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

by Fredrik Logevall

Mendès France went on to enumerate the sacrifices that would be required in order to give this option a realistic chance: new taxes, conscription, a reduction of defenses in Europe, a slowdown in productive investment, and the impossibility ultimately of opposing the German rearmament sought by the United States.

“An agreement involves concessions, broad concessions, without doubt more significant than those that would have been sufficient in the past. One may reject this solution. It is difficult to apply. But then we must speak the truth to the country. We must inform it of the price that will have to be paid to bring the other solution about.”

The plea fell on deaf ears in the corridors of power. Disengagement short of victory would insult the memory of the Frenchmen who had died defending the cause, top civilian and military leaders insisted, a stock argument they would use time and time again in the months to come (as would, beginning in the mid-1960s, their American successors).

French leaders also now committed themselves to something they had hitherto resisted: the formation of a Vietnamese national army. They had made a few halfhearted moves in this direction in 1948 and 1949, but the French High Command held sole responsibility for the conduct of operations and for Vietnam’s internal security.

The announcement was of course an admission of weakness, tacit acknowledgment that the Expeditionary Corps as presently constituted was not up to the job. But the move gave desperate war planners in Paris a reason to hope both that their great and growing military manpower needs could be met and that Bao Dai’s anemic government could, by fielding its own army, enhance its popular support. The ordinary villager was weary of the war, French analysts believed, and wished for nothing more than peace and security. If Bao Dai could exploit this desire, if he could convince the peasantry that he would provide that security, he might be able to swing public opinion in his favor. But for that argument to have any chance of working, he needed to be his own man. And to be his own man, he needed Vietnamese troops. Far too many villagers were reluctant to enter areas held by the Expeditionary Corps. Many of them chose instead to back the Viet Minh, not out of ideological conviction but because they were Vietnamese.

It was a disingenuous argument, of course, inasmuch as France was still unwilling to let Bao Dai be his own man, still unwilling to grant his government real independence. But certainly Paris officials were right to see a Vietnamese national army as essential;

And if the creation of such a force could cause the Americans, who had long favored the proposition, to boost their military and other assistance to the war effort, so much the better. On that score too, many French officials saw some reasons for hope in the midst of their late-autumn gloom.30

The pivotal U.S. decision to provide aid to the French military effort had preceded the outbreak of fighting in Korea, but the war there shaped the nature of the U.S. aid program in key ways.

(It was a standard feature of such U.S. “survey missions” during the war: They almost always returned with a “can-do” recommendation for positive action, no matter how intractable the problem might seem to outside observers.)

Yes, a joint State-Defense report acknowledged in early December. But that possibility had to be considered alongside the prospect of ultimate defeat if things continued on their present course.

“America without Asia will have been reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precarious foothold on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent,” the authors concluded, but “success will vindicate and give added meaning to America and the American way of life.”33

Inevitably, the growth in U.S. involvement gave Washington officials increased leverage in the decision making and lessened France’s freedom of maneuver. For now, though, only one thing mattered: The struggle demanded an infusion of resources, which only the Americans could provide.

Unbeknownst to the party propagandists who made their pitch, and to the cheering crowds who heard them, change was coming to Vietnam, in the form of a new French commander with a different conception of how to wage the struggle and the strength to realize that vision. And unbeknownst to them, Vo Nguyen Giap was about to make his biggest blunder of the war.

Specifically, de Lattre had determined that the key to success lay in capturing the active support of the rural population; in the phrase of a later era, French soldiers and officers had to win the “hearts and minds” of the peasantry. The war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all, and that meant striving to meet the needs of people where they lived, whether in the form of providing security, or building schoolhouses or athletic fields, or improving sanitation.

Over time, though, his letters began to take on lugubrious tones, especially as news reached him of the calamity in Cao Bang. He despaired at the “fear psychosis” gripping some fellow officers, and at the louche lifestyle led by others, and he complained of the absence of firm, purposeful command.

More than one observer compared him to Churchill for his singular ability to dominate any room he entered, to attract all attention to himself, and to keep listeners enthralled with his magnetism, his self-deprecating wit, his eloquence.

