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

by Fredrik Logevall

Several more weeks would be taken to get everything into place, to study the French defenses more thoroughly, and to make sure not a single ingredient for victory had been left out. Nothing would be left to chance. The orange would be peeled by hand, slowly.

“we strictly followed [the] fundamental principle of the conduct of a revolutionary war; strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if it is not, then don’t strike.”38

it seems impossible in hindsight to argue against the veteran commander’s reasoning.

Sending U.S. ground forces seemed out of the question, at least in the president’s mind; he told an NSC meeting on January 8 that he could not imagine putting American troops anywhere in Southeast Asia, except perhaps in Malaya, in his mind a crucial link in America’s defensive perimeter.

The group’s charge included consideration of committing U.S. ground forces or airpower to Indochina, and it was instructed to proceed from the assumption that a defeat in Indochina would be a major blow to American national security.

“But we can’t get anywhere in Asia by just sitting here in Washington doing nothing. My God, we must not lose Asia. We’ve got to look this thing in the face.”

Bidault, at once insistent on negotiations and tempted by his dream of making China cease aiding the Viet Minh as the price of her participation, signed on as well and won approval for his preferred venue: Geneva.

On February 18, the Berlin conference agreed that “the problem of restoring peace in Indochina will also be discussed at the Conference [on the Korean question], to which representatives of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Chinese People’s Republic and other interested states will be invited.”

Dulles was the tough one to crack,

To Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in executive session, he was blunt: Either the conference proposal would be accepted, or “our influence would have been zero in France, both in relation to Indochina and in relation to the EDC.”

This was going too far. Dulles had not changed his mind regarding the stakes in Vietnam, and he was nowhere near seeking a “negotiated way out.”

Upon his return to Washington, Dulles went on the offensive, insisting before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 24 that he had had no option at Berlin but to agree to include Indochina in the upcoming conference, lest the Laniel government fall.

Certainly the evidentiary record shows plenty of warning signs for the French prior to the February 18 announcement and plenty of French official optimism afterward. But it also shows that DRV leaders did in fact make battlefield decisions in late February and in March with Geneva firmly in mind.

Just as Dulles anticipated, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues wanted to be in the best possible military position when the diplomats descended on the Swiss lakeside city.

He had set out to determine if time was on the side of France or the Viet Minh, and everything he saw indicated the latter.

Beijing’s aid to the DRV was growing each day and would present more and more problems.

As for the Bao Dai government, it inspired little support among ordinary Vietnamese.

Just as the French had always anticipated, the battle had begun when it was still light enough for Viet Minh artillery to find its targets, but too late for Bearcat fighters based at Dien Bien Phu to intervene effectively. For many days, moreover, enemy movements had made clear that Béatrice and Gabrielle would be the initial targets.

What de Castries and his subordinates did not know, however, was the full extent of enemy preparations. Since that crushing disappointment seven weeks earlier, when their commander in chief had canceled the attack mere hours before it was set to start, Viet Minh soldiers and porters had been hard at work, day after bruising day. General Giap ordered that artillery positions be better prepared, that more ammunition and supplies be on hand, and that overwhelming supremacy in men and firepower be established; only then would the operation commence. Huge effort was expended installing 75mm and 105mm guns in casements sunk into the forward slope of the hills surrounding the basin. It was riskier than the conventional deployment on the reverse slope, but it promised a bigger payoff: The gunners would be able to fire “down the tube” at the French targets.

To draw enemy fire and air attacks, dummy guns were built and positioned.

Giap ordered the digging of a vast trench system around the camp.

Anxious to reduce the enemy’s air capabilities at the source, Giap ordered daring commando raids on French airfields in the Red River Delta.

In early February, a handful of Viet Minh soldiers crawled through the drainage pipes undetected and entered the Do Son air base south of Haiphong, where they proceeded under the cover of darkness to destroy five Dakotas and one hundred thousand liters

February 20, after some American air force technicians had arrived at the base (part of the two-hundred-man contingent authorized by Eisenhower in late January), it was discovered that infiltrators had con...

On March 4, commandos entered Gia Lam air base and placed gasoline satchels wired with explosives under ten Dakotas, destroying all of them. Despite elaborate defenses a...

Three days after that, Viet Minh units destroyed four B-26 bombers and six Morane spotter planes at Cat Bi airfield, home to another c...

On March 10, Viet Minh guns shelled the Dien Bien Phu airstrip for the first time, and on the twelfth, the eve of the attack, a handful of commandos slipped past the garrison’s defenses to destroy some of the steel grilling of the airstrip—and, while the...

