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

by Fredrik Logevall

Peter Dewey was the first of nearly sixty thousand Americans to be killed in Vietnam. His body was never found, and the French and Viet Minh accused each other of being responsible for the murder. Washington reacted to the killing by scaling back the OSS presence and activities in Saigon. Before he left for the airport on that final day, Dewey had summarized his thinking in a report: “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”

Leclerc soon came to agree. “One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution. Any hope of imposing such a solution would require a vastly larger French fighting force, which Paris was in no position to provide, now or in the foreseeable future. The task of French forces, therefore, would be to reassert French control and thereby give negotiators a base from which to proceed to a generalized political settlement involving mutual concessions.

Stalin’s Soviet Union was not merely uninterested but had been prepared to accept the future of Southeast Asia in Chiang Kai-shek’s hands.

He moreover continued to suspect Ho of being too independent, too much the nationalist, and too desirous of American support.

Ho continued to send letters to the White House asking for support; with each nonreply, he lost a bit more faith.

Leclerc would not have quibbled seriously with historian Bernard Fall’s later assertion that in early 1946, France gained control of Cochin China—but only “to the extent of 100 yards on either side of all major roads.”

In the afternoon of March 6, the two sides, under intense Chinese pressure, signed a “Preliminary Convention,” wherein the French recognized the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state” (état libre) within the Indochinese Federation and French Union; the Vietnamese agreed to welcome twenty-five thousand French troops for five years to relieve departing Chinese forces; and France in turn agreed to accept the results of a future popular referendum on the issue of unifying the three regions.

Ho reiterated his conviction that the first order of business was to be rid of the dread Chinese. “As for me,” he told aides, “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

To those concerned about his Marxism, Ho offered soothing words. Maybe in fifty years, Vietnam would be ready for Communism, he told a group of journalists in Paris the week before, “but not now.” Any change to the economic system would be gradual, and the Vietnamese constitution—modeled, he emphasized, on the American one—contained safeguards for private property. “If the capitalists come to our country, it will be a good thing for them,” he added. “They will make money, but not as it was made in the old days. From now on it is fifty-fifty.”

the failure of the Fontainebleau talks allowed hard-liners on both sides to dig in, rendering a compromise settlement more remote than ever.

Giap would make his share of mistakes on the battlefield, but his record as a logistician, strategist, and organizer is nevertheless extraordinary and ranks him with the finest military leaders of modern history—with Wellington, Grant, Lee, and Rommel.

in hindsight it’s tempting to see the whole thing as inevitable, especially after the failure of the Fontainebleau talks. But wars are never inevitable; they depend on the actions of individual leaders who could have chosen differently, who had, if not a menu of options, then at least an alternative to large-scale violence.

Most important of all in this constellation of voices on the French political scene was the MRP under Georges Bidault, which opposed not only negotiations with Ho but the granting of independence to any Vietnamese regime.

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.

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.

during the course of 1947 more and more African conscripts were deployed.

Valluy had units of the French Foreign Legion, about which so much has been written, and which included within it a sizable number of ex-Nazis.3 Most legionnaires in Indochina in 1947 were indeed Germans in their midtwenties who had gone into the Wehrmacht young and knew no occupation but war, who had helped conquer France in 1940, and who bore scars from wounds suffered in Russia, Poland, or Romania.

GIAP GRASPED RIGHT AWAY THAT he must deny the French the quick victory they sought.

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. Already on December 22, 1946, a mere three days into the fighting, the DRV issued a proclamation stating that the war would be fought along these lines.8 The declaration was drafted by theoretician Truong Chinh, who elaborated on the essentials of this Maoist strategy in a publication titled The Resistance Will Win, which appeared in February 1947.

More than Mao, Truong Chinh stressed the importance of international powers—in this case, principally the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—to the success of the insurgency, and he emphasized that French public opinion could ultimately prove decisive.

As for the efficacy of the practice, a postwar internal study by the Deuxième Bureau was unambiguous: The use of torture during interrogations of Viet Minh prisoners did not improve the quality of the intelligence provided.

General Leclerc, who went to Indochina on a brief inspection tour at the start of 1947, returned to the metropole filled with foreboding, telling associates that France would need a minimum of five hundred thousand troops to subjugate a people so committed to their independence. Such a figure being utterly impossible, for logistical as well as political reasons, the general concluded that “the major problem from now on is political.”

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.

More than many histories of the period have suggested, planners were divided about the proper American course of action.28 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. “The Cold War,” as Walter Lippmann would christen this conflict that year, would continue to shape U.S. policy choices on Vietnam for the next quarter-century

Harry Truman, warned by leading GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg that he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people” to gain congressional approval for a $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey, delivered an alarmist speech in March 1947 intended to stake out the American role in the postwar world. Communism, the president declared, fed on economic dislocation and imperiled the world. “If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority,” he gravely concluded in an early version of the domino theory, “the effect upon its neighbor Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.”

Then the key sentence in what came to be called the Truman Doctrine: “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Congress approved the funds, and the United States was launched on the construction of an international economic and defensive network to protect American prosperity and security and to advance U.S. hegemony.

More and more, a staunch and undifferentiated anti-Communism became the required posture of all aspiring politicians, whether Republican or Democrat; more and more, alternative visions for relations with Moscow were deemed illegitimate.