At the conclusion of the war, General de Gaulle sent de Lattre to Berlin to participate in the Armistice ceremony, even though France hadn’t been invited. De Lattre signed as a witness and exulted:

Did de Lattre really believe it was so simple? It’s hard to be sure. His hatred of Communism knew no bounds, and he was convinced that his actions in Indochina ultimately mattered as much to the West’s defense as did MacArthur’s in Korea. But he also knew that the imagery of countries falling one by one, like bowling pins—or, as it were, dominoes—resonated in the halls of power in Washington, among both civilians and military men. And on this point de Lattre needed no schooling: The success or failure of the daunting task that confronted him, he knew, depended in large measure on the attitudes and policies of the Truman White House.

To de Lattre, however, the guard appeared slovenly, and in front of bystanders he ripped into the colonel in charge, a terrifying treatment known in French slang as the “shampoo.”

Always fascinated by military laurels and recognition, Giap viewed the selection of such an illustrious figure as a compliment to himself and to his troops, and he eagerly took up the challenge. “The French are sending against the People’s Army a foe worthy of its steel,” he declared.

Others disagreed, but Giap’s advocacy received a boost from the growing rice shortage in Viet Minh–held areas; unless revolutionary forces could expand their presence in the delta, he and others insisted, the food situation would become desperate.

Giap prided himself on his meticulous preparation for battle, but here he miscalculated—his hubris got the better of him. He gave insufficient thought to his great advantage in the Border Campaign: The French were dispersed and had few lines of communication or transport. But that advantage did not apply in the delta: Here the French were much better placed.

French commanders girded for battle, and their intelligence analysts (especially those of the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage, or SDECE) identified the general whereabouts of the enemy’s concentration and the probable attack date.

I order my men to take cover from the bombs and machine-gun bullets. But the planes dive upon us without firing their guns. However, all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes.

Giap too grasped the importance of the stepped-up American aid to the enemy’s cause. But he was unwilling to admit that Vinh Yen represented a serious defeat, or that it showed his forces unready for a major battle of maneuver. The operation was a close-run thing, he reasoned; the result could easily have gone the other way.

He had been outclassed, had shown his inexperience as a general. Cocksure by nature, he had failed to heed what the Vinh Yen defeat had taught about the difficulty of penetrating the delta. Neither he nor his staff yet understood adequately how to move large units or how to handle them in battle.

formations. Senior party leaders, notably theoretician Truong Chinh, accused Giap of causing needless massacres and of selecting the wrong commanders; even Ho Chi Minh, whose own leadership was called into question, expressed distress at the heavy battle losses. DRV radio broadcasts obliquely criticized the offensives by praising the guerrilla techniques used early in the war, and there were reports of increased desertions from Viet Minh ranks.

In time, the devastating effect of the son’s death on the general’s outlook would become clear for all to see. Initially, though, he masked his despair, stressing at every opportunity that both his Christian faith and his faith in the importance of France’s mission in Indochina were undiminished. Bernard had given his life for the most noble of causes, he insisted—perhaps, some thought, a bit too insistently.

Huu’s government was apathetic and weak, and middle-class Vietnamese—the very people who had the most stake in the outcome of the war—were not signing up for the army. Despite a desperate shortage of medics, for example, not a single doctor could be induced to sign up.30

Maybe the general deep down inside felt some personal responsibility for the death. Rumors circulated quietly that he himself had assigned his son to that particular battalion, in order to break up Bernard’s affair with a Vietnamese woman who once had been a mistress of Emperor Bao Dai.

Altogether too many privileged Vietnamese were unwilling to fight and die for Bao Dai’s government. Many sought to avoid military service completely; others pulled every available string to steer clear of combat duty.

IF IN DE LATTRE’S VIEW THE VIETNAMESE WERE UNGRATEFUL, INSINCERE, and even treacherous, he had hardly better things to say about the Americans. The latter, indeed, in his mind were in good measure responsible for the attentisme problem.

It outraged the French that so many Vietnamese were enrolling in the USIS’s English-language classes, particularly when so few of them had adequate command of French. Was this one more sign that the United States sought to supplant France in Vietnam?

