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April 21 - May 7, 2025
Cogny now insisted that there be no capitulation: “Mon vieux, of course you have to finish the whole thing now. But what you have done until now surely is magnificent. Don’t spoil it by hoisting the white flag. You are going to be submerged [by the enemy], but no surrender, no white flag.”
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.
With Giap now free to shift the bulk of his forces to the delta, would France be forced to give up Tonkin altogether and shift her efforts to maintaining control of Cochin China and southern Annam? Publicly Navarre denied that this was so and that all was lost in the north; privately he understood that the outlook was bleak and getting bleaker.
AS THE FRENCH COMMANDER SUSPECTED, GENERAL GIAP OPTED, even before the smoke had cleared at Dien Bien Phu, to shift the bulk of his fighting force there to the delta.
Giap’s more immediate concern was the disposition of hundreds of enemy wounded at Dien Bien Phu, and thousands of enemy prisoners.
The Viet Minh, lacking the medical or transport facilities to care adequately for the gravely ill either on the spot or their own rear areas, agreed, with a curiously old-fashioned conventionality that they on occasion exhibited, that about nine hundred of the wounded should be evacuated by air from the basin to French hospitals.
now they would be compelled to cover some twelve miles per day for forty days over difficult terrain and during the rainy season. The daily ration of 800 grams of rice, supplemented by the occasional banana or handful of peanuts, provided insufficient nourishment, and the prisoners soon shed whatever body fat they had been able to retain during the siege.
The few doctors among the marchers were kept separated with the other officers and forbidden from giving even minimal care to the French wounded,
Few of the grievously wounded survived more than a day or two, and even many of the technically fit succumbed before the end of the march.
These personal tragedies may rightly be laid at the feet of the Viet Minh. Instances of outright wanton brutality or sadism on the part of the guards were by all accounts very few;
Overall, though, the Viet Minh guards and political officers (can bo) showed scant concern for the survival of the captives and for abiding by the Geneva Conventions, even as more and more of the POWs succumbed to the brutal conditions.
Of the approximately 15,000 men who served in French uniform in the valley of the Nam Youm, fewer than half ever went home, wounded or unwounded.
When on one occasion he unavoidably found himself in close proximity to Zhou Enlai, the Chinese extended his hand in greeting. Dulles turned away.8
France finished, etc. “We have seen the best of our times … and the bond cracked between father and child” (Lear?)
what is clear is that Dulles, on May 11, cabled conditions for U.S. intervention to Ambassador Douglas Dillon in Paris, who waited until after Laniel survived his vote of confidence to deliver them on May 14. The request must have the backing of the National Assembly, Dulles asserted, and must be addressed to other countries as well. The French troop level in Indochina must be maintained, and agreement must be reached on the training of Vietnamese troops and the nature of the command structure for joint intervention. Finally, the secretary of state maintained, the French government was
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he and Dulles, in the last half of May, worked hard to do what Vice President Nixon had advocated on April 29: create an allied coalition without the British.
“I do not think that any adequate thought has been given to the implications of our so-called ‘alliances,’ ” Dulles wrote. “How much should it in fact tie our hands with respect to many areas as to which there is no agreement?” The letter implied that the two men had already discussed the matter the previous week, and Dulles said there might be an important meeting on the subject a few weeks thence, in mid-June, for which he would value Rusk’s input.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Smith seemed to be coming around to the need for some kind of division of the country.
the American press branding partition a sellout—U. S. News & World Report compared “Winston Churchill’s proposal” to Chamberlain allowing partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich, while Time said British leaders “look alarmingly like appeasers”—Smith’s
This was a holding action, and it annoyed Eden, though not as much as what Smith did next: He declared his desire—no doubt with American domestic opinion firmly in mind—to make his reservation public. Eden countered by saying he would not release his own proposal to the press, so that Smith would not feel compelled to announce his reservation. “For some reason or other this apparently annoyed the Americans,” he wrote in his diary, an understatement of the first order. Smith was outraged by what he called, in a cable to Dulles, Eden’s “exhibition of impatience and pique.” Despite the foreign
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“I want you to know that I believe it will be a sad day for Britain and America when Eden becomes Prime Minister. I am convinced, after long association, that he is without moral or intellectual honesty, and his vanity and petulance are not counterbalanced, as in the case of Churchill, by genuine wisdom and great strength of character.”
This is why Australia’s decision to support a political settlement has historical importance: Not long after word of it reached the White House, the Eisenhower administration began to sing a different tune.
The following evening Dulles indicated the administration was inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the war.
If the news from down under was one reason for this apparent change in American thinking, there was also a second: a growing appreciation of just how dire the situation was on the ground in Vietnam. That same weekend witnessed the start of
For Arthur Radford and like-minded members of the American military, such “defeatist” talk was contemptible. During the Washington talks, the admiral continued to press for United Action, continued to insist that the West faced a choice between military intervention and the rapid loss of all of Indochina and perhaps Southeast Asia too, continued to argue that Tonkin was the key to the whole region.