In Vietnam, Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu early in the year moved what was then still a localized and strictly Franco-Vietnamese conflict to the highest international level, that of East versus West, Communism versus anti-Communism. Long convinced that Washington and Moscow would clash on the world stage, the admiral now told anyone who would listen that Ho and the Viet Minh were mere pawns in Stalin’s struggle for world supremacy. France, he vowed, would never allow the Sovietization of a people it had nurtured and defended for decades, and he called Indochina a key battle in the West’s emerging struggle with Moscow.

found a receptive audience in Washington. Despite the fact that the State Department saw no evidence of mass popular support for Communism within Vietnam, and further that it was not ideology but a desire for independence and a hatred of the French that drove the unrest, the principals in U.S. decision making proceeded on the basis of worst-case assumptions.

the lack of evidence for such involvement did not seem to matter, as skeptics were given the impossible task of proving a negative, of proving Soviet noninvolvement.

Marshall acknowledged the French claim that Ho Chi Minh had “direct Communist connections” and further that Washington did not wish to see a colonial administration supplanted by one controlled by the Kremlin. 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. What, then, should be Caffery’s final recommendation to his French interlocutors? There was none. Marshall could only throw up his hands as he concluded, in a startling admission of impotence: “Frankly, we have no solution [to the] problem to suggest.”

After Paul Mus’s visit, no non-Communist Westerner is believed to have seen Ho Chi Minh in the jungle until midway through 1954. By then the French war had ended in defeat and Paul Mus had published a classic study of contemporary Vietnam, a dense, convoluted, mesmerizing work titled Viêt-Nam: sociologie d’une guerre (1952).

already now in the spring of 1947, Mus had drawn three major conclusions: that Ho was the undisputed leader of the Viet Minh; that Ho had an almost serene confidence in the Viet Minh’s revolutionary program; and that this program had already accomplished an enormous amount in the countryside through which Mus was passing. French forces might be able to reoccupy these regions, the Frenchman reasoned, but they could never achieve lasting control over them. Why? Because France had already lost the battle that counted most: the battle for the support of the local population.

Already in 1947, Mus believed that it would be a war for people rather than for territory, and that the Viet Minh would be supreme.8

In the spring of 1947, while Paul Mus readied to make his trek to Ho’s headquarters, the Viet Minh leader sent his personal envoy, Pham Ngoc Thach, a physician who would later serve as Ho’s personal doctor, to Bangkok to stress to American diplomats stationed there the moderate nature of the Vietnamese revolution and the opportunities that would be available to U.S. investors following independence.

Communism in Vietnam, as it had existed since the early 1930s, he even said at one point, “is nothing more than a means of arriving at independence.” And Americans could feel confident about the DRV’s economic program: “The communist ministers … favor the development of capitalist autonomy and call on foreign capital for the reconstruction of the country.” U.S. firms could expect to get special privileges, Thach went on, including tax and other concessions, and American tourists would find postcolonial Vietnam “an ideal place” to visit.

That same month Ho Chi Minh made a further gesture designed partly to conciliate Americans and other non-Communist observers abroad: He reshuffled his government, replacing three Communist ministers (including Giap as defense minister, though he remained battlefield commander) with non-Communists who supported his policies.11 The efforts were for naught—once

The top foreign policy minds in Washington that summer were focused on winning congressional approval for and then implementing the Marshall Plan (formally the European Recovery 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,

He responded by redoubling his efforts to strengthen contacts with the French Communists and with Moscow.

war. The Soviets too were more or less unresponsive.

If he could not convince most audiences abroad that the DRV was the sole and legitimate government of Vietnam, over time more and more domestic voices would have their own doubts on that score. Ho knew it, and his Vietnamese rivals knew it. The French knew it too.

as a public rationale, the new approach was a kind of masterstroke, for it bought increased support for French aims in Vietnam and in the international community, most important in the United States. It was indeed tailor-made for American audiences. As the astute observer Philippe Devillers later said, through this “Bao Dai Solution,” Paris would use anti-Communism to neutralize America’s anticolonialism. An ostensibly nationalist regime would be the means by which the war against the Viet Minh would be redefined for Americans as part of the emerging struggle against Communism.

the French thought he had the attributes they particularly valued: In their eyes, he was weak and malleable, concerned principally with indulging his passions for gambling, sport, and womanizing. It didn’t hurt that a number of other Vietnamese nationalists, including members of the Dai Viet and the VNQDD, expressed their support for Bao Dai against the Viet Minh, and that some leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects did the same. Ngo Dinh Diem, a prominent Catholic nationalist and later America’s “miracle man” in South Vietnam, asserted that Bao Dai could produce Vietnamese independence without the “Red Terror.”

Bao Dai reacted cautiously and said he would demand of France as much as Ho demanded: the dissolution of the Cochin China government, the reunification of Vietnam under one government, and full independence.

A victory by Mao would inevitably strengthen Ho Chi Minh and thereby perhaps doom forever their hope of splitting the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

March 8, 1949, Bao Dai and French president Vincent Auriol concluded, by an exchange of letters, the Élysée Accords,

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 the weeks that followed, officials took every chance to try to convince Americans of the liberality of French policy and of Bao Dai’s stature as the only thing standing in the way of a Communist takeover. The tactic worked. It did so despite the fact that Washington had long held doubts about Bao Dai’s viability as a nationalist leader.

Mao’s forces were pressing forward to victory in China, and global Communism seemed to be on the march. Something had to be done.