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April 21 - May 7, 2025
When a State Department analyst in February 1949 noted the general absence of anti-American propaganda coming out of Viet Minh headquarters, and suggested that Ho Chi Minh still hoped for U.S. backing for—or at least noninterference in—his cause, Acheson was unmoved. The question, he said some weeks later, of whether Ho Chi Minh was as much a “nationalist as a Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists.” Ho, he said, was an “outright Commie.”3 To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this
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In the early spring, Acheson resisted pressure from State Department conservatives to throw full U.S. support behind France and the Bao Dai solution. He couldn’t get away from the notion that Bao Dai was a weak leader with no hope of winning broad popular support, couldn’t get away from the suspicion that France sought merely to continue her colonial war under a new guise.
When French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez tried to convince Stalin that he could trust Ho’s commitment to the cause, Stalin demurred. Ho had collaborated too much with the Americans in World War II, he replied, and failed to solicit advice from the Kremlin before making key decisions. Case in point: Ho’s decision to dissolve the ICP in 1945. Thorez tried to say that the dissolution had been merely tactical, but the Soviet dictator would not hear it. A
Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to
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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 referred to Mao as that “cave-dweller-like Marxist,” whose ideas were primitive and who—like Ho Chi Minh—was probably, underneath it all, much more nationalist than internationalist.
At Mao’s urging, Stalin agreed to meet with Ho Chi Minh. Still focused on European concerns and still distrustful of Ho, the Soviet leader affirmed his government’s recognition of the DRV but ruled out direct Soviet involvement in the war against the French. “There must be a division of labor between China and the Soviet Union,” Stalin said. As his government had to meet its commitments in Eastern Europe, it would be up to China to give Vietnam what she needed.
For on February 7, while Ho had still been en route to the Soviet capital, Dean Acheson had announced formal U.S. recognition of the Bao Dai government and its sister regimes in Laos and Cambodia.
AT 6:45 IN THE MORNING OF MAY 25, 1950, A VIOLENT FUSILLADE suddenly rained down on the small French garrison (eight hundred men, mostly Moroccan) at Dong Khe, a post situated between Cao Bang and That Khe along the RC4. The post was a bastion in the French military system where convoys could stop to rest in the shelter of the French flag. Giap’s aim: to take and hold Dong Khe, thereby isolating Cao Bang from its links with That Khe. In the days prior, four Viet Minh infantry battalions succeeded in hoisting five 75mm cannons onto the heights surrounding the town without being detected by the
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The French responded quickly, dispatching thirty-four aircraft to drop a battalion of paratroops upon the town. They caught the Viet Minh units completely off guard and after intense fighting forced them to flee for the jungle. Giap had reinforcements he could have called in, but the monsoon was fast approaching, and he chose to call it a day. The French congratulated themselves on their quick deployment of the paratroops rather than face the deeper truth of their extreme vulnerability in the Viet Bac. They chose not to take this last great chance to evacuate the frontier posts while time
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By the late spring, the Viet Minh had grown to a force of about a quarter of a million troops, organized into three components: a regular army (chu luc), regional units, and guerrilla-militia forces. The regular forces, with an estimated strength of 120,000,
The task of these regular forces was to conduct a war of maneuver, aimed at drawing French units into combat in locales and under conditions in which French advantages in firepower and air support would be neutralized.
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.
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.
Most critical of all, Giap received considerable assistance from the Chinese, as pledged by Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh in Moscow and Beijing earlier in the year.
In Tonkin, where the immediate threat loomed, Carpentier had some 53,000 troops at his disposal. Practically all of them, however, were engaged in internal security duties,
An intensive pacification effort in the first half of the year, commanded by Major General Marcel Alessandri and designed to clear the Red River Delta and thereby deny the Viet Minh a major source of rice, had achieved considerable success—the flow of rice was cut almost in half. This was a severe problem for the DRV not merely in nutritional terms but also because rice was the medium of exchange of the Viet Minh economy. Troops were paid in rice; services and supplies were purchased with rice. Through the middle months of the year, rice rations for Giap’s forces were cut again and again.
Alessandri, upon learning of the order, wired Carpentier: “Cancel everything. If you carry it out it will be a crime.”
“We plunged into the mountains, on a ‘trail’ which was a trail only in name,” a Hungarian legionnaire in the Le Page column recalled of the night of October 3–4. “Several of our wounded died that night. They could not take falling every ten or twenty yards with their porters. We were all beat, for we had practically not slept since we left our base [four days earlier]. Climb, descend several times each day on these abrupt slopes loaded to the maximum with packs and equipment was back-breaking.”
“Why do we need to rest now?” Ho Chi Minh declared. “We are tired but the enemy is ten times more so.
