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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Max Hastings 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photograph © AP Photo/Art Greenspoon

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Source ISBN: 9780008132989

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008133009

Version: 2018-09-24

Dedication

For my dear friend Rick Atkinson, who chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of American armies with an elegance, penetration and human sympathy that his fellow-historians strive to match.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Epigraph

Introduction

Note on Styles Adopted in the Text

Glossary

1 Beauty and Many Beasts

1 CLINGING TO AN EMPIRE

2 THE VIETMINH MARCH

2 The ‘Dirty War’

1 STEAMROLLER TYPES

2 WASHINGTON PICKS UP THE TAB

3 PEASANTS

3 The Fortress That Never Was

1 WAITING FOR GIAP

2 DISASTER BECKONS

4 Bloody Footprints

1 QUIT – OR BOMB?

2 ‘A TRIUMPH OF THE WILL’

3 GENEVA

5 The Twin Tyrannies

1 ‘A REGIME OF TERROR’

2 ‘THE ONLY BOY WE GOT’

3 BOOM TIME

4 A RECALL TO ARMS

6 Some of the Way With JFK

1 ‘THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE THEIR COUNTRY IF …’

2 McNAMARA’S MONARCHY

3 LE DUAN RAISES HIS STAKE

7 1963: Coffins for Two Presidents

1 SMALL BATTLE, BIG STORY: AP BAC

2 THE BUDDHISTS REVOLT

3 KILLING TIME

8 The Maze

1 ‘ENOUGH WAR FOR EVERYBODY’

2 DODGING DECISIONS

9 Into the Gulf

1 LIES

2 HAWKS ASCENDANT

10 ‘We Are Puzzled About How to Proceed’

1 DOWN THE TRAIL

2 COMMITTAL

11 The Escalator

1 ‘BOTTOM OF THE BARREL’

2 NEW PEOPLE, NEW WAR

12 ‘Trying to Grab Smoke’

1 WARRIORS AND WATER-SKIERS

2 UNFRIENDLY FIRE

3 TRAPS AND TRAIL DUST

13 Graft and Peppermint Oil

1 STEALING

2 RULING

3 GURUS

14 Rolling Thunder

1 STONE AGE, MISSILE AGE

2 ‘UP NORTH’

15 Taking the Pain

1 BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES

2 FRIENDS

16 Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy

1 PEACENIKS

2 WARNIKS

3 FIELDCRAFT

4 GUNS

17 Our Guys, Their Guys: the Vietnamese War

1 SONG QUA NGAY – ‘LET’S JUST GET THROUGH THE DAY’

2 FIGHTERS

3 SAIGON SOLDIERS

18 Tet

1 PRELUDE

2 FUGUE

3 A SYMBOLIC HUMILIATION

19 The Giant Reels

1 FIGHTING BACK

2 SURRENDER OF A PRESIDENT

20 Continuous Replay

1 DYING

2 TALKING

21 Nixon’s Inheritance

1 A CRUMBLING ARMY

2 AUSSIES AND KIWIS

3 GODS

4 VIETNAMISATION

22 Losing by Instalments

1 THE FISHHOOK AND THE PARROT’S BEAK

2 COUNTER-TERROR

3 LAM SON 719

23 Collateral Damage

1 MARY ANN

2 THE ‘GOAT’

3 ‘LET’S GO HOME’

24 The Biggest Battle

1 LE DUAN FORCES THE PACE

2 THE STORM BREAKS

3 AN EMPTY VICTORY

25 Big Ugly Fat Fellers

1 ‘IT WILL ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY, WIPE OUT McGOVERN’

2 ‘WE’LL BOMB THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF THEM’

26 A Kiss Before Dying

1 THE PRISONER

2 ‘PEACE’

3 WAR OF THE FLAGS

27 The Last Act

1 INVASION

2 ‘AH, MY COUNTRY, MY POOR COUNTRY’

28 Afterwards

1 VENGEANCE

2 THE AUDIT OF WAR

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

Also by Max Hastings

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Tonkin, 1896: entrance to the pagoda of the Great Buddha. (© BnF, département des Cartes et Plans, Société de géographie, Sg XCm 707)

Tonkin, 1908: French officers with the heads of Vietnamese suspected of poisoning French troops. (Apic/Getty Images)

1945: victims of the catastrophic famine that swept northern Vietnam. (Special Collections & University Archives Department, University of Central Florida Libraries, Orlando, Florida)

OSS officers with Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh.

French troops with a Vietminh suspect. (Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images)

French troops bring in a casualty. (©Daniel Camus/ECPAD/Défense)

Dienbienphu, November 1953. (Keystone/Staff)

Giap and Ho. (Collection Jean-Claude LABBE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Cogny, de Castries and Navarre. (Ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images)

French officers escort a Vietminh unit into their lines following the July 1954 ceasefire. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Lodge and Diem. (Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Nguyen Thuy Nga and Le Duan.

Mao Zedong and Le Duc Tho. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Lou Conein.

Gen. Max Taylor and Gen. Paul Harkins. (Larry Burrows/Getty Images)

The Ho Chi Minh Trail. (© Le Minh Truong/Another Vietnam)

Hueys. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Special forces camp at Plei Me under Vietcong assault in 1965. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Walt Boomer. (Courtesy of Walter Boomer)

Tim O’Brien. (Courtesy of Tim O’Brien)

John Paul Vann and Doug Ramsey. (Courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

Bob Kerrey.

Leon Gouré. (State Archives of Florida)

Australian private Tom Blackhurst. (© Australian War Memorial C36943)

Mike Eiland. (Courtesy of Mike Eiland)

Classic combat image by Don McCullin. (© Don McCullin)

Doan Phuong Hai.

Bao Ninh. (© 1993 The Sorrow of War)

Nguyen Cong Luan.

Truong Nhu Tang.

1st Air Cav at An Thi. (AP/Shutterstock)

Maxwell Taylor and William Westmoreland. (Silverwell Films)

Duong Van Mai. (Courtesy of Duong Van Mai Elliott)

Nguyen Thi Chinh. (Courtesy of Kieu Chinh)

Vietcong doctor Dang Thuy Tram. (Courtesy of Dang Thuy Tram)

Body count. (Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Dan Hickman. (Courtesy of Dan Hickman)

Jeff Anthony. (Courtesy of Jeff Anthony)

Bob Nelson. (Courtesy of Bob Nelson)

David Rogers. (Courtesy of David Rogers)

A US Marine carries an injured woman to safety. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Hue 1968: Marine officer Myron Harrington with British photographer Don McCullin. (Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)

Gen. Creighton Abrams. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

A bonze immolates himself on a Saigon street in 1965. (Malcolm Brown/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Vietcong prisoner during Tet 1968. (Eddie Adams/AP/Shutterstock)

Children flee a 1972 napalm strike. (Nick Ut/AP/Shutterstock)

New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury with Pham Van Dong, 1966. (Black and White Photograph of Harrison Salisbury and Pham Van Dong, Hanoi, 1966–67. MS#1509, Box 210, Folder 23, Harrison E. Salisbury Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York)

North Vietnamese salvage wreckage from a downed US aircraft. (© Doan Cong Tinh/Another Vietnam)

Dean Rusk, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara. (Bill Allen/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

Lyndon Johnson harangues journalists, including the author, in the White House cabinet room, January 1968. (Author’s collection)

Henry Kissinger, Nguyen Cao Ky, Ellsworth Bunker, Nguyen Van Thieu and Richard Nixon, 1969. (VA004679, Douglas Pike Photograph Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University)

Bill Weise after being wounded at Daido, May 1968. (Courtesy of William Weise)

Marines attack at Daido. (Courtesy of William Weise)

Jim Livingston. (Courtesy of James E. Livingston)

Staged shot of North Vietnamese troops. (© Hoang Mai/Another Vietnam)

Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan. (© Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos)

Frank Snepp. (Courtesy of Frank Snepp)

Catherine Anne Warnes.

Gen. Van Tien Dung. (AP Photo/Vietnam News Agency/REX/Shutterstock)

Doug Ramsey at his 1973 release after seven years in Vietcong hands. (Courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

Fugitives during the April 1975 collapse of the South Vietnamese army. (Anonymous/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

ARVN defenders of Saigon, 1975. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

North Vietnamese troops approach Saigon. (Hervé GLOAGUEN/Getty Images)

ARVN captives attend a reindoctrination session. (© Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos)

Boat people. (Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 428-N-1175389)

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

Maps

French Indochina

Dienbienphu, 1954

Partitioned Vietnam

South Vietnam’s provinces and main towns

The Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Tet offensive, 1968

Hue

Daido, 30 April–2 May 1968

Operation Linebacker, 1972

January 1973: rival areas of control

The 1975 North Vietnamese offensive: main thrusts

Epigraph

‘Asia will have a long-deferred revenge on her arrogant younger sister’

Dean Inge, 1928

‘Every military fact is also a social and political fact’

Antonio Gramsci

‘Contains mature content strong language and graphic violence: Viewer discretion is advised’

Screen warning introducing the 2017 PBS Burns-Novick series The Vietnam War

Introduction

The struggle for Vietnam, a poor South-East Asian country the size of California, comprising mountains, jungles and paddies which enchant twenty-first-century tourists but were uncongenial to twentieth-century Western warriors, lasted three decades and cost between two and three million lives. In the eyes of the world, and even those of the communists’ Chinese and Soviet armourers, for the first twenty years it was a marginal affair. During its last phase, however, the war seized the imagination, roused the dismay and indeed revulsion of hundreds of millions of Western people, while destroying one US president and contributing to the downfall of a second. In the wave of youthful protest against authority which swept many countries in the 1960s, rejection of old sexual morality and an enthusiasm for the joys of marijuana and LSD became conflated with lunges against capitalism and imperialism, of which Vietnam appeared an exceptionally ugly manifestation. Moreover, many older Americans who lacked sympathy for any of those causes came to oppose the war because it was revealed as the fount of systematic deceits by their own government, and also seemed doomed to fail.