But what if such capitulation and accommodation occurred, or what if the Communists used the failure of the conference as an excuse to try to conquer the whole of the Indochinese peninsula? Robert Bowie, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, articulated precisely that fear
Bowie had not merely asserted that partition served American interests better than allowing the negotiations to fail; he had said the southern half of Vietnam was militarily defensible.
at the time, in mid-June 1954, neither he nor President Eisenhower knew what they wanted.
In soliciting the National Assembly’s support, the veteran Radical deputy didn’t merely proclaim as his first objective a cease-fire in Indochina; he vowed that he would resign within thirty days of his investiture if an agreement had not been reached.
what about Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, which that week had had her own change of leadership, one little noticed at the time but with enormous implications for the future? Buu Loc was out as prime minister, replaced by Ngo Dinh Diem.
“To govern is to choose,” Mendès France had once declared (gouverner, c’est choisir), and he had been withering in his criticism of previous French governments for avoiding the tough decisions on Indochina. Now he would get the chance to follow his dictum.
His rise to the highest political office in the land was at once extraordinary and entirely to be expected. A descendant of Marrano Jews who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition of 1684, Pierre Mendès France was born in Paris in 1907. From an early age, he assumed the wholly secular sense of identity long held by middle-class Jewish families of the Third and Fourth republics, who trusted that an assimilationist but condoning France would satisfy their sense of belonging. Ambitious and brilliant, he had served as the precocious undersecretary of finance in Léon Blum’s second ministry in 1938 and
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An epic encounter it would be. Zhou Enlai, attired not in his usual blue high-collared tunic but in a gray business suit and tie, looked younger and more relaxed than he had in Geneva, and he made an immediate winning impression on Mendès France: “L’homme était impressionnant.”
For one thing, the evidence is strong that senior American policy makers in spring 1954 were at best dimly aware of Ngo Dinh Diem’s existence and credentials.
“All the people below the Secretary and Under Secretary are unanimous that we should intervene with or without the French,” he wrote Philip Bonsal, the director of the State Department’s Office of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs, who was in Geneva. Bonsal answered that the view in Geneva was different. American delegates to the conference doubted that intervention could produce more advantageous results than those to be gained from a negotiated agreement.
The only real answer, Eisenhower and Dulles determined, was to accept the likelihood that part of Vietnam would be lost at Geneva and to plan for the defense of the rest of Indochina and Southeast Asia.
It was a monumental decision, as important as any made by an American administration on Indochina, from Franklin Roosevelt’s to Gerald Ford’s. Its true import would become clear only with time, but even on that day the weight of the secretary of state’s words were hard to miss. The United States would thenceforth take responsibility for defending most of Indochina, he told the lawmakers, and without “the taint of French colonialism.”
wasn’t it potentially contradictory to speak of the possibility of national reunification while also ruling out a Communist takeover? What if Ho Chi Minh won the national elections? To Mendès France and Chauvel it seemed clear that Washington was still hedging its bets,
As Chauvel said, the ultimate success of the conference depended on the Soviets and Chinese applying pressure on the Viet Minh while the United States did the same to Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam. He was not willing to wager money that either would happen.
Vo Nguyen Giap sketching out the big picture. Dien Bien Phu had represented a colossal defeat for France, he began, but she was far from defeated. She retained a superiority in numbers—some 470,000 troops, roughly half of them Vietnamese, versus 310,000 on the Viet Minh side—as well as control of Vietnam’s major cities (Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, Tourane [Da Nang]).
In the best-case scenario, Giap replied, full victory could be achieved in two to three years. Worst case? Three to five years.
lesson: “The key to the Korea issue lay in U.S. intervention. It was completely beyond our expectation that the [American] reinforcement would arrive so quickly.… If there had not been U.S. intervention, the Korean People’s Army would have been able to drive Syngman Rhee’s [troops] into the ocean.”
“The central issue,” Zhou told Ho, is “to prevent America’s intervention” and “to achieve a peaceful settlement.”
Ho Chi Minh and General Secretary Truong Chinh took turns articulating the need for an early political settlement so as to prevent a military intervention by the United States, now the “main and direct enemy” of Vietnam.
They accordingly reminded their colleagues that France would retain control of a large part of the country, and that people living in this area might be confused, alienated, and vulnerable to enemy manipulations.
For the Chinese as well as the Viet Minh, clearly, one thing mattered most of all: keeping the United States
THE FINAL PHASE OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE BEGAN ON JULY 10, when Pierre Mendès France arrived to take charge of the French delegation.
In the first week of July, the administration faced a drumbeat of domestic criticism for seemingly cooperating in what would amount to a Communist victory parade in Geneva—“another Munich,” a “second Yalta.”
Knowland urged that neither Dulles nor Smith should return to Geneva. Vice President Richard Nixon agreed, as did Senate minority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson,
“But do you know,” replied Mendès France in English, “that the absence of an American minister in Geneva delights the delegations from the East?
