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April 21 - May 7, 2025
But it’s clear that the Asian tour changed JFK’s outlook. 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.
He did not have much time left, he knew. He was dying. Doctors had operated on him in Paris in October and had told him his final stay in Vietnam would be brief.
When these units located a fortified Viet Minh village, its inhabitants were given notice to quit; if they refused to comply, air support was called in to raze the village, usually using napalm.
But the old problem remained: The French, undermanned as always, could not long stay in the conquered areas; as soon as they departed, the Viet Minh flowed back in.
“We shall never give up Hoa Binh,” de Lattre vowed, but he was wrong. In February 1952, General Raoul Salan ordered the post’s evacuation.
The Viet Minh duly took it and began to push a north-south trail toward central and southern Vietnam, the beginning of what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
by then de Lattre ...
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Now, the novelist observed, “the changes were startling.” De Lattre was an altered man, weary and morose, “his rhetoric of hope wearing painfully thin.”
His last words, voiced during a moment of brief consciousness on the ninth, were “Where is Bernard?”
De Lattre indisputably demonstrated what a decisive contribution to events a leader can make, for without him the war in Tonkin might well have been lost in the early weeks of the year.
At the same time, de Lattre’s dictatorial methods alienated many Vietnamese,
De Lattre recognized immediately that only the Americans could supply the material assistance he needed, and over the course of the year he (along with his civilian counterparts in Paris) achieved great success in cementing America’s presence.
Of de Lattre’s fifty-five weeks as commander in chief, none were more important than the two he spent in the United States.
Speculation turned to Colonel Trinh Minh Thé, a flamboyant former Cao Dai chief of staff who had broken with the French in 1951 and, together with twenty-five hundred Cao Dai troops, had set up a headquarters in a swampy area past Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. His aim: to fight both the French and the Viet Minh,
“Nature doesn’t really interest me—except in so far as it may contain an ambush—that is, something human.”
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.
In Ways of Escape, his otherwise reticent autobiography, he acknowledged that he traveled to the revolutions and wars of the colonial world “not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on [wartime] London.”
“Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Viet Minh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism—national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”
Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,” Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”
Pham Xuan An, a self-taught English speaker who was tasked with censoring the Englishman’s dispatches, and who would later lead an extraordinary double life as a Time reporter and Viet Cong spy. “While he was in Asia, smoking opium and pretending to be a journalist, the Deuxième Bureau assured us he was a secret agent in MI6, British Intelligence.
But very likely de Lattre had it right. Trevor-Wilson was not only the consul in Hanoi; he also managed the Secret Intelligence Service’s operations in the city.
Greene’s sympathetic views toward the French cause in Indochina would in time change, but not his negative assessment of the United States. It was set in stone.
America had become for him a symbol of empty materialism, lack of tradition, political immaturity, and cultural naïveté.
Along comes the Ivy League–educated Pyle, ignorant of the world and full of reforming zeal, “determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.”
Nor has any other firm evidence for American involvement in the bombing turned up, though it’s apparent that among French officials (with whom Greene had close contact) there were strong suspicions to that effect.
No evidence has surfaced that U.S. agents supplied his organization with explosives—though that is not always the type of information that would be recorded on paper.
“There were disaffected people, people like [Ngo Dinh] Diem who held themselves aloof from the French for a long time, and we thought they were a more likely independent force [than Thé].”
A few years thence, as we shall see, at about the time the novel was published, U.S. officials were in close contact with Thé and did promote him as someone who could play at least a supporting role in a Third Force movement in Vietnam. In 1954–55, none other than Edward Lansdale had contact with Thé and worked to keep him supportive of U.S. policy.
Although the French High Command had final say on the distribution of American military matériel, a stipulation in the bilateral agreement allowed the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to make suggestions regarding that distribution. In addition, MAAG had the right to conduct “end-use” inspections in the field to determine how the U.S.-supplied equipment was being utilized.
On the appointed day, French drivers would arrive hours behind schedule and then inexplicably get lost en route to the post. When at last the U.S. officers arrived on scene, they would be told that for “security reasons” the inspection would be limited to service and support units. An elaborate lunch table would be laid for them, with four courses, red and white wine, and cognac toasts offered by the senior French officer present. When Simpson and his colleagues at last emerged into the afternoon sun, it would be too late to visit the outlying posts.35
In Europe, the administration sought to bring France firmly into the structure of the fledgling European Defense Community (EDC). Proposed by France’s René Pleven in response to Washington’s desire for the rearmament of West Germany, the plan called for a common European army, under joint control, that would help counter the Soviet threat while not re-creating a sovereign German army. U.S. analysts fully understood that the ultimate ratification of the EDC treaty depended inordinately on attitudes in the house of its originator—where Charles de Gaulle, always a force to be reckoned with,
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Thus it can be said of the spring of 1952: It was a turning point that didn’t turn. French attitudes were undergoing a sea change, as countless observers noted. The war had never been popular, but now, for the first time, one could speak of genuine antiwar agitation.
Yet the Truman administration insisted on pressing forward. De Lattre might be dead, but the example of his “brilliant” offensive strategy lived on and had to be followed.
A major U.S. policy document, NSC-124, approved by Truman on June 25, summarized the administration’s position. The United States, it declared, would oppose negotiations leading to a French withdrawal. Should Paris nevertheless prefer such a course, the United States would seek maximum support from her allies for collective action, including the possibility of air and naval support for the defense of Indochina. Should China intervene, her lines of communication should be interdicted and a naval blockade of the Chinese coast imposed. If these “minimum” measures proved insufficient, the United
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The Viet Minh commander’s main concern was the coming fall campaign. Having suffered bloody failures in the delta, he looked for more favorable terrain. He had his eye on the Tai highlands, an almost inaccessible area of mountain gorges, grass-cloaked plateaus, and dense jungle in northwestern Tonkin along the border with Laos. Although far from the delta, these uplands, covering an area the size of Vermont, were dotted with small French posts, and the Viet Minh had thus far failed to generate support for their cause among the roughly three hundred thousand Tai tribal inhabitants. Large-scale
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Ho Chi Minh secretly visited Beijing. He and Mao agreed on a two-stage strategy, whereby Viet Minh forces would focus first on the border region and the “liberation” of Laos, then on moving southward to increase pressure on the Red River Delta.
“We lived on rubbish—fish heads and rice,” recalled one legionnaire. “We were parachuted in some food once, and we could see that the tins had been painted over. A friend got a hold of a tin and made a hole in it with his bayonet. A sort of green mist flew out. [I] scraped off this painted layer … [underneath] it said in French, ‘For Arab troops, 1928.’
There were the fearsome tigers of lore, often heard if not often encountered, and poisonous snakes and scorpions. Stinging insects of various kinds were a constant menace, as were bloodsucking leeches and burrowing ticks. And there were rats, big and savage, that could find their way even into a jungle fort’s bunkhouse to bite through a sleeping soldier’s boot into his foot.
We had these collapsible ampoules and we used to stick them in a chap’s cheek. You gave them an overdose if they’d got their legs blown off—you’re 300km from anywhere—what are you going to do? The chap would be covered in ants in a moment.”
No less than their European foes, the Viet Minh forces were vulnerable to disease—to malaria, dysentery, cholera, and typhoid—which, if it did not kill them, could leave them incapacitated for weeks or months, and could spread from one unit to another.
More portentously, in Salan’s eyes, the theory of the air-ground base appeared to have been vindicated. Na San, it would turn out, was a dress rehearsal for a bigger battle to come.
What had they gained in exchange for this sacrifice? Precious little. The leadership had promised to give them land but had put off implementing land reform, out of fear of alienating the middle class and thereby disrupting the national unity essential to ultimate success in the war effort. With discontent on the rise, the Viet Minh now asked landowners to drastically reduce rents so that tenant farmers could keep a greater percentage of crops and live better.
About the same time, Dulles informed French leaders that the president saw Vietnam and Korea as parts of a single front, and that this distinguished the new administration from its predecessor. Late that month, in his record of a conversation with Eisenhower, Dulles wrote that Indochina was probably the administration’s top priority in foreign policy, because unlike Korea its loss could not be localized “but would spread throughout Asia and Europe.”17 By the time the secretary spoke those words, more than 139,000 metric tons of U.S. equipment had been delivered to the French, including some
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But they also worried about the new administration’s aggressiveness on Indochina and concurred that there could be no thought of increasing the French war effort significantly, no matter how hard the Americans pressed.20
In Eisenhower’s judgment, the fall of Laos would be no less disastrous than the fall of Vietnam, and probably more so, for Communist control of Laos would permit a hostile drive west as well as south. “If Laos were lost,” he warned the National Security Council, the United States would “likely lose the rest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. The gateway to India, Burma, and Thailand would be open.”
Only two developments, he said, would really save the situation. The first was an official declaration from the Paris government guaranteeing the independence of the Associated States as soon as the war was concluded. The second was a strong and capable new military commander who would accept battle, not shy away from it.
He was frustrated by his government’s dependence on Washington and by the Eisenhower administration’s insistence on a military solution in Indochina at the same time it sought a political settlement in Korea.
The internationalization of the war, which had looked like such a good idea in 1949–50, when Paris leaders worked so hard to secure allied and especially American backing, had become a crushing burden from which there seemed no real relief.
The same week the National Security Council approved NSC-149/2, which suggested the possibility of direct American intervention in Indochina in the event of Chinese aggression or, generally, a “basic change” in the situation.
The Paris government’s failure to consult with him or his ministers prior to the decision was inexcusable, Tam charged, and it suggested that the whole concept of the French Union should be reexamined.