Fifteen Viet Minh battalions had closed in. Panic set in among the Moroccans, who had a well-earned reputation for extraordinary courage and resilience; all of a sudden, many of them fled down the cliff faces screaming “Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!” The French force was disintegrating into a mob.
Ultimately, only some 600 men from the two columns made it back to French lines. The Expeditionary Corps had suffered 6,000 casualties, of whom no fewer than 4,800 were listed as dead or missing.
In author Bernard Fall’s later estimation, it was the greatest French colonial defeat since the loss of Montcalm at Quebec in 1759.
Large stocks of arms, ammunitions, stores, and vehicles were left behind for the Viet Minh to claim—enough to supply Giap’s army for many months.
Viet Minh casualties in the Border Campaign (as it came to be called, or bien gioi to the Vietnamese) were extremely heavy—much heavier than was known at the time. Of the 30,000 troops Giap threw into the fight, as many as 9,000, or 30 percent, may have been killed.
At all times he had at least a 3 to 1 superiority in numbers, and at Dong Khe it was more like 8 to 1.
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,
The declining influence of the French left in colonial and defense policy was critical to the French choices in Indochina that resulted in adherence to the Bao Dai solution, refusal to pursue direct negotiation with the Viet Minh leadership, and greater attachment to U.S. Cold War imperatives,
Broader public opinion in France played little part in determining this firm posture.
On foreign affairs, most voters were far more concerned about Germany, about France’s eastern frontiers, and about building up the armed forces to resist yet another invasion across the Rhine.
The exception was Pierre Mendès France, an articulate leader of the Radical Party (which, despite the name, was a party of the center-left). 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.
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. Would it not be better, he asked, to choose the second option, involving a negotiated settlement with Ho Chi Minh?
Much of the stigma of colonialism can be removed if, where necessary, yellow men will be killed by yellow men rather than by white men alone.”
Vietnamese non-Communists likewise saw their leverage reduced with the Americans’ arrival. Whereas in Indonesia non-Communist nationalists under Sukarno won U.S. backing in their struggle against the Netherlands and secured independence via an international negotiated settlement in 1949, in Vietnam a different dynamic prevailed. Here the non-Communists were allied with the French against the Viet Minh and thus had far less chance to play the Americans—who saw this as a Cold War struggle first and foremost—against the colonial overlord. With each passing month, it seemed, non-Communist
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like MacArthur, he was vain and had a flair for the intensely dramatic. “General de Théatre,” some called him.
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.
Egocentric to the point of megalomania, de Lattre was prone to moodiness and to volcanic expressions of anger toward underlings.
In the days thereafter, he shuttled all over the delta in his small Morane spotter plane, showing
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.
Giap had lost 6,000 dead and 8,000 wounded and had been defeated in the open field. French airpower, using a terrifying new weapon, had proved decisive.
But the planes dive upon us without firing their guns. However, all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire that falls from the skies.
The napalm bombs and howitzers were particularly important, but de Lattre also knew that virtually all the aircraft employed were of U.S. origin, as was much of the artillery.
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.
He left some 9,000 dead and 1,000 captured.
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. He had sent them into action in open terrain during daylight, which made them easy targets for superior French firepower. He had failed to leave himself with reserve units and thus had no way to exploit sudden opportunities, and his withdrawals from all three operations had been chaotic and slow,
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De Lattre took one look at him and, before the aide could open his mouth, exclaimed: “Bernard is dead!”
More generally, de Lattre now declared that French officers and soldiers had sacrificed themselves needlessly to defend and protect a selfish and mistrustful Vietnamese people. “If this constant sacrificing of our youths’ flower does not prove us sincere in our desire to give Vietnam independence,” he asked, with scarcely disguised contempt, “what further is necessary to drive the point home?” In a “bona fide war,” he would at least have the consolation that his son had died a heroic death. Instead, Bernard had been “offered up on behalf of an ungrateful people,” who not only had failed to
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To remind all and sundry of the sacrifices being made by the French Union for the defense of Vietnam, de Lattre ordered a series of commemorative services be held for his fallen son, at various points around the country. On July 5, for example, there was a solemn mass in St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi. Reluctant Vietnamese ministers were compelled to fly to Tonkin—how could one decline such an invitation?—as were equally reluctant members of the diplomatic community, most of whom weren’t informed of the event until eight o’clock the night before. Hasty arrangements were made, and the aircraft
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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? French officials thought so. And why was it that the USIS’s first translation effort was a history of the United States?
Secretary of State Dean Acheson scoffed at the French complaints. “If the Viets ‘know nothing or little’ of their own history or that of France, this is a problem for the Ministry of Education and incidentally one which should have been taken up long ago,” the secretary of state commented acidly.
apex of America’s Vietnam decision making. This was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose visit to Indochina in mid-October—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Patricia, during a tour of Asia and the Middle East—is described at the start of this book.
