Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Stackpole Military History Series)

by Bernard B. Fall

Georges Clemenceau is reputed to have said (and perhaps he did) that war was too important to be left to soldiers. Nobody seems to have come forward with the obvious corollary, which is that peace is too precious to be left to politicians.

For war is itself a political act. Politics cannot be separated from war, nor war from politics. Political considerations do not cease abruptly with the onset of war, and military considerations can never be far from the politician's mind, even in times of peace.

The United States Army was no more indoctrinated and trained for that sort of war than were the French in Indochina. What it calls for is individual stamina and fortitude, for the understanding and acceptance of battlefield conditions almost unimaginable in their demands on human endurance, for recognition in doctrine that these requirements exist and that they may very well have to be met.

It is true enough that the U.S. Army is training specialists in counter-insurgency warfare to pass on their skills to indigenous forces. But along with this effort goes a great and perhaps mistaken dependence on the newer tools of mechanized battle. Could it be that one American, indoctrinated in the political aspects of insurgency, would outweigh on the scales of war, a platoon of fighting men flying blindly into the jungle?

This nation is foremost in providing its troops with the mechanical means of war. What is needed now, in the light of France's failure in Indochina, is a search for stout legs, stout hearts, fertile brains, and an underst...

As a battlefield, Indochina is unlike any other fought over by Western forces previously, for warfare there assumes the aspect of what the French called "la guerre sans fronts"-a war withou...

the Japanese were as alien to the combat environment and, particularly, to its civilian population, as the Allies were. In fact--and this was true particularly during the last two years of World War II-the sympathies of the population were often with the Allies and against the Japanese.

the French were definitely the "aliens" and the Communist-led Viet-Minh forces could count on the instinctive support of the native population. Where such outright support did not exist, as was true in certain heavily Catholic areas, well-applied terror could insure at least the neutrality of the population in the struggle. As will be seen later, almost nowhere did the French succeed in creating viable anti-guerrilla guerrilla forces, and French tactical intelligence was often faulty because of this Communist-created isolation of the French forces from the population in which it operated.

French Union Forces fought well to the last; Frenchmen as well as Foreign Legionnaires, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians as well as Algerians, Moroccans and Senegalese. Close to 95,000 men, including four generals and 1,300 lieutenants, died on the battlefield or behind the barbed wire of Communist prison camps.

I met many a soldier, French or Asian, who could tell me in his own terms what it was like to be out along the defense perimeter, wet and afraid; and learned how it felt to pry off a few leeches or to struggle with dysentery, for I had had to do it several times myself and hadn't liked it. But after a while it knocked the intellectual superciliousness out of me.

native guerrilla groups had begun operations late in 1944 in the remotest areas of North Viet-Nam and in the neighboring Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Kwang-Si. They were led by two able Communist leaders, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. Ho, under various aliases, had been a Communist since 1920; and Giap, the military "brains" of the group, also had been a Communist since the earliest beginnings of the movement in Indochina.

The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun. The French managed to lose the second round-that of political negotiations-through their own stubbornness and their unwillingness to see the situation as it was: they had been defeated, through their own fault and that of their allies; and they did not have the overwhelming military force needed to make a military test of strength between themselves and the Viet-Minh which would be so obviously hopeless for the latter that they would not attempt it. And France, in 1946, seemed a likely bet for Communist domination herself.

The outbreak of the Indochina war can be traced back to that single, tragic erroneous estimate-which, in some ways, resembles the Communist gamble in Korea, and, in the long run yielded equivalent results: the partition of Viet-Nam in one case, and the continuance of partition in the case of Korea.

For the French, the search for the big set-piece battle in which they could outmaneuver and outgun the enemy, began then. It was to end seven years later, when they found the set-piece battle in a small mountain valley whose English name would be "Seat of the Border County Administration." Its Vietnamese name was Dien Bien Phu.

The guerrilla groups of 1946-1949 had transformed themselves into battalions, then into regiments, and now began to take their final shape as 10,000-man divisions. The first series of five divisions-the Divisions 304, 308, 312, 316, and 320-was created in 1950, soon to be followed by a so-called "351st Heavy Division" of the Soviet artillery division type and composed of two artillery regiments and one combat engineer regiment. The Viet-Minh felt ready to throw the French into the sea.

Giap outlined the Indochina war as consisting of three stages. First was that of the initial retreat of the Viet-Minh forces until they had time to re-train and consolidate. The second phase would begin when the French, failing to destroy the Viet-Minh guerrilla forces, would allow them to re-equip themselves and with the help of the Chinese Communists, to eliminate slowly but surely most of the small French posts in the Viet-Minh base area. The third stage was to be the total destruction of the French troops.

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand,...

The hard fact remained, however, that the Communist troops were not yet ready for the general counter-offensive which was to sweep the French into the sea. On the other hand, the French lacked the necessary cross-country mobility and, for that matter, necessary manpower or airpower to exploit such an unexpected victory as that of Vinh-Yen.

a tremendous explosion shook the whole complex: Viet-Minh "Volunteers of Death" (the Communist version of the Japanese Kamikaze)

But de Lattre realized that this temporary retreat was nothing but a brief respite given him by Giap and his Chinese advisers before new tactics could be devised to cope with the new offensive spirit instilled into the French forces by de Lattre after the disastrous border campaign of 1950, and by the ever-mounting influx of American equipment. In order to take advantage of this temporary stalemate this time, de Lattre decided to strike first and in an unexpected direction: instead of aiming at the enemy's main centers of resistance in the northeast, he struck out across the bend of the Black River and captured the city of Hoa-Binh.