As always, he sought also to connect the two Asian wars: “America and France are today giving the world examples of enterprises which are as magnanimous and disinterested as the principles and splendor of their cultures,” he declared.

Disputable claims, certainly, but hardly evidence of deep Franco-American discord. According to a British onlooker, however, the tension was palpable throughout the ceremony, from the moment early in his speech when de Lattre said:

Salan admitted to taking opium on occasion to relieve stress but denied the other charges. No leftist poker aficionado he. In hushed tones, Salan told the British consul in Hanoi, A. G. Trevor-Wilson, that de Lattre had become extremely neurotic and sour, with hardly a good word for anyone.40

Was de Lattre’s bitterness a passing phase? The question was topic A in the diplomatic community in Saigon that summer and among the journalists who gathered daily for drinks at the Continental Hotel’s terrace bar—the

No, others insisted, this went beyond the loss of Bernard. De Lattre despaired at the size of the obstacles that still stood in the way of victory in the war, these analysts believed, notwithstanding his success against Giap’s offensives earlier in the year. Paris was not delivering anywhere near the reinforcements he needed, and the VNA was not ready to make up the difference—and wouldn’t be ready for a long time to come, if ever.

Never a patient man, he now seemed intolerant of even minor delays and setbacks. Yet the old personal magnetism hadn’t disappeared, at least not among those who saw him only intermittently or met him for the first time. For them, he could still radiate charm and sincerity.

British officials thought he looked tired and worn during a dinner in Paris on the fourth but were impressed by the case he laid out, by his passionate defense of French policy. Also impressed were two prominent Americans he saw in the French capital, General Dwight Eisenhower, who had succeeded him as Western Europe’s top general and was now NATO commander, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts.

The United States, as France’s principal ally in the effort, was guilty by association and risked being forced down the same path as the European colonialists. The French-supported Vietnamese government lacked broad popular support, Kennedy determined, and Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.

It convinced him that the United States must align herself with the emerging nations, and that Communism could never be defeated by relying solely or principally on force of arms. His Indochina experience led him to that conclusion, as did a dinner conversation in New Delhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the French war an example of doomed colonialism and said Communism offered the masses “something to die for” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War would not stop Communism, Nehru warned him; it would only enhance it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.”

In this way de Lattre, for all his military sagacity and dazzling leadership, for all his daring and élan, was cut from the same cloth as the high commissioners who went before. His parting comment surely is telling: Never did he fully comprehend Indochina.

Of de Lattre’s fifty-five weeks as commander in chief, none were more important than the two he spent in the United States. By January 1952 he was gone, but the Americans were more firmly committed to his cause than ever before.

To Donald Heath, the U.S. minister, this merely meant the Viet Minh had shifted tactics. “While feat selected is less [an] exhibition of strength than of VM willingness to indulge in cowardly and brutal acts of terrorism,” he cabled Washington, “exploit was carried out with grim efficiency and will undoubtedly be heralded as Commie triumph.”

As an uncommonly bored schoolboy, Greene is said to have played Russian roulette, to have had a kind of death wish; perhaps he never changed. He was drawn mothlike to “the exciting thing,” to physical danger, to societies in the throes of violent upheaval.

The Pearl of the Far East had begun to lose its luster, to look faded and feel gritty, but that only added to the city’s allure for Greene, who reveled in the atmosphere.

He developed a taste for opium, boasting in one letter that he managed to smoke five pipes in a night; in later years he would devote many hours during his Vietnam visits to taking the drug.8 And he sought out prostitutes, notably at Le Parc aux Buffles (Park of Buffalo; in the novel, The House of 500 Girls), reputed to be the world’s largest brothel, with four hundred women of various nationalities.

He was on assignment from Time’s sister publication, Life, whose publisher, Henry Luce, and editor Emmet John Hughes had been impressed with an evocative—and staunchly anti-Communist—piece Greene had written for the magazine on the insurgency in Malaya. They commissioned him to write one also on the Indochina struggle.

“There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.”13