The 1975 fall of Saigon represented a humiliation for the planet’s most powerful nation: peasant revolutionaries had prevailed over American will, wealth and hardware. The silhouetted stairway up which on the evening of 29 April fugitives ascended to a helicopter, as if towards Calvary, secured a place among the symbolic images of that era. Vietnam exercised greater cultural influence upon its times than has any other conflict since 1945.

The merits of rival causes are never absolute. Even in the Second World War, the Western allied struggle against fascism was compromised by its reliance upon the tyranny of Stalin to pay most of the blood price for destroying the tyranny of Hitler. Only simpletons of the political right and left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue. The authors of all the authoritative works about the conflict are American or French. More than a few of the former write as if it was their own nation’s story. Yet this was predominantly an Asian tragedy, upon which a US nightmare was overlaid: around forty Vietnamese perished for every American.

Although my narrative is chronological, I have not attempted to chronicle or even mention every action, but instead to capture the nature of Vietnam’s experience through three decades. As in all my books, while relating the political and strategic tale I also try to answer the question: ‘What was the war like?’ – for Northern sappers, Mekong delta peasants, Huey pilots from Peoria, grunts from Sioux Falls, air defence advisers from Leningrad, Chinese railway workers, bar girls in Saigon.

I was born in 1945. As a youthful correspondent, I lived for almost two years in America, and later repeatedly visited Indochina. My understanding was so meagre, my perceptions so callow, that in the text that follows I shall not allude to personal experiences, instead summarising them here. In 1967–68 I travelled widely in the US, first on a journalistic study fellowship and latterly as a reporter during the presidential election campaign. I had brief encounters with many of the major players, including Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Eugene McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan … and Harrison Salisbury, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez.

In January 1968, I was among a group of foreign journalists who visited the White House. Seated in the cabinet room, we were harangued for forty minutes by President Lyndon Johnson about his commitment to Vietnam, weeks before he stunned the American people by announcing that he would not run for re-election. That morning his personality seemed no less formidable for being close to the caricature. ‘Some of you like blondes, some of you like redheads, and some of you maybe don’t like women at all,’ he declared in that deadweight drawl, gesticulating constantly to emphasise his points and making broad pencil strokes on a notepad before him. ‘I’m here to tell you what kind I like. I’m prepared to meet Ho Chi Minh any time in a nice hotel with nice food and we can sit down and talk to settle this thing.’

After making his pitch this big man left the room abruptly, without taking questions, merely loosing a Parthian shaft at anti-war columnist Walter Lippmann. We had risen and were gathering our notes, when suddenly the president put his head around the door again. ‘Now, before y’all go,’ he said almost coyly, ‘I want to ask: do any of you feel any different from anything you had read or heard about me before you came?’ We were stunned into inarticulacy by this glimpse of Johnson’s awesome vulnerability.

In 1970, I presented a series of reports for BBC TV’s 24 Hours programme from Cambodia and Vietnam, then returned in the following year to do more of the same, interviewing President Nguyen Van Thieu and also visiting Laos. Among other themes of those films, I accompanied men of the US 23rd Division on a sweep in the Hiep Duc valley, flew in a Vietnamese Skyraider on a strafing mission, and reported on the battle for Firebase 6 in the Central Highlands. Later that year, in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People I shook the hand of Zhou Enlai. In 1973 and 1974 I travelled again in Vietnam, and in 1975 reported the final campaigns, including the shambles of Danang just before its fall, later from around Saigon.

I intended to remain among the handful of correspondents covering the North Vietnamese takeover. On the afternoon of the final day, however, I lost my nerve, forced a path through the mob of terrified Vietnamese around the US embassy, and scrambled over its wall with some assistance from the Marine defenders. A few hours later I was evacuated in a Jolly Green Giant to the USS Midway.

The above episodes* yielded immature journalism, but today lend personal colouring to my descriptions below of the sweat-soaked, dust-clinging, bomb-happy ‘boondocks’, as Vietnamese, French and American fighters knew them. In later years I met Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and other giants of the Vietnam era. Arthur Schlesinger became a friend.

All wars are different, and yet the same. A myth has grown up, in the US at least, that Vietnam inflicted unique horrors on its participants, attested in countless veterans’ anguished gropings into poetry. Yet anyone who lived through Rome’s Carthaginian struggles, the Thirty Years War in Europe, Napoleon’s campaign in Russia or the 1916 Somme battles would mock the notion that Indochina offered qualitatively worse experiences. The violence that men inflicted with spears and swords, or unleashed on innocents in the path of armies, was as ghastly in the second century AD as in the twentieth. An attacker set afire by burning oil poured from the walls of a medieval city suffered as terribly as one who fell victim to napalm. Looting, rape, black markets, casual violence towards civilians and prisoners, are inseparable from all conflicts. The 1939–45 cities of Europe hosted as many girls for sale as later did Saigon – recall London’s ‘Piccadilly commandos’. In times gone by, however, little was said to folks back home about such sordid manifestations. Film footage authorised for public screening excluded images that were deemed demoralising, because explicit.

In the new revelatory mood of the 1960s, however, suddenly the world witnessed nightly on prime-time TV the excesses and uglinesses perpetrated by US and South Vietnamese forces. Among images that inflicted special injury upon American purposes were that of Saigon’s police chief shooting a Vietcong prisoner during the 1968 Tet offensive; and of a screaming child, running naked in her agony after falling victim to a 1972 napalm strike. Hanoi released no comparable snapshots of cadres executing indigenous opponents by burying them alive, nor of Vietcong being mown down in unsuccessful assaults. Instead, it broadcast only heroic narratives, together with heart-rending footage of devastation inflicted by capitalist air power. The visual contrast between the war-making of a superpower, deploying diabolical technology symbolised by the B-52 bomber, and that of peasants clad in coolie hats or pith helmets, relying for mobility upon sandals and bicycles, conferred a towering propaganda advantage on the communists. In the eyes of many young Western people, Ho Chi Minh’s ‘freedom fighters’ became imbued with a romantic glow. It seems quite mistaken to suggest, as did some hawks fifty years ago, that the media lost the war for the United States. But TV and press coverage made it impossible for Westerners either to ignore the human cost or to deny the military blunderings.

Hours before I myself, aged twenty-four, flew to Saigon for the first time, I sought advice from Nicholas Tomalin, a British Sunday Times reporter. He gave me the address of the Indian bookshop on Tu-do Street which offered the best rate for changing dollars on the black market. Then he said, ‘Just remember – they lie, they lie, they lie.’ He meant the US command, of course, and he was right. Like many other Western writers then and since, however, Nick ignored the important point that Hanoi did the same. This does not render acceptable the deceits perpetrated by MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and JUSPAO (Joint US Public Affairs Office), but it provides a context often absent from judgements upon the so-called ‘credibility gap’.

Moreover, although American and South Vietnamese spokesmen peddled fantasies, MACV seldom barred reporters from getting out there and seeing for ourselves. In a fashion unmatched in any conflict before or since, free passage was accorded on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to journalists and photographers, many fiercely hostile to their carrier’s cause. Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.

In modern Vietnam collectivist economic policies have been largely discarded, yet the legitimacy of its autocratic government derives solely from its victory in 1975. Thus, no stain is permitted to besmirch that narrative: few survivors feel able to speak freely about what took place. This opacity has been amazingly successful in defining the terms in which Western as well as Asian writers address the war. While it is unlikely that US archives still conceal important secrets, many must be locked in Hanoi’s files. Liberal America has adopted an almost masochistic attitude, which has distorted the historiography as surely as do jingoistic works by conservative revisionists. I recently asked one of the most celebrated correspondents of the war era, ‘If peace demonstrations had been permitted in Hanoi, how many people would have shown up?’ He replied unhesitatingly, ‘None. The North was 100 per cent behind the struggle.’

This seems heroically naïve: most normal human beings crave escape from an experience that is inflicting grief and hardship on themselves and loved ones. Many of those in the West who opposed the war made a well-founded assessment that the US was doing something unlikely to succeed, employing grievously haphazard violence. Some then went a step further, adopting a view that if their own nation had embraced a bad cause, the other side’s must be a good one. Yet the Hanoi politburo and National Liberation Front caused the South Vietnamese people merely to exchange oppression by warlords and landlords in favour of even harsher subjection to disciples of Stalin. Democracy allows voters to remove governments with which they are dissatisfied. Once communist rule has been established, however, no further open ballot is indulged, nor has been under Hanoi’s auspices since 1954.

In conducting its war effort, the Northern politburo enjoyed significant advantages. Its principals were content to pay an awesome price in human life, secure from media or electoral embarrassments. They could suffer repeated failures on the battlefield without risking absolute defeat, because the US had set its face against invading the North. By contrast, when the South lost once, its fate was irreversible. There are significant parallels between the Vietnamese communists’ struggle and the Soviet Union’s 1941–45 war effort: Stalin yoked patriotism, ideology and compulsion in just the fashion emulated by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan a generation later. Beyond peradventure the communists proved more effective warriors than the soldiers of Saigon, but it seems prudent to hesitate before anointing them the good guys in this saga.

Much of the narrative below depicts cruelties and follies, yet within the big canvas many individuals, Vietnamese and American, of all ages and both sexes, military and civilian, behaved decently. I have sought to tell stories of such people, because it is mistaken to allow virtuous endeavour to vanish into the cauldron of bomb blasts, brutalities and betrayals from which most accounts of the war are served up. I decided not to conduct primary political research: US archives have been trawled by scholars for decades; exhaustive accounts exist of the Western participants’ decision-making, notable among them those of Fredrik Logevall. Ken Hughes’ 2015 rendition and analysis of the White House tapes have established an almost incontrovertible record about the thinking and decision-making of Nixon and Kissinger that ended in the January 1973 Paris Accords, and supersedes much of the self-serving narrative presented in the participants’ memoirs. However, I have spent many hours studying testimony in the US Army’s Military Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle, Pa., and the US Marine Corps’ Archive at Quantico, Va. I have also accessed online material from Texas Tech University’s Vietnam War Study Center at Lubbock, and conducted almost a hundred interviews with survivors of all ages and both sexes, American and Vietnamese. Thanks to the indispensable aid of Merle Pribbenow, I have read many thousands of pages of translated Vietnamese memoirs, documents and histories.

Any historian such as myself, publishing a 2018 study of Vietnam, should acknowledge a debt to the recent Burns-Novick TV documentary series, which around the world has reawakened consciousness about this epochal struggle. I hope that my own work conveys something of the enormity of the experience the Vietnamese people endured over three generations, from the consequences of which they remain unliberated to this day.

MAX HASTINGS

Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia

May 2018

* Described, along with other experiences of conflict, in the author’s 2000 memoir Going to the Wars.

Note on Styles Adopted in the Text

Viet Nam is represented thus by its own people; in the interests of accessibility, however, I sustain the Western custom of using Vietnam, just as I render Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Dien Bien Phu, Da Nang and Viet Cong as single words.

The Vietnamese language makes extensive use of tone marks. I omit these in my text, but in the bibliography and index all proper names are appropriately accented.

Vietnamese names are commonly triple-barrelled, with the family name coming first, and I have adhered to this convention. Many Westerners are bewildered by the profusion of Vietnamese called Nguyen, but this is an accident beyond my undoing.

Wherever possible without forfeiting coherence I omit province names, to avoid crowding the narrative with geographical detail.

Translations often yield stilted prose. When quoting from foreign-language documents and memoirs in all my books, I respect Dryden’s admonition that a translator ‘should not lackey behind his author, but mount up beside him’. Thus, I seek to convey Vietnamese and French conversations in colloquial English.

‘African American’ is a modern term; in the Vietnam era, the word ‘black’ was used, and thus I retain it here. I cite an American’s race only where this seems relevant.

Ranks attributed are those held at the time of episodes described.

North and South Vietnam are capitalised thus when referenced as separate states, but lower-cased as north and south when the country was unified pre-1954 and post-1975.

All the combatants measured distances metrically. I nonetheless adopt feet, yards and miles, even in direct quotations.

The colloquial phrase for joining South Vietnam’s communist guerrillas was ‘ra bung’ which meant ‘going out into the marshes’, rather as some French World War II Resistants designated themselves maquisards, because they sought refuge in the maquis wilderness. Vietcong and its abbreviation ‘VC’ were South Vietnamese slang terms, but too familiar not to retain here.

American spellings are used in quoted speech by Americans, or in a conspicuously American context, for instance ‘secretary of defense’.

In thematic sections – notably, about the experience of combat – personal experiences from different periods of the war are sometimes merged, where this does not distort their significance and validity.

Timings of military operations are given by twenty-four-hour clock, but otherwise in accordance with twelve-hour civilian practice.

No attempt seems plausible to set a value upon the South Vietnamese piaster against the US dollar, since chronic inflation and unrealistic official exchange rates render no comparison valid for more than a short period of the wartime era.

Glossary

AFN US Armed Forces Network radio stations

AK-47 Soviet-designed Kalashnikov assault rifle of which a Chinese variant began to be issued in quantity to Vietnamese communist forces in 1965

APC armoured personnel-carrier, most often in Vietnam the tracked M-113

ARVN Army of the Republic of [South] Viet Nam, pronounced as ‘Arvin’

bangalore torpedoes explosive charges packed in sections of metal or bamboo tubing, for breaching wire entanglements

battalion military unit, comprised of 400–1,000 men, normally organised in three/four companies and a headquarters

boonie-rat slang term for US infantry soldier

brigade military headquarters, controlling up to 5,000 men

cadre communist functionary

CAP combat air patrol

cherry green infantryman

chieu hoi literally ‘welcome return’, name of Saigon’s programme to process and rehabilitate defectors from the VC or NVA, often used to categorise the many thousands who joined it – ‘He’s a chieu hoi’

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

Claymore M-18 directional anti-personnel mine, spraying a hundred steel balls across a 40-degree arc, triggered manually or remotely

company military unit, a captain’s command, comprised of 100–180 men, in three or four platoons

CORDS Civilian Operations and Revolutionary [later changed to Rural] Development Support

corps military headquarters directing two/three divisions, commanded by a lieutenant-general

COSVN communist headquarters – the Central Office for South Vietnam, or Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam, usually located near the Cambodian border

CP command post

division military formation, comprised of 8–15,000 men, organised in two/three brigades, commanded by a US major-general or sometimes by a Vietnamese colonel

DMZ the Demilitarized Zone, created near the 17th Parallel by the 1954 Geneva Accords, separating the new North and South Vietnams

dust-off slang for a medevac helicopter

DZ dropping zone for paratroops

ECM electronic counter-measures deployed by US aircraft against North Vietnamese ground defences

FAC forward air controller

flak slang term for anti-aircraft fire

FO [artillery or mortar] forward observer, accompanying infantry

FOB forward operating base

FSB fire support base

GCMA French special forces – Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés

grunt slang term for US infantry soldier

hooch slang term for soldiers’ quarters, alternatively a bunker or hut

ICC International Control Commission, established under the 1954 Geneva Accords with Indian, Polish and Canadian membership to monitor implementation. It persisted, albeit little heeded, until the 1973 Paris Accords, following which it was supplanted by a new

ICCS, International Commission for Control and Supervision, which had a wider membership to address an alleged 18,000 ceasefire violations, but proved equally ineffectual

JCS US Joint Chiefs of Staff

Kit Carson scouts NVA or VC defectors serving with US units

LAW shoulder-fired 66mm Light Anti-tank Weapon, used by US and South Vietnamese forces

LRRP long-range reconnaissance patrol

LZ landing zone for a helicopter assault – a ‘hot’ LZ was one defended by the enemy

M-14 US Army 7.62mm semi-automatic infantry rifle, standard until 1966–68, when progressively withdrawn

M-16 5.56mm rifle, a much lighter automatic weapon than the M-14 that it replaced, of which 1966–68 versions proved prone to jam in action

MACV Military Assistance Command Vietnam, US headquarters in Saigon – pronounced ‘Mac-V’

MEDCAP Medical Civil Action Program – deployment of military medical teams to provide care to the civil population

montagnards originally French term for Vietnamese hill tribes, often abbreviated by Americans to ‘Yards’, who were almost universally anti-communist and often recruited by special forces as irregulars

NLF National Liberation Front: the supposed political coalition – in reality entirely communist-run – movement, established in 1960 to promote and direct Southern resistance to the Saigon government

NSC National Security Council

NVA North Vietnamese Army, a contemporary American usage adopted below, in preference to the more common modern PAVN, People’s Army of Vietnam

platoon element of 30–40 men, normally four to each company, customarily commanded by a lieutenant, seconded by a sergeant

PRC-10, later replaced by PRC-25, US infantry voice radio set, weighing 23.5lb including battery. A company commander might be accompanied by up to three RTOs – operators – each carrying a set tuned to different nets

PRG Provisional Revolutionary Government-in-waiting created by the communists in June 1969 to supersede the NLF. It was initially located at COSVN, then from February 1973 at South Vietnam’s ‘provisional capital’ at Loc Ninh, north of Saigon

RoE Rules of Engagement, whereby US forces were permitted to attack communist forces and installations; entirely different in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and varied during the course of the war

recoilless rifle relatively portable Soviet-designed short-range artillery pieces ranging in calibre from 57mm to 106mm, that could penetrate armour at a range of 500 yards, or propel an explosive bomb up to 4,000 yards, mounted either on a tripod or a two-wheeled carriage; extensively used by the VC and NVA

regiment military unit normally composed of three battalions, commanded by a full colonel

RF, PF Regional Forces, Popular Forces – militias recruited by Saigon for local defence, lightly-armed and commanded by province chiefs, totalling 525,000 men and sometimes known as Ruff-Puffs

RPG rocket-propelled grenade-launcher, a superbly effective communist shoulder-fired weapon, delivering a rocket with a range of 150 yards, that could penetrate seven inches of armour

R&R rest and recuperation – a week-long out-of-country leave granted to all US personnel at least once during a Vietnam tour, usually in Hawaii, Hong Kong or Australia

SAC USAF Strategic Air Command, of which the B-52 bomber force was the principal component

SAM Soviet-built surface-to-air missile, most commonly the SAM-2, deployed in North Vietnam from 1965

sappers VC and NVA elite spearhead units, specially trained in the use of explosives

SF Special Forces

‘short’ a term used by US soldiers – ‘I’m short’ – to denote a man close to his DEROS – Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service, and thus exceptionally reluctant to die

slick troop transport helicopter, most often a Huey

SOP standard operating procedure

squad normally four in an infantry platoon, comprised of 8–10 men commanded by an NCO, subdivided into fireteams

USIA US Information Agency

Vietcong or VC derives from term Cong San Viet Nam, meaning Vietnamese communist, progressively adopted from the late 1950s

Vietminh common usage for the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, Vietnamese communist front organisation founded in 1941

1
Beauty and Many Beasts
1 CLINGING TO AN EMPIRE

Let us start this long tale, tragic even among the myriad tragedies of wars, not with a Frenchman or an American, but with a Vietnamese. Doan Phuong Hai was born in 1944 in a village on Route 6 only eighteen miles from Hanoi, yet wholly rustic. Among Hai’s earliest memories was that of wire, barbed wire, the rusty strands that encircled the French army post on a hillock near the marketplace, and the manner in which they sang when the wind blew through them. Behind the wire and beneath France’s fluttering tricolour flag lived a Vietnamese trumpeter named Vien, whom the little boy loved. Vien gave him empty butter tins and metal bottle caps, from which he built and cherished a toy car. Hai would sit among a little cluster of admiring children listening to Vien’s tales of his many battles, peering at the scar from a leg wound he had received at Limestone Mountain where he blew the call for a charge in which Foreign Legionnaires claimed to have killed a hundred communists. The boys stroked the sergeant’s stripes and hoarded empty cartridge cases that he occasionally gave to them.

Sometimes Vien would sing in a deep, sad voice, perhaps about his mother who had died in the previous year. Then, as a special treat, he led his small followers down to the riverbank and played in succession the bugle calls of the army, ‘some that made our hearts thrill to the notes, others so sad that they made one want to cry’. Then came a day in 1951 when Hai’s family moved to Hanoi, taking all their possessions aboard the aged district bus. Vien was commanding a picket by the roadside, and gave him parting gifts of two pieces of chewing gum and a gentle tug on the ear. As the bus pulled away, the boy saw him waving through a cloud of red dust behind, as houses, paddy fields, bamboo groves and da trees at the end of the village disappeared from his own life forever. Hai embarked upon a succession of journeys, exiles, a few joys and many misfortunes, such as were the shared experience of the Vietnamese people for half a century. Though he himself became a soldier, never again would warriors be imbued in his eyes with the glow of romance conferred upon them by Sergeant Vien and his bugle.

Vietnam endured a thousand years of rule by the Chinese before their expulsion in 938; they returned several times, and were finally driven out only in 1426. Thereafter the country enjoyed independence, though by no means stability or good governance. Rival dynasties controlled the north and south respectively until 1802, when Emperor Gia Long imposed unity, ruling from the city of Hue. During the late-nineteenth-century scramble for empires, France fixed its attentions on Indochina, and by force of arms established a progressive dominance, initially in the south, Cochinchina. In May 1883, when the National Assembly in Paris voted five million francs for an expedition to consolidate the region as a ‘protectorate’, the conservative politician Jules Delafosse proclaimed, ‘Let us, gentlemen, call things by their name. It is not a protectorate that you want, but a possession.’ So it was, of course. The French committed twenty thousand troops to securing Tonkin – northern Vietnam. Achieving this after a year’s hard fighting, they imposed a ruthless governance. While they abolished the old custom of condemning adulteresses to be trampled to death by elephants, the penalty of beheading, formerly imposed only upon thieves, was extended to all who challenged French hegemony. Opium consumption soared after the colonial power opened a Saigon refinery.

Vietnam comprises 126,000 square miles, a few more than Italy or metropolitan France, most of which are mountainous and shrouded in exotic vegetation, or flatland of extraordinary seasonal wetness and fertility. Almost every visitor who escaped the penance of exertion in the clinging heat was awed by its beauty and penned lyrical descriptions, celebrating views of ‘paddy fields in which water buffalo grazed, almost every one with a white egret perched on its back picking at insects; of vegetation so bright and green that it hurt the eyes; of waits at ferries beside broad rivers the colour of café crème; of gaudy pagodas and wooden homes on stilts, surrounded by dogs and ducks; of the steaming atmosphere, the ripe smells and water everywhere, giving a sense of fecundity, of nature spawning, ripening and on heat’.

Westerners rejoiced in the sublimity of Vietnamese weaving skills, manifested in thatch, basketwork and conical coolie hats. They peered curiously at the exotic dead creatures purveyed on street stalls, the profusion of fortune-tellers, dice-throwers, spices. Jungle butterflies grew as big as bats. There was a glorious water culture: sampans glided up rivers and canals where carts could not creak; fishing was fun, as well as a prolific source of food. Visitors described cockfights and gambling hells; glittering ceremonies in the imperial palace at Hue where the French indulged a puppet emperor who held banquets surmounted by roast peacock, said to taste like tough veal. The coastal region around the old capital was regarded with considerable suspicion by inhabitants of the Mekong delta, who said ‘The mountains are not high nor the rivers very deep, but the men are deceitful and the women over-sexed.’ A Westerner who loved the Vietnamese wrote that they spoke in cadences that made them ‘sound to me like charming ducks: their monosyllabic language comes out in a series of sweet quacks’.

Among fifty ethnic groups, the wildest tribes shared the wildest regions of Annam with tigers, panthers, elephants, bear, boar and a few Asian rhino. Two great deltas, those of the Red River in the north and the Mekong in the south, yielded prodigious agricultural produce. A boom in the rice export trade prompted a French land-grab at the expense of native peoples, matching those conducted by Americans in their own West and by British colonists across swathes of Africa. The peoples of Indochina were taxed to fund their own subjection, and by the 1930s 70 per cent of peasants were reduced to tenantry or smallholding. French planters – a few hundred families who accumulated colonial Indochina’s great fortunes – adopted in the twentieth century an uncompromising attitude towards the Vietnamese, in the words of a British visitor ‘identical with that of any of the old slave-owning aristocracies. It is one of utter contempt; without which effective exploitation would probably be impossible.’

French plantocrats, rubber magnates and coal-mine owners were indulged in institutionalised cruelty towards their workforces by the colonial administration, which also imposed an artificially high exchange rate for the franc against the local piaster that further enriched the Paris exchequer. The invaders were successful in imbuing many Vietnamese with their language, education and culture. A schoolboy recalled being taught in class that his forebears were Gauls. He learned better only when his father, an NCO in the French army, told him sternly and proudly, ‘Your ancestors were Vietnamese.’ An Australian surgeon wrote of a consciousness, even among relatively humble people, ‘of their long unbroken history and ancient civilization’.

Their circumstances were slightly better than those of the Congolese ruled by Belgium; somewhat worse than those of Indians under the British. There was a contradiction about the lives of upper- and middle-class Vietnamese. Compulsorily immersed in a European culture and language, they nonetheless saw little of French people outside working hours. Nguyen Duong, born in 1943, grew up with a passion for Tintin and French spy stories. Yet like all Asians, to whom a physical blow is the worst of insults, at his school he recoiled from French teachers’ habitual slapping of dunces. He never knew his parents to entertain a colon family, nor to dine out with such people. Norman Lewis described Saigon as ‘a French town in a hot country. It is as sensible to call it the Paris of the Far East as it would be to call Kingston, Jamaica, the Oxford of the West Indies. Its inspiration has been purely commercial and it is therefore without folly, fervour or much ostentation … Twenty thousand Europeans keep as much as possible to themselves in a few tamarind-shaded streets.’

Colonial life seemed to most of its beneficiaries infinitely comfortable and agreeable – for a time. Those who lingered too long, however, risked worse diseases than malaria or dysentery: the crippling lassitude of the East, compounded by opium and access to many servants. Old French hands – les anciens d’Indo – spoke of le mal jaune. Mastery did not spare them from the disdain of Indochina’s upper-crust native inhabitants. It was a Vietnamese tradition to blacken teeth with enamel, which caused them to regard white fangs with disdain: an emperor demanded, on receiving a European ambassador, ‘Who is this man with the teeth of a dog?’ Norman Lewis wrote: ‘They are too civilized to spit at the sight of a white man, but they are utterly indifferent … Even the rickshaw coolie, given – to be on the safe side – double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil.’

Few Vietnamese regarded French rule with equanimity, and local revolts were commonplace. In 1927 the Mekong delta village of Vinh Kim spawned a remarkable band of teenage performers called the United Women’s Troupe, which staged anti-colonialist shows and plays. The 1930s witnessed rural demonstrations, crop-burnings, insurgencies. A relentless debt squeeze caused some peasants to be imprisoned for non-payment of taxes, others to be so harrowed by loan sharks that by 1943 almost half of Vietnam’s land was in the hands of less than 3 per cent of its farmers. The colonial authority was confident that repression was the best medicine. A Vietnamese sûreté officer taunted an arrested revolutionary: ‘How can a grasshopper kick an automobile?’

Guerrilla and bandit groups nonetheless persisted in the country’s many wildernesses – ‘les grands vides’. On the terrible prison island of Poulo Condore, cells were seldom empty. There was little pretence of due process for Vietnamese consigned there, and the place became known as ‘the revolutionary university’. Many of those who later played prominent roles in the independence struggle served time there. Indeed, the man who became their leader, one of the most famous revolutionaries of the twentieth century, was among the few who did not.

Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in a central Vietnamese village in 1890. His father had risen from being a mere concubine’s son to mandarin status, but then abandoned the court to become an itinerant teacher. Ho, like Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong and Ngo Dinh Diem later, attended Hue’s influential Quoc Hoc high school, founded in 1896, from which he was expelled in 1908 for revolutionary activity. He cast off family ties, and after a brief period teaching in a village school, in 1911 became a stoker and galley boy aboard a French freighter. For three years he roamed the world, then spent a year in the United States, which fascinated him, before taking a job as an assistant pastry chef in London’s Carlton Hotel. He became increasingly politically active and met nationalists of many hues – Irish, Chinese, Indian. He spoke English and French fluently, together with several Chinese dialects and later Russian.

In 1919 he drafted an appeal which was delivered to US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace conference, soliciting his support for Vietnamese independence: ‘All subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilization against barbarism.’ He attended the 1920 French socialist congress, at which he delivered a speech that later became famous: ‘It is impossible for me in just a few minutes to rehearse to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina by the bandits of capitalism. There are more prisons than schools … Freedom of the press and opinion does not exist for us … We don’t have the right to emigrate or travel abroad … They do their best to intoxicate us with opium and brutalize us with alcohol. They … massacre many thousands … to defend interests that are not [Vietnamese].’ Ho became a prolific pamphleteer and contributor to left-wing journals, often quoting from Lenin.

In 1924 he travelled to Moscow, meeting Russia’s new leaders and spending some months at the so-called University of Oriental Workers before moving on to Canton, where he became an interpreter for the Soviet adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. Three years later, after Chiang turned on the communists, Ho fled back to Europe. A French acquaintance described a conversation on a bridge over the Seine, during which the Vietnamese said reflectively, ‘I always thought I would become a scholar or writer, but I’ve become a professional revolutionary. I travel through many countries, but I see nothing. I’m on strict orders, and my itinerary is carefully prescribed, and you cannot deviate from the route, can you?’

‘Orders’ from whom? There are many mysteries concerning Ho’s life. He never married, and his emotional needs appear to have been fulfilled by commitment to political struggle. Who funded his global travels? Was he a paid servant of Moscow, or did he merely receive ad-hoc financial assistance from political fellow-travellers? It is unsurprising that he became a communist, because the world’s capitalists were implacably hostile to his purposes. He was less remarkable for his own writing and thinking, which were unoriginal, than for an extraordinary ability to inspire in others faith, loyalty and indeed love. A Vietnamese student wrote of a first meeting with Ho some years later in Paris: ‘He exuded an air of frailty, a sickly pallor. But this only emphasized the imperturbable dignity that enveloped him as though it was a garment. He conveyed a sense of inner strength and generosity of spirit that impacted upon me with the force of a blow.’

In 1928, Ho appeared in Bangkok, a rendezvous for exiled Indochinese nationalists. The following year he moved to Hong Kong, where he presided over a meeting of leaders of rival Vietnamese factions, held in a football stadium during a match to evade police attention. He persuaded his compatriots to unite under the banner of the Indochinese Communist Party, which in 1931 was formally recognised by the Moscow Comintern. During the years that followed, a series of revolts took place in Vietnam. The French responded with bombings of suspected insurgent villages, and guillotinings of identified leaders. Though Ho was not directly linked to the risings, he was now a wanted man, pursued through the European powers’ colonies. After a series of adventures, he escaped into China by persuading a Hong Kong hospital employee to have him declared dead. Thereafter he commuted between China and Russia, suffering chronic privations and recurrent sicknesses. A French communist agent who met him during his odyssey described Ho as ‘taut and quivering, with only one thought in his head: his country’.

Early in 1941, after an absence of three decades, he secretly returned to Vietnam, travelling on foot and by sampan, and assuming the pseudonym by which he would become known to history – Ho Chi Minh, or ‘Bringer of Light’. He took up quarters in a cave in the hills of the north, where he met young men who embraced this fifty-year-old as ‘Uncle Ho’, among them such later heroes of the revolution as Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap at first introduced Ho to the little guerrilla group by saying, ‘Comrades, this is an old man, a native of this area, a farmer who loves the revolution.’ But they quickly realised that this was no local, and certainly no farmer. Ho drew maps of Hanoi for those who had never seen it, and advised them to dig latrines. A veteran recalled: ‘We thought to ourselves, “Who is this old man? Of all the things he could tell us, he gives advice about how to take a shit!”’ Nonetheless Ho was readily accepted as leader of the group, and indeed of the new movement, which they called the Vietnam Independence League, shortened to Vietminh. Its leaders did not disguise their own ideological commitment, but only much later did they explicitly avow communism as their only permitted creed.

Nazi mastery of western Europe drastically eroded France’s authority in its colonies, and intensified peasant suffering. In Indochina the French requisitioned to meet their own needs such basic commodities as matches, cloth, lamp oil. In the Mekong delta there was a brief 1940 communist-led rising in which several French officials were killed, army posts seized. Rice granaries were occupied and their contents distributed, bridges broken down by insurgents waving hammer-and-sickle flags. The so-called Nam Ky insurrection lasted just ten days, and only a small minority of local people participated, yet it emphasised the rage latent in the countryside.

From the summer of 1940 onwards, Tokyo exploited its regional dominance to deploy troops in Indochina, first to sever the Western supply route to China, later progressively to establish an occupation, which provoked President Franklin Roosevelt to impose his momentous July 1941 oil embargo. Although the French retained nominal authority, the Japanese thereafter exercised real power. They craved commodities to supply their domestic industries, and insisted that the Vietnamese should curtail rice-growing in favour of cotton and jute. This, together with enforced export of foodstuffs, created increasing hunger among the inhabitants of the richest rice-producing area in South-East Asia.

In 1944, a drought followed by floods unleashed a vast human tragedy. At least a million Vietnamese, one in ten of Tonkin’s population, perished in a famine as disastrous as the contemporaneous East Bengal disaster in British India. There were credible reports of cannibalism, yet no Frenchman is known to have starved. The famine remained in the memory of many northern Vietnamese as the most dreadful experience of their lives, not excluding subsequent wars. One peasant’s earliest memories of life in a village near Hanoi were of his mother scolding the children if they wasted food: ‘You wouldn’t do that if you remembered 1945.’

Another peasant described deserted hamlets and desperate people: ‘Skinny bodies in rags roamed every country road and city street. Then corpses began to appear along roadsides and in pagoda yards, church grounds, marketplaces, city parks, bus and railway stations. Groups of hungry men and women with babies in their arms and other children at their sides invaded every accessible field and garden to search for anything they thought edible: green bananas, cores and bulbs of banana trees, bamboo shoots. The people of my own village had to defend their land by force.’ Oxcarts carried away corpses, to be interred in mass graves. One day his three-year-old sister was eating a rice cake outside their house when an emaciated young man ‘who looked like a ghost in ragged clothes’ sprang forward, snatched the morsel from her hand and darted away.

In some areas charity food kitchens were established to provide gruel for the starving, and long queues gathered before them. Van Ky, a Tonkin teenager who became a famous Vietminh balladeer, said later: ‘When you opened the front door in the morning, you might see a corpse lying there. If you saw a big flock of crows, that meant a body underneath.’ It is unsurprising that such experience bred revolutionaries, including Ky himself. He was born in 1928 into a peasant family, but grew up in the unusually literate household of an uncle, from whom he learned La Fontaine’s fables and performed little plays based on them. He read such books as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. By the age of fifteen, Ky was distributing leaflets for the communists. He became chief of his local secret militia, serving until it was decided that he had artistic talents more useful to the Revolution than his military ones. Communist propagandists exploited music to great effect, resetting traditional folk songs to fit their own message, delivered by travelling troupes. Ky later wrote a ballad entitled ‘Hy Vong’ – ‘Hope’ – which became one of the favourite tunes of the Resistance. His experience demonstrated a notable aspect of the independence struggle: that a respect for French culture was no barrier to a determination to see France quit Vietnam.

2 THE VIETMINH MARCH

The last phase of the world war had momentous regional consequences. In March 1945 the Japanese staged a coup, deposing the French puppet regime and assuming full mastery over Vietnam. Colonialism was sustainable only as long as it appeared to subject peoples as the inevitable order, a perception changed forever in South-East Asia. Vietnamese recoiled from the new rulers’ brutalities, but were impressed by the spectacle of fellow-Asians wielding authority: some called the Japanese ‘oai’ – ‘awe-inspiring’. In July the Office of Strategic Services – US sponsor of guerrilla war – dispatched to Indochina a team of paramilitary agents led by Major Archimedes Patti, who pitched camp with Ho Chi Minh. Those callow young men, like so many of their kind both American and British in occupied countries around the world, were grateful to find friends in a hostile environment: they fell in love with the romance of their circumstances, and with their hosts. A twenty-two-year-old guerrilla told one of the OSS men with jocular humour that he should not show himself outside their camp at Tan Trao, ‘because if the Japanese catch you, they will eat you like a pig!’ When he chortled to Giap about this sally, however, he was reprimanded: ‘We are revolutionaries, and the members of this team are our allies, so we must talk to them in a cultured and civilised way.’

Washington’s Indochina policy-making was fumbling and erratic. The allied warlords were preoccupied with completing the defeat of Germany and Japan. From Yugoslavia to Burma, however, and from Greece to Vietnam, local nationalists focused their ambitions almost exclusively upon securing political control, once Axis forces were gone. Colonial subjects saw no merit in securing liberation from fascist suzerainty, only to bend once more beneath the yoke of their former masters, whether French, British or Dutch. The OSS team with Ho became fascinated by his personality, and allowed themselves to suppose that the arms with which they supplied him were being used to harry the Japanese. In truth, the Vietminh staged a few small showpiece actions against the occupiers, but focused upon building their organisation and husbanding weapons to fight the French. Ho’s appointed military chief was Giap. This former teacher and avid student of history had no military training whatsoever when, on 22 December 1944, he formed the so-called Vietnamese Liberation Army Propaganda Unit, just thirty-four strong, three of them women. On 15 May 1945 this body was absorbed into an embryo ‘Liberation Army’.

Modern Hanoi histories record with glee the manner in which communist cadres exploited Western arms and training to pursue their own purposes. In 1943, following the Allied occupation of French Madagascar, the British secret warfare organisation Special Operations Executive recruited seven Vietnamese prisoners whom its officers found languishing in a Vichy prison. These men assured the liberators of their eagerness to return home to fight, without mentioning that they numbered the French among the fascist foes. A later Vietminh account asserted: ‘The seven intelligence men appeared to be Allied agents, but their hearts and minds belonged to communism.’ After the usual training in the black arts they were parachuted back into Vietnam, fearing rejection by the Party for having accepted service with SOE. Instead they received a warm welcome, and were promptly ordered to signal Calcutta for more arms, wirelesses and medical supplies.

The suddenness with which the war ended in August 1945 enabled Ho to seize the initiative, to fill a power vacuum that yawned widest in the north. His emissaries persuaded Bao Dai, Vietnam’s whimsical and indolent young puppet emperor, to write to the Paris government asserting that the only way to safeguard France’s position was ‘by frank and open recognition of the independence of Vietnam’. Gen. Charles de Gaulle, interim master in Paris, declined to respond to this missive, but was obliged grudgingly to notice that before abdicating on 25 August Bao Dai had invited Ho to form a government. The Vietminh leader marched his followers into Hanoi, Tonkin’s capital, and on 2 September 1945 proclaimed before a vast and ecstatic crowd in the city’s Ba Dinh square the establishment of a Vietnamese state. He declared: ‘The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated, our people have broken the fetters which for over a century have tied us down.’

The news was broadcast throughout the country, and a schoolboy who lived south of Hue later recalled: ‘Our teachers were so happy. They told us we must go out and celebrate independence. They said that when we are old men … we must remember this as a day of celebration.’ Ho in his speech quoted from the US Declaration of Independence, and secured a propaganda coup when the OSS group allowed itself to be photographed saluting the Vietminh flag-raising ceremony. By chance, at that moment a flight of USAAF P-38 fighters roared overhead: in the eyes of thousands of beholders, the US thus laid its blessing upon the new government.

In truth, of course, a cluster of idealistic young State Department and OSS men merely exploited Washington’s lack of a policy to make their own weather. Patti, upon whose considerable vanity Ho played like a lute, described the Vietminh leader as ‘a gentle soul’, and another American said, ‘We felt that he was first a nationalist, second a communist.’ The major admitted long afterwards, ‘I perhaps was somewhat naïve with respect to the intent and purpose in using the words [of the 1776 Declaration] … But I felt very strongly that the Vietnamese had a legitimate gripe or claim, to really govern themselves. After all what was [the Second World War] all about?’

Charismatic leadership is a determinant in most revolutionary struggles – consider India’s Gandhi and Nehru, Kenya’s Kenyatta, Cuba’s Castro. Ho Chi Minh established a legitimacy that proved impregnable even when the shortcomings and indeed barbarities of his regime became apparent, because in 1945 he seized sole ownership of Vietnam’s independence movement. Sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky wrote later that in those days in Hanoi ‘the one name on my lips, as well as those of nearly everyone of my generation, was Ho Chi Minh’. Many households began to display his portrait: in the words of another young Vietnamese, ‘We were hungry for a hero to worship.’ The French had made no attempt to foster an indigenous political class with any sympathy for the aspirations of its own people: rich and educated Vietnamese existed in a world entirely alien from that of the peasantry. While Ho and his intimates knew that few would endorse an avowed communist prospectus, he was able to unite a great swathe of his people behind expulsion of the French. In the years that followed, he achieved a mystic stature unrivalled by any fellow-countryman.

During the early years of the independence struggle, in ‘liberated zones’ land was compulsorily transferred from landlord to peasant ownership. Ho and his associates did not reveal that they viewed redistribution as a mere transit stop, pending collectivisation. Political cadres painted a glowing picture of Russia as an earthly paradise, which Vietnam should aspire to emulate. Ho himself exuded an aura of dignity and wisdom that impressed all those who met him, and proved a brilliant political manipulator. Beneath a veneer of benignity, he possessed the quality indispensable to all revolutionaries: absolute ruthlessness about the human cost of the courses he deemed appropriate for his people. It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane. A remark attributed to Giap answered this question for the Vietminh: ‘Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die upon this earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.’

Ho Chi Minh’s conduct reflected the same conviction, though he was too astute a politician ever to be recorded by Westerners as expressing it. There has been much debate about whether he was a ‘real’ communist, or instead merely a nationalist driven by political necessity to embrace Lenin’s creed. Evidence seems overwhelming in favour of the former view. He was never the Titoist some of his Western apologists suggested: he repeatedly condemned Yugoslavia’s 1948 severance from the Soviet bloc. He avowed an unflagging admiration for Stalin, though the Russian leader never reciprocated either by trusting the Vietminh leader or by providing substantial aid to him.

It seems narrowly possible that Vietnam’s subjection to communism could have been averted if France in 1945 had announced its intention to quit the country, and embarked upon a crash transition process to identify credible indigenous leaders and prepare them to govern, as did the British before quitting Malaya. Instead, however, the French chose to draft a long suicide note, declaring their ironclad opposition to independence. The colonialists’ intransigence conceded to Ho Chi Minh the moral high ground in the struggle that now began to unfold.

De Gaulle bore chief responsibility for this blunder. In March 1945 he overrode the views of Pierre Messmer, his liaison officer in the Far East, who argued the necessity of parleying with the Vietminh. Instead, the haughty general committed the restoration of French authority to the intractable colonialist Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, who became high commissioner in Saigon. In some parts of the world, Africa notable among them, a dearth of credible nationalist movements enabled European empires to cling to their power and privileges for a further generation. In Vietnam, however, as elsewhere in Asia, foreign hegemony became unsustainable once local leaders found voices that could not be silenced, together with audiences to heed them. This was the reality that France spent the ensuing decade attempting to deny.

On 12 September 1945, less than a month after the Vietminh appropriated authority in Hanoi, British and Indian troops landed in Saigon. They freed the embittered French colonialists from their prisons, and dismissed the Vietminh aspirants to power amid messy and bloody skirmishing, in which some Japanese were deployed alongside the allies. The British commander, Maj. Gen. Douglas Gracey, asserted: ‘The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French.’ One of his officers described a first encounter with the Vietminh: ‘They came to see me and said “welcome” and that sort of thing. It was an unpleasant situation and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously communists.’ Gracey is sometimes criticised for using his troops to suppress Ho’s people. Yet he was merely a relatively junior soldier, no Caesar nor even Mountbatten, mandated to emulate many of his peers around the world in those days: use bayonets to restore the pre-war order.

At Washington’s behest 150,000 Chinese troops, Chiang Kai-shek’s men, descended upon northern Vietnam to assume a share of the allied occupation role. The Vietnamese dubbed them tau phu – the ‘swollen Chinese’ – because they all seemed to have bulging feet, perhaps from beriberi. The newcomers behaved more like locusts than warriors, stripping the countryside of everything edible or portable. They interfered little with Ho’s energetic extension of his political authority, and obligingly sold weapons to the Vietminh. Early in October 1945 the first French troops appeared in Saigon, but more than a year elapsed thereafter – a delay priceless for the communists and fatal to the imperialists – before they reasserted control in the north.

At the age of sixteen, student Pham Phu Bang was an enthusiastic revolutionary who saw the Vietminh exclusively as an independence movement: ‘I knew nothing about communism.’ When the Japanese swept over the country, at first he found it thrilling to see fellow-Asians humiliate the French colonial power – ‘like two great water buffaloes locking horns’. After Japan’s collapse Bang started his own revolutionary career, stealing weapons from careless Chinese soldiers, writing posters and banners proclaiming ‘Up with Ho Chi Minh’, ‘Long Live Free Vietnam’. One day he joined a train taking rice north to famine-stricken areas, which became trapped at a bridge wrecked by allied bombing. Its Vietminh escort enlisted local villagers to hump sacks across the river, but soon found the train besieged by a throng of starving people. Young Bang was accosted by a skeletal figure who had been given a can of rice for himself, but pleaded desperately for one more for his child. ‘We argued a lot among ourselves about who was to blame for these terrible things – the Japanese who ruled; the French who took as much food as they wanted to feed themselves; or the Americans who had bombed the railways. We decided it was all three. We asked each other: why did our small, fragile country have so many enemies?’

In the course of 1945–46 the Vietminh took over the non-communist Vanguard Youth movement and suppressed other opposition groups in the north. Many of the rival leaders were jailed, and in the countryside some thousands of alleged ‘enemies of the people’ were liquidated. The Vietminh hustled to announce its own triumph in a 4 January 1946 national election, as assuredly rigged as was every other ballot in Indochina through the decades that followed. For a brief season while the Chinese army and allied representatives were conspicuous in the north, a semblance of free speech was tolerated. By mid-June, however, most of Chiang’s men were gone, and purges resumed.

Ho’s people moved swiftly and effectively to secure control of rural areas, especially in the remotenesses towards the Chinese border. In the Mekong delta, by contrast, early in 1946 the French reasserted themselves, so that insurgent structures had to evolve secretly, alongside the colonial administration. Among Vietminh returnees from imprisonment was Le Duan, who two decades later would become ruler of his country. As the French expelled the Vietminh from urban areas, he was among those who established himself in the delta countryside, where guerrillas began to fight. And the colonial power fought back.

France’s adoption of this doomed course derived in significant measure from its humiliation in the Second World War. A similar disaster was averted in India, probably only because British voters at their 1945 election displayed the wisdom to endorse a socialist government, which made the historic decision to quit the subcontinent and Burma. By contrast, in Paris in the summer of 1945 a black delegate from Guyana, Gaston Monnerville, asserted: ‘without the Empire, France today would be no more than a liberated country … Thanks to her Empire, France is a victorious country.’ Successive revolving-door governments of the Fourth Republic proved feeble in everything save a willingness to deploy force in France’s overseas possessions, with a ruthlessness seldom matched by the Soviets. Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people. Only in the enervating climate of a world that had exhausted its stock of moral outrage could the creation of such mountains of corpses by a European power have passed with so little remark. Algeria and Madagascar provide important context for the matching bloodshed that descended upon Indochina.

More puzzling than France’s rashness and inhumanity was US willingness to support them. Without military aid, Paris’s colonial policy would have collapsed overnight. Fredrik Logevall observes that there would have been no contradiction about an American decision to assist France’s domestic revival, while withholding backing for its imperial follies. Washington’s contrary call was made partly because, even before the Cold War became icy, policy-makers recoiled from acquiescence in communist acquisition of new territorial booty. While American liberal intellectuals detested colonialism, in an era when much of their own country was still racially segregated, the spectacle of white men lording it over ‘lesser races’ did not seem as odious as it would soon become. In the late 1940s, French policy was less closely linked to US anti-communism than it later became, but the interests of the Vietnamese people – or for that matter of their Malagasy, Algerian and suchlike brethren – ranked low in the priorities of President Harry Truman.

Some Vietnamese at first regarded the return of the French as an acceptable temporary expedient, to rid themselves of the Chinese plundering the north. Ho Chi Minh received token recognition as master of Tonkin, while Bao Dai’s nominal rule over the country was acknowledged. In July 1946, when Ho visited Paris for talks about the constitutional future, he was greeted with the honours of a head of state. This, however, was mere window-dressing. In the talks at Fontainebleau that followed, the Paris government made it plain that he had been summoned only to receive the instructions of his masters, not to negotiate a reassignment of power. De Gaulle said: ‘United with the overseas territories which France opened to civilisation, she is a great nation. Without these territories she would be in danger of no longer being one.’

The head of the French delegation told a Vietminh representative contemptuously: ‘We only need an ordinary police operation for eight days to get all of you out.’ For some weeks, Ho lingered in frustration. Truong Nhu Tang, almost three decades later a Southern revolutionary minister, was among a group of Vietnamese students who met their hero in Paris. They were entranced when the aspiring national leader instructed them to call him ‘Uncle Ho’ rather than ‘Mr President’. He asked their opinions about Vietnam’s future, devoted an afternoon to conversation with them: ‘It is hard to think of another world leader who under similar circumstances might have done the same.’ When Ho found that the north, centre and south of the country were all represented in the student group, he said, ‘Voilà! The youth of our great family … You must remember, though the rivers run dry and the mountains crumble, the nation will always be one.’ His remarks profoundly impressed his young compatriots, because they evoked ‘the language of slogan and poetry that Vietnamese leaders had always used to rally the people … From that afternoon I was Ho Chi Minh’s fervent partisan. I had been won by his simplicity, charm, familiarity. His … burning patriotism offered me a role-model for my own life.’

Ho returned to Tonkin knowing that no peaceful settlement was attainable. The French behaved with unswerving duplicity: as fast as more troops, planes and warships became available, they tightened their grip in the south, then reached out for the north. That summer of 1946 their foremost soldier, Philippe Leclerc, directed military operations: he branded Ho an enemy of France, and unwisely declared the conflict as good as won. The general treated with contempt Giap, Ho’s former intelligence chief who was then presumptive Vietminh ‘minister of defence’. Giap’s broad, infectious grin deluded some Westerners into believing that he was a more genial and pliable figure than his leader. In truth, Giap’s vanity matched his ruthlessness: the Frenchman’s casual insults fuelled his loathing for the colonialists.

Leclerc belatedly changed his mind about Indochina, becoming convinced that it could not be held in the face of a nationalist hostility shared by communists and non-communists alike. Yet shortly afterwards he was killed in an air crash in Africa, and Thierry d’Argenlieu thereafter dominated his country’s policy-making. The high commissioner was a figure of Jesuitical inflexibility, who persuaded the Paris government that the Vietminh could be crushed: ‘It is from now on impossible for us to deal with Ho Chi Minh … We shall find other people with whom we can negotiate.’ The French dallied with promoting the young ex-emperor Bao Dai. Yet in Vietnam, as in many oppressed nations around the world, a tide was running strongly for the Left. No other Vietnamese remotely matched the grip upon popular imagination secured by Ho.

In November 1946, following the breakdown of negotiations, the French launched a brutal naval and air bombardment of the Vietminh’s alleged strongholds in and around the port of Haiphong. Several thousand people perished, and only the city’s European quarter escaped devastation. On 19 December d’Argenlieu issued an ultimatum calling on the Vietminh to quit, to which they responded by staging an armed insurrection in Hanoi, sustained for sixty days. When at last they were expelled amid widespread destruction, the French deluded themselves that they had regained control of Tonkin.

Foreign observers were sceptical, however. A correspondent of The Times of London wrote in December: ‘Any colonial power which puts itself in the position of meeting terrorism with terrorism might as well wash its hands of the whole business. We are about to see the French army reconquer the greater part of Indochina only to make it impossible for any French merchant or planter to live there outside a barbed-wire perimeter.’ Ho and Giap, preparing for a long campaign, needed bases beyond range of France’s airfields and heavy guns. Thus, their main army, some thirty thousand strong, abandoned towns and cities and marched away to Viet Bac, the remote north-western region.

The Vietminh leaders, who became cave- or hut-dwellers, never deluded themselves that they could achieve absolute military victory. Instead, they sought merely to make French rule prohibitively costly. To this end, covert local groups waged guerrilla war, while regular forces launched setpiece operations where conditions appeared favourable. They relied chiefly on captured weapons, but also began to manufacture their own, assisted by some three thousand Japanese deserters. With boundless ingenuity, they scavenged French cartridge cases for reloading, made mines from captured shells and mortar bombs. At the outset, they exercised overt or secret control of around ten million people, most of whom paid taxes to them, and performed labour or military service. Though the Vietminh denounced opium trafficking as a manifestation of colonial exploitation, Ho boosted the movement’s revenues by the same means.

Families are almost sacred hubs of Vietnamese society, yet in those days many became riven. Ten-year-old Tran Hoi’s father was a Hanoi small businessman who continued to acquiesce in French rule. He said: ‘If we have to choose between colonial domination and communism, I will take colonialism, because it means access to Western civilisation.’ There was a bitter row when Hoi’s uncle, a doctor, announced his own determination to join Ho Chi Minh. The clan’s divisions, like those of many others, remained unhealed through decades of strife that now began to unfold.

2
The ‘Dirty War’
1 STEAMROLLER TYPES

In the early months of 1947 Charles Trenet crooned irresistibly, reminding the world of the glory of the French language: ‘La mer, qu’on voit danser la long des golfes claires’, words rendered banal in English: ‘The sea, that we see dancing the length of the bright bays’. Christian Dior seized the imagination of fashionable womankind with his New Look, unfolding swathes of fabric beneath a tight waist and bodice, putting to flight years of austerity. French culture, style, beauty both natural and man-made, were once more ascendant. From Paris the writer Nancy Mitford tirelessly mocked her English compatriots for their inability to match her hosts’ cuisine, wit, sophistication.

And yet these same clever, conceited, morbidly insecure people chose to immerse themselves in a brutal colonial war eight thousand miles from home, which eventually cost their own side more than ninety thousand dead, and the Vietnamese people far more. Most of the inhabitants of metropolitan France regarded the struggle to preserve their overseas empire – la sale guerre, ‘the dirty war’ – with indifference, if not outright cynicism. De Gaulle, now in political exile, displayed belated doubts, which soon became certainty, that France had no vital interest in Indochina, and could not prevail there. Yet a vocal minority cared passionately, and promoted a fabulously expensive military commitment.

George Orwell observed that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it, whereas it was France’s misfortune to take almost a decade to achieve this. The struggle for Indochina took different forms, according to the regions of the country. In the north, large forces manoeuvred and fought against communist formations that eventually mustered sixty thousand men, supported by a revolving cast of peasant porters. A Vietminh document declared the dry season between October and April ‘most propitious for fighting’, while the rainiest months from May to October, when movement became difficult, were for rest, training, redeployment, planning. Meanwhile in towns and cities, the French strove to combat terror attacks – bombs thrown into crowded cafés, shootings of officials. Such incidents became part of a new normality: at a mayoral reception in Haiphong, guests were momentarily alarmed by a nearby explosion and gunshots, but cocktails and conversation resumed when it was learned that a Vietminh had merely been shot dead after tossing a grenade at a police station. In one unusually successful and cruel attack, guerrillas burst in upon a dinner party held at a French home at Cap St Jacques, near the mouth of the Saigon River. They killed with grenades and old British sten guns eight officers, two women, six children and four Vietnamese servants.

Across the countryside, a network of almost a thousand forts and miradors – watchtowers skirted with mines, concertina wire, logs, sandbags, corrugated iron and trenches prickling with sharpened bamboo stakes – was created to protect villages and roads. These had indifferent success in containing the Vietminh, who lifted the mines for their own use, and could usually overrun a local post if they set their minds to it. French small craft fought fierce battles on the Black River against guerrillas firing from the shore.

Meanwhile, high in the mountains and deep in the jungle, French special forces of the GCMA – Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés – led tribesmen who hated the communists for their own reasons. Since insertion and extraction were dependent upon airstrips, some GCMA men went native because they had no choice; more than a few never returned to civilisation. This became the last conflict in which paratroops made repeated operational jumps, some as often as once a week. For most French units, however, this was a road-dominated war, in which helicopters played only a marginal role: even in the struggle’s last days, the colonial power owned just twenty-three. Infantry conducted an interminable succession of sweeps across the countryside, with such lyrical code names as Citron, Mandarine, Mercure, Artois, Mouette and Nice I & II. These killed some Vietminh, but only in return for a terrific expenditure of effort and intensification of peasant grievances.

Giap had attended no war college, yet read voraciously: he became obsessed with Napoleon, Clausewitz and the guerrilla tactics of Mao. His forces achieved one of their first high-profile successes on 27 January 1947, ambushing a convoy carrying Vietnamese politicians in French service on an inspection tour of the north. Fourteen vehicles were destroyed, the education minister and a French engineer killed. The attack impressed the authorities by its boldness and efficiency, and more of the same followed. Route 5 from Hanoi to Haiphong became known as ‘the road of blood’. A village on the north–south Route 1 was so notorious an ambush site that the French bulldozed it.

The two sides competed in ruthlessness. The Vietminh executed village chiefs who declined to bow to their will, often by live burial before peasant audiences, after subjecting them to tortures of medieval ingenuity. When the Vietminh killed one Vietnamese soldier captured in French service, a guerrilla borrowed a pair of pliers from a nearby house, with which he removed the man’s gold fillings. A child witness wrote: ‘I had seen many corpses beheaded, dismembered, eviscerated, even scalped, yet nothing more disgusting than the sight of that guerrilla holding the two gold teeth, his face beaming.’ Vietnamese adapted readily to conducting covert lives in parallel with their overt ones, because their society had a long tradition of secret associations.

The French employed every extravagance of firepower on the battlefield, and allowed their troops almost absolute licence behind it. The writer Norman Lewis described his first flight to Saigon. His neighbour in the Air France plane was a Foreign Legion colonel, who peered at the Mekong delta below with the jaundiced eye of familiarity. As they passed a cluster of huts at two thousand feet, Lewis’s innocent gaze fixed upon what might have been a wisp of incense curling upwards. Then he grasped that it was, instead, a billowing pall of smoke. When moving specks also became visible, his neighbour the Legionnaire observed sagely, ‘Une opération.’ Lewis wrote: ‘Somehow, as he spoke, he seemed linked psychically to what was going on below. Authority flowed back into the travel-weary figure. With the accession of this priestly essence he dominated the rest of the passengers. Beneath our eyes violence was being done, but we were as detached from it almost as from history … One could understand what an aid to untroubled killing the bombing plane must be.’

French brutality was driven partly by the habit of racial domination, partly by consciousness that even if many peasants were not active foes, they knew where the enemy was, in which culvert or on what path his snares awaited the unwary. The colonialists and their allies of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao – southern religious sects with formidable private armies – are reckoned to have killed five civilians for every one of their own people who perished. The November 1948 massacre of over two hundred Vietnamese women and children at My Trach, in the southernmost province of what would become North Vietnam, is scarcely acknowledged in modern France, yet seems evidentially beyond doubt. Meanwhile, following incidents such as an ambush in which the founders of the Hoa Hao were killed, ‘The Hoa-Hao liked to tie Viet-Minh sympathisers together with rope and throw them into the rivers to drown in bundles,’ in the words of Bernard Fall, ‘floating down the river like so many trains of junks, at the mercy of the currents and tides.’

An American, Bob Miller of United Press, was aboard a French armoured barge patrolling a canal late one night when its searchlight fixed upon three sampans, breaching the curfew. Two that ignored an order to halt were riddled with machine-gun-fire. The third contained two elderly peasants and their son, with a cargo of rice. The sacks were duly tipped overboard, whereupon the boy sought to escape by leaping into the water. A soldier tossed a grenade in his wake, killing him. A courteous young French officer explained to Miller that ‘it was only by making people understand that breaches of the regulations would be punished with extreme severity that [the French] could hope to keep the upper hand’. Upper hand? Even in the relatively quiet years 1947–48, a single Foreign Legion battalion suffered two hundred casualties from mines, skirmishes and ambushes.

The Legion has become part of a heroic legend of Indochina. Yet other French soldiers derided them as genre rouleau compresseur – ‘steamroller types’. Among Vietnamese civilians their units – which included some former members of Hitler’s SS and Wehrmacht – achieved an appalling reputation for rape and pillage. Duong Van Mai, one of a traditional mandarin family, described how Legionnaires entered her home, slit suitcases with their bayonets and removed whatever property took their fancy. As her family trekked through the northern war zone, French soldiers stripped them of cash and gold, deemed legitimate warriors’ perquisites. Black colonial troops were less discriminating, seizing even villagers’ poor stocks of salt and nuoc mam – fish sauce. As in Europe in World War II, Moroccans were the most unwelcome visitors that a district could suffer. Meanwhile the Vietminh might be notoriously cruel, but were also famously honest.

The Austrian-born French writer and adventurer Bernard Fall’s books on his nation’s Indochina war are often cited as classics: they offer vivid anecdotage, some of it believable, and shrewd analysis of the difficulties of conducting counter-insurgency. Yet they embrace an essentially heroic vision of the French army, while remaining mute about the many atrocities its soldiers committed, of which Fall, as a contemporary witness, must have been aware. Vietnamese in French service showed little more sensitivity: American Howard Simpson watched exuberant parachutists tearing down a Saigon street in a jeep which crushed and scattered a row of bamboo panniers, filled with red peppers laid out to dry in the sun. After the vehicle passed, two old women set to work painstakingly to collect the debris and salvage what they could of their ravaged wares. Here was a minuscule event amid a vast tragedy, yet Simpson asked himself, how could it fail to influence the hearts and minds of its victims, those two elderly street-sellers?

Early in 1948 a half-hearted attempt was made to establish an anti-communist political front under the patronage of Bao Dai, who returned from exile shortly afterwards at the age of thirty-four. Yet the emperor, indolent and spoilt, was soon preoccupied with currency racketeering in partnership with French politicians. Bereft of both moral and political authority, his interests were girls, hunting and yachts. Thus France resolved to settle its difficulties by military means, and eventually deployed in Indochina sixty-two infantry battalions including thirteen North African, three paratroop, and six Foreign Legion. In addition several hundred thousand militiamen, of doubtful utility, guarded villages and roads.

Until the last stage of the war, the French never lacked for local volunteers, who needed the money. Some Vietnamese soldiers distinguished themselves in France’s service – brave, proficient, loyal to their salt. Many more, however, proved reluctant to fight with anything like the necessary determination. Moreover, French commanders never resolved a chronic dilemma: how to concentrate superior strength against Giap’s regular formations in the north, while protecting a thousand prospective targets elsewhere. Neither the French and their allies nor the communists had strength enough to dominate the whole country. In Christopher Goscha’s words: ‘Instead they all administered competing, archipelago-like states, whose sovereignties and control over people and territories could expand and shrink as armies moved in and out and the balance of power shifted.’ It seems to some historians strange that the French, who had so recently suffered a cruel occupation of their own homeland, should decline to recognise that atrocities alienate. Yet some Frenchmen derived a different message from their experience: that Nazi harshness had worked, until mid-1944 cowing an overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

In October 1949 the struggle intensified dramatically. China, Vietnam’s giant northern neighbour, acquired a communist government led by Mao Zedong, which set aside his nation’s historic animosity to back