Another important consideration was that of maintaining the allegiance of the Muong mountaineers whose members had so far remained fiercely loyal to the French. Two Muong battalions were fighting on the French side and thousands of Muong tribesmen had taken refuge in the delta. Hoa-Binh was the capital of the Muong tribe and thus constituted a psychological point of attraction of no mean importance.

The next afternoon, all major objectives were in French hands with a minimum of losses and almost no enemy resistance. Faithful to his own methods, Giap had refused combat as soon as he saw that his troops had neither the required numerical superiority nor an adequate route of withdrawal to justify such a stand. The French had stabbed with all their might-and had encountered empty space.

As it turned out, the battle for Hoa-Binh was to become first and foremost a battle for the communications leading to it.

In fact, the battle for the road already had begun while the agony of the Black River line was still going on. The enemy had now occupied the commanding heights around Hoa-Binh itself and possessed an intermittent view of Hoa-Binh airfield which was now and then under enemy fire.

The tactics used by Giap against the forts along Road No. 6 were monotonously identical to those used by him in 1950 against the French border positions, and in December 1951 against the Black River line.

With the carefulness and deliberateness which is the trademark of the Foreign Legionnaire, the whole hill had been fortified with deep trenches, earth bunkers, and well-prepared barbed wire and minefields.

Atop the hill, the men had dug four-man bunkers, with one squad in each platoon constantly manning the parapets. Active day-and-night...

the Viet-Minh had simply followed the patrols back to Xom-Pheo using them as guides through the mine field! Within seconds, the carefully prepared positions of 1st and 2d Platoons were overrun, with the 1st Platoon being practically submerged in its own bunkers before it had a chance to react. At the same time well-prepared mortar fire pinned down 7th Company in its position, preventing it from using the communications trenches to 5th Company. A few seconds later, 4th Platoon was also attacked, thus leaving only 3d Platoon in position to act as a reserve. With incredible speed, indicating that the whole operation had been carefully rehearsed not only on the map and at the sand table but also through individual visual reconnaissance, Viet-Minh assault troops began to mop up the bunkers one by one with concentrated charges of TNT and bangalore torpedoes.

At 0400, with most of their officers and senior NCO's dead or wounded and half the position overrun, the Foreign Legionnaires counterattacked with fixed bayonets and hand grenades. In the savage hand-to-hand combat which ensued, no quarter was given and as dawn rose, the Viet-Minh who had penetrated into the position were being slowly hacked to pieces. They, too, were crack troops, and not a single Viet-Minh withdrew from the position.

It had now become apparent that far from drawing the enemy into a "meat-grinder" operation, the French had been compelled to draw nearly one-third of all their mobile forces available in the Red River delta into an area where those forces became unable to contribute to the mopping-up of enemy guerrillas now infiltrating the vital Red River plain on an increasingly massive scale.

Seen from a long-range viewpoint, however, the French once more had been the heavier losers, for while the Viet-Minh used the battle for the Black River salient as a sort of dress rehearsal for a future show-down battle, the French apparently failed to consider the operation as either a dress rehearsal or as a portent of things to come.

Ironically enough, the name "Hoa-Binh," in Vietnamese, means "Peace."

By March 1952, the French were mounting combined operations involving several mobile groups behind their own lines in order to keep their communications open.

More and more the solidity of the whole French position in the Red River Delta rested on the shoulders of a small group of young energetic colonels whom de Lattre had nicknamed Mare chaux d'Empire-Marshals of the Empire-in remembrance of the group of daring French military leaders whose fast-moving armies held Napoleon's empire together. This was exactly the case with the half-dozen regimental and airborne combat teams commanded by such men as Colonels Vanuxem, de Castries, Kergaravat, Blanckaert, Gilles, and Langlais, who soon became famous for the drive and energy with which they led their mobile groups into battle.

and de Castries, with the bright red field cap of the Spahis, his eternal silk scarf and his reputation as a great ladies' man.

Wasn't there a de Castries in GRD's Dorsai tales?

The Viet-Minh, having seen the possibilities and limitations of French heavy equipment during the battles around the periphery of the Red River delta, now had decided on the final course which was to bring it eventual victory-an attack across the top of the Indochinese peninsula.

In view of the French mastery of the air, the Viet-Minh troops had made a veritable fetish out of camouflage. The greatest pains would be taken even in safe rear areas to camouflage anything which could offer the French a suitable target. This constant emphasis on perfect camouflage, carried out relentlessly even when at rest, made the Communist soldier as well as the civilian population unbeatable masters at the game.

the choice that was finally made consisted in throwing to the enemy as a sacrificial lamb one paratroop battalion which, by a determined rear-guard action, would draw upon itself the main effort of the enemy and would give time to the slower and larger units to fall back on the Black River. There was not the slightest illusion as to the chances of survival of the paratroop battalion; if it lived long enough to accomplish its mission, its expenditure would have been well worth it.

They reached it on October 22, having covered more than forty miles of jungle paths in less than two days at the cost of more than three-fifths of the battalion. They were exhausted, begrimed, suffering from malaria and leech bites, but they were still a. fighting unit. And they had carried with them all their wounded who had not been taken prisoner at Tu-Le Pass.

Of the 110 lightly wounded or unwounded paratroopers who had been taken prisoner at Tu-Le and at the pass on October 20, 1952, only four, including Father Jeandel, survived their ordeal in Viet-Minh prison camps to see the day of their liberation in August 1954.