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

by Fredrik Logevall

It didn’t take French commanders long to realize that many Vietnamese agents had contacts with both sides; one could never be assured of their loyalty.

It was a war without fronts, where the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

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.

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.

Hindsight can distort; prophets become prophets only in time.

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.

In the Madagascar rebellion, for example, French authorities depicted the leaders of the Mouvement démocratique de la rénovation malgache (MDRM) in the most sinister terms possible 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combined with extreme deprivation, killed an estimated one hundred thousand Madagascans, a figure acknowledged and then withdrawn by French officials in 1949.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 Communists (PCF), having moved in previous weeks to a confrontationist posture on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, called for immediate and serious negotiations—involving mutual concessions—with the Viet Minh.

In between these extremes, the Socialists groped for a middle way but in effect endorsed the MRP line. Ramadier pledged to seek a negotiated settlement and to end the war swiftly, but he heaped scorn on the traitorous Viet Minh and their “criminal” leader.

Paul Reynaud, the prime minister at the time of the defeat in 1940 who now sat as an Independent, won broad backing for his claim that if France left this “admirable balcony on the Pacific,” she would cease to be a great power.24

The Socialist reformer Maurice Viollette, having advocated broad concessions to the Viet Minh, was punched to the ground by angry deputies from the opposition benches.

Tensions reached a fever pitch when Reynaud, reading from a document purportedly showing that one of Ho Chi Minh’s representatives in Paris, Duong Bach Mai, was responsible for atrocities committed against Frenchmen in Indochina, was told by a deputy that this man was present in the public gallery at that very moment. Amid cries of “This is the criminal!” and “Arrest him!” the session had to be suspended. Duong Bach Mai was soon detained and deported to Vietnam.

Though a dozen prime ministers came and went between September 1944 and mid-1950, only two men—Georges Bidault and Robert Schuman, both of them militant on Indochina—presided over the Foreign Ministry.

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.

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.

Already, it seemed, the Truman administration was moving to oppose any effort by the Dutch to use military means to restore control in Java; could Indochina be next?

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.

Never mind that the Soviet Union was little involved in the Greek civil war, that the Communists in Greece were more pro-Tito than pro-Stalin, and that the resistance movement had non-Communist as well as Communist members.

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.

Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state and a figure of growing influence at Foggy Bottom, said that while the Viet Minh had never acknowledged any connection to the Kremlin, neither had they explicitly denied such a tie.

Might a defeat cause Western-oriented moderates to lose their grip on power in Paris and enhance the prestige of the Soviet-supported PCF, maybe even bring that party to power? The thought gave the Truman team heartburn and made them reluctant to quibble with Paris over its pursuit of a military solution in far-off Southeast Asia.

In spite of any misunderstanding that might have arisen in the minds of the French in regard to the U.S. position concerning Indochina, “they must appreciate that we have fully recognized France’s sovereign position in that area and we do not wish to have it appear that we are in any way endeavoring [to] undermine that position.”

“It appears that the Indochina affair must now be dealt with not so much on its actual merits but even more so by taking account of the likely international impacts and consequences,” Jean Chauvel of the Foreign Ministry wrote in February.

For the mission to Ho’s jungle headquarters, Bollaert selected one of his most knowledgeable political advisers, a scholar and teacher who enjoyed considerable respect among many Vietnamese for his knowledge of the country and who ranks as one of the most extraordinary figures in our story.

But long before that, indeed 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.

Because France had already lost the battle that counted most: the battle for the support of the local population.

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. Stalin remained suspicious of Ho Chi Minh’s ideological bona fides—especially following Ho’s tactical decision in late 1945 to dissolve the Indochinese Communist Party—and he was in any event much more interested in Europe, the heart of the emerging Cold War, where he hoped to see the French Communist Party take power and help block American expansion.

Nationalist leaders in India and Southeast Asia offered pledges of moral support, but these affirmations, though welcome, carried little practical import. Hardly anyone in the major world capitals paid attention in January 1947 when Pandit Nehru, then vice president of the self-declared Indian interim government and its minister for external affairs, publicly appealed to France to “revert to peaceful methods in Indo-China.” Fewer still took note of Burmese nationalist leader Aung San’s declaration, also in January, that it was “necessary for all the states of Asia to assist” the Vietnamese in their fight.

