earlier, in early April, to nudge the administration away from doing what in fact it seemed about to do. “We shall not be able to reverse our whole position in Asia and to support a colonial war against national independence,” he wrote. “That would shatter our prestige in the rest of Asia. And even if we were willing to do that, there is no way that this Congress would or could promise enough money and enough military aid to enable the French army to plan a campaign of pacification which would last for many
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The humiliation of the colonial past seemed as if it could finally be swept away. In early February 1950, while Ho was still away, the party resolved that it would follow Mao Zedong’s lead and lean to the Soviet-led Communist side in the Cold War. Fighting a war of national liberation would not be enough, Truong Chinh told his colleagues; Vietnam must do her part in the internationalist struggle against the imperialist bloc led by the United States:
The new Sino-Vietnamese arrangement soon had tangible effects. In short order, Beijing created a Chinese Military Advisory Group (CMAG) and sent senior PLA officers south to assist in the training of Viet Minh units and plot strategy. The Fourth Field Army of the PLA set up a military school for the Vietnamese. Sizable amounts of Chinese military and nonmilitary equipment followed, though it paled next to what the Americans were providing the French. The outbreak of the Korean War in late June, and the announcement by the United States that she would intervene militarily on behalf of South
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The first months of the year had not produced a change in the overall nature of the war; it remained a stalemate, which as before was to the disadvantage of the French. The Viet Minh did not have the capacity to wage major attacks on the deltas, but they continued to infiltrate behind the lines, and to reduce the number of villages under Bao Dai’s administration.
In a measure of that strength, the Viet Minh under commanding general Nguyen Binh were able to mount numerous large operations, involving hundreds of troops, in and around the Mekong Delta in the latter part of 1949; the French were obliged to send major reinforcements and were able to prevail only at considerable cost.37
Revers in his report catalogued many of these problems and drew sobering conclusions. No military solution favoring France was possible, he argued, not in the long run. All actions must proceed from this basis, and ultimately Paris leaders would need to seek a “peace of the brave” with Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Bao Dai was a poor leader whose government had minimal support, and France did not have enough manpower in Indochina to impose her will on the population.
The fortresses on the Chinese frontier along Route Coloniale 4, already suffering from the relentless attacks on the convoys, would become indefensible if the PLA reached the border and decided to aid the Viet Minh. They were, moreover, strategically unimportant and were tying down troops badly needed in the Red River Delta.39
The Revers report was top secret and was made for the private information of senior French policy makers. It thus caused an uproar when excerpts from it were broadcast on Viet Minh radio and when, following a fight between a French soldier and a Vietnamese student on a Paris bus, a copy of the report was discovered in the latter’s briefcase.
To keep these new formations fighting in the field required complex logistical planning. For example, senior Viet Minh planners determined that maintaining an infantry division in action away from its base required the use of roughly fifty thousand local peasants as porters, each carrying about forty-five pounds in supplies. These numbers could be reduced when bicycles were available—when pushed along roads and tracks by the rider, these specially outfitted vehicles could carry up to two hundred pounds during the dry season—but even then the figure was huge.
Ammunition was often in short supply, but these battalions could take on French units effectively for brief periods of time. Often they also had the task of training the guerrilla-militia forces, who tended to be unarmed or lightly armed and were usually part-timers. Their chief duties included intelligence gathering, transport, and sabotage. A better-armed element of the guerrilla-militia forces, so-called elite irregulars, was equipped with grenades, rifles, and mines, and sometimes even a few automatic weapons. It frequently joined with the regional forces in local operations.
Giap spent the rainy season preparing for a large-scale autumn offensive. There was in effect a truce in the fighting from July to September, as the war came to a stop in the wet. The rain fell almost continuously, and the rivers overflowed. The spongy, saturated jungles were virtually impassable by French troops—and, for that matter, by Viet Minh units—and the going was not much easier in the watery surfaces of the deltas.
Meanwhile, the vagaries of French domestic politics hurt Carpentier’s planning, as the cabinet in Paris turned down his request for reinforcements and instead in August reduced the number of French soldiers in Indochina by nine thousand, on grounds of cost. The increased American aid had yet to really manifest itself, and the war was a major drain on French resources. Pleas from Hanoi to consider using conscripts in Vietnam also met with deaf ears in Paris; no politician wanted to go anywhere near the notion.8
Some colonial troops, meanwhile, notably the Moroccans, were reportedly beginning to question what they were doing, waging war against a people whose nationalistic effort they admired and themselves sought to emulate.9
Two companies of legionnaires put up furious resistance and initially held their own, even though heavy cloud cover precluded air support. Nervous tension enveloped Giap’s command headquarters nearby, particularly after news arrived that a key Viet Minh regiment had lost its way and been unable to join in the attack.
“The disaster of RC4” was by far the most devastating defeat of the war to this point. General Carpentier, stunned and shattered, facing the prospect of informing Paris that the Charton and Le Page columns had been wiped out, flew over the scene and could only say mysteriously, “Everything that could happen has happened.”
The engagement also showed something else: that the war had entered a new, intensive, deadly phase, as the Cold War not only internationalized the diplomatic nature of the conflict but militarized it in unprecedented ways.
For Carpentier and his underlings in Saigon, most distressing for the future was that the Viet Minh had shown themselves to be so much more than the ragtag, primitive bandit gang of French imagination (or at least rhetoric); they were a serious fighting force, disciplined and courageous, able to move rapidly and maneuver, and willing to take major battlefield losses.
Nor had the DRV’s medical services factored in that they would need also to take care of hundreds of wounded European, African, and North African troops captured in the battle. Many of these soldiers also succumbed, whether from inadequate treatment of their injuries or from illness contracted in the malaria-infested jungles of Cao Bang.22
Marcel Le Page, who commanded the Lang Son column, was the wrong man for the job, an artilleryman with little experience in jungle warfare and a tendency toward indecision and self-doubt (qualities duly noted by his men).23
THE FRENCH FACED A STARK NEW REALITY. THE CAO BANG DISASTER, beyond the enormous loss of blood and treasure, beyond the immediate humiliation of having been out-generaled and out-fought by a supposedly inferior enemy, showed that in this war, time was not on France’s side. The strategy of isolating the Viet Bac and of reducing the areas under Viet Minh control had not succeeded; to the contrary, Ho Chi Minh’s government now had firm control over a huge swath of Tonkin and threatened the rest; it also remained a formidable presence in many parts of Annam and Cochin China. French commanders
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French Union forces, meanwhile, were about to be bolstered by an infusion of aircraft and other materials from the United States.26
Certainly, there could be no talk of quitting, of seeking a fig-leaf diplomatic settlement with Ho that would allow an exit from the morass. France’s credibility was on the line, as was the personal credibility of her leaders. And one could speak as well of partisan credibility being at stake. France from 1947 to 1951 had a string of coalition governments, each one standing to the ideological right of its predecessor. Indochina was one reason for this rightward drift.
Unbending resolve to tackle the Viet Minh became pivotal to the MRP, the dominant party in these coalitions, which feared a disastrous hemorrhage of support to the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) if it bowed to Socialist and Communist demands for negotiation with Ho Chi Minh.
Many expressed opposition to the Indochina War on the narrow grounds that the expenditures of manpower and money there took away from this preparation at home. But the unpopularity of the war did not yet translate into mass active opposition, and thus politicians could act with a considerable degree of impunity.
Decrying the government’s inertia, Mendès France called the war an exercise in futility, one that moreover was exacting a huge cost in blood and treasure. “It is the entire conception of our action in Indochina that is false,” he declared from the rostrum in the Assembly, “for it is based on a military effort that is insufficient … to bring about a solution by force and on a policy that is incapable of assuring us the support of the people.”
Things cannot continue like this.… There are only two solutions. The first consists in realizing our objectives in Indochina by means of military force. If we choose that, let us at least avoid illusions and pious lies. To achieve decisive military successes rapidly we need three times as many troops in the field and a tripling of appropriations, and we need them very quickly.…