Giap’s attack plan involved three phases. In the first phase, the outlying posts of Béatrice, Gabrielle, and Anne-Marie would be overrun. Viet Minh forces would then close in on the main positions crowded around the airstrip and the camp’s headquarters. The final phase would involve an attack on whatever remained, including the other outlying strong-point, Isabelle in the south.

Nothing was left to chance. “We had observed everything and made a minute study of the terrain several nights before the attack, using models too,” a Viet Minh officer later told a French interviewer. “Every evening, we came up and took the opportunity to cut barbed wire and remove mines. Our jumping-off point was moved up to only two hundred yards from the peaks of Béatrice, and to our surprise your artillery didn’t know where we were. Finally, some Tai deserters had given us a lot of information.”54

“We’re done for,” the artillery chief murmured. “I’ve told de Castries he must put a stop to it all. We’re heading for a massacre, and it’s my fault.”

Piroth slipped away to his dugout. Being one-armed, he could not charge his pistol. He lay down on his cot, pulled the pin from a grenade with his teeth, and clutched it to his chest.

Giap had his own problems, the high number of battlefield dead being only one. His ammunition was running low, as was medicine for the wounded. His units had only one full-fledged surgeon, Dr. Ton That Tung, who with his team of six assistants had responsibility for some fifty thousand men.

Eisenhower was unequivocal. “The collapse of Indochina,” he shot back, “would produce a chain reaction which would result in the fall of all Southeast Asia to the Communists.”

necessary to contemplate new measures to prevent it. Accordingly, the president went on, “this might be the moment to explore with the Congress what support could be anticipated in the event that it seemed desirable to intervene in Indochina.” Congress, he declared, was the key: Lawmakers “would have to be in on any move by the United States to intervene in Indochina. It was simply academic to think otherwise.”

he grasped the implications. The president of the United States had just said that the fall of Indochina would be a calamitous development and that he was contemplating expanded U.S. involvement to keep this from occurring.

According to Richard Rovere in The New Yorker, Dulles had undertaken “one of the boldest campaigns of political suasion ever undertaken by an American statesman,” in which congressmen, journalists, and television personalities of all stripes were being “rounded up in droves and escorted to lectures and briefings” on the crucial importance of achieving victory in Vietnam.

The secretary of state, Rovere wrote, was represented in the briefings as believing that “we should not flinch at doing anything that is needed to prevent a Communist victory,” including, if necessary, committing American ground forces.

Explicit congressional authorization would be required. Eisenhower had made that clear. He had only slim majorities in both houses, after all (48–47–1 in the Senate, 221–213–1 in the House), and he could scarcely depend on Republicans to remain unified.

Remembering well the GOP’s attacks on Truman for his unilateral decision to send American troops to Korea in 1950, some now said they were not eager to rally to the aid of a Republican president contemplating a similar move.

Vice President Nixon, who attended, recorded in his diary that Ike referred to the situation at Dien Bien Phu as desperate, so much so that he would consider the use of a diversionary tactic such as a landing by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces on China’s Hainan Island or a naval blockade of the Chinese mainland.

the speech stressed the importance of Indochina to American interests and raised the prospect of military action to “save” it.

Dulles called for a coalition of nations composed of the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Associated States that would pledge collectively to defend Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia against aggression.

This was United Action, and its ambitions were, it seemed, enormous: to deny any Viet Minh takeover in Indochina—whether

The speech was carefully crafted—it went through twenty-one drafts—to sound menacing while remaining vague on specifics; as one Dulles deputy recalled, it did not actually commit “anyone to anything.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the two men had made up their minds: All of Indochina would have to be held, with direct American intervention if necessary.

Underlying Ridgway’s opposition, and that of his subordinates in army intelligence, was a deeply skeptical view of what the use of airpower could accomplish in Vietnam.

To Ridgway, recent history showed clearly that airpower alone could not effectively interdict lines of communication if the adversary had the resources and the motivation to keep supplies moving, as the Viet Minh clearly had. The Italian campaign in World War II had demonstrated this, as had Korea.

Eisenhower, after affirming his “complete agreement” with Dulles on Indochina policy, said he “could conceive of no greater disadvantage to America” than to send U.S. forces “in great numbers around the world, meeting each little situation as it arises.”

Two days earlier, on March 30, General Vo Nguyen Giap had launched the second phase of his attack plan on Dien Bien Phu, and the reports coming into the White House were ominous: The garrison had suffered withering blows in two nights of savage fighting, much of it at strongpoints Eliane and Dominique.

Dulles presented a draft congressional resolution on Indochina that he hoped to show lawmakers at what now shaped up to be a key session the following day.