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. Vietnam would not be Communist for decades, Thach assured these men, and even then the government would be a moderate, inclusive, nationally oriented one. 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.”

He devoted weeks at a time to hunting expeditions in the jungle highlands, reportedly bagging single-handedly a sizable percentage of Vietnam’s tigers. (He preferred to track the tigers into their dens, with a lamp attached to his head and a rifle at his side. One time, legend had it, he killed one with his bare hands.) Upon

Though the DRV intelligence network had gotten wind of the operation two days earlier, a communication snafu meant that the information reached Bac Kan just as the French were launching the attack. Ho and Giap managed to get away, but with only minutes to spare. They were forced to leave behind arms and munitions caches as well as stacks of secret documents. One senior DRV official, the well-known scholar Nguyen Van To, was killed by paratroopers as he tried to escape.

that at the end of 1947, the position of the French outside the delta was again roughly what it had been a year before.

It would be more accurate to say that the enemy had managed a draw, which in the circumstances was the same as a victory.

Still, the moment was not without significance. The French had publicly recognized Bao Dai as a potential head of state and had explicitly promised “independence”—a pledge Ho Chi Minh had failed to extract from them at Fontainebleau two years before. In the Xuan government, moreover, Vietnam now had her first formal opposition to the Viet Minh. Might Ho Chi Minh’s hold over the non-Communist nationalists now be broken, or at least seriously weakened? Ho feared as much, and he wasted no time in branding Bao Dai and those who constituted the new government as traitors. He needn’t have worried. 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.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948 CAME A DEVELOPMENT THAT WOULD ALTER the calculations on all sides in both France and Vietnam and, in due course, profoundly affect the nature of the Indochina War: In China’s long-running civil war, the fortunes swung sharply in favor of Mao Zedong’s Communists.

On the military side, 1948 saw no major operations of the type General Valluy attempted in the fall of 1947.

What a difference a year made.

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.

doing everything possible to disrupt the flow of supplies along the vital Hanoi-Haiphong corridor.

By October, not a drop of gasoline was available for civilians in Hanoi.

A young Canadian who would go on to become prime minister of his country was traveling through Asia that fall and winter. Handsome and cosmopolitan at age twenty-nine, Pierre Elliott Trudeau arrived from Thailand to find in Saigon “hate, strife, and inevitable waste of men, money, and morals.” Once again, he wrote his mother, the youth of France were in uniform, fighting a war that was going “nowhere fast.”

BAO DAI TOO SAW THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE VIET MINH’S MILITARY success and of Mao’s gains in China. They gave him increased leverage but also reduced his options. 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 could opt simply to back Xuan and start a new Cochin China experiment with a puppet government run from Paris. He decided to take the plunge, hopeful also that the Americans—who were always at the forefront of his calculations—would now be more inclined to get involved. The reasoning went like this: To contain the Chinese Communists, the Truman administration would step up assistance to France in Indochina, but only if U.S. officials were persuaded that the French cause was vital to the West. This, however, presupposed that the Vietnam that was to be “saved” from Communism was not a mere colonial entity but an independent nation, one headed not by a French puppet but by a genuine nationalist with broad popular support.

On March 8, 1949, Bao Dai and French president Vincent Auriol concluded, by an exchange of letters, the Élysée Accords, so named for the grand presidential palace in Paris at which the ceremony took place. The accord reconfirmed Vietnam’s autonomy and her status as an “Associated State” within the French Union (Laos received the same status that July, and Cambodia in November),

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.

In April, the Viet Minh issued a warrant for Bao Dai’s arrest on the charge of high treason.

Already in December 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that any government under the emperor would be fatally harmed by association with France and would never pose a serious threat to the “fanatical loyalty” inspired by Ho.

Should that happen, an April 1949 memo warned, “we must then follow blindly down a dead-end alley, expending our limited resources … in a fight that would be hopeless.”

What swung the Truman administration in favor of the Élysée Accords was the possibility, distant though it might be, that Bao Dai really was a viable moderate nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh, and moreover that the risks of committing to him and to the French were smaller than the risks of doing nothing. Mao’s forces were pressing forward to victory in China, and global Communism seemed to be on the march. Something had to be done.

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.

“HAVING PUT OUR HAND TO THE PLOW, WE WOULD NOT LOOK back.”1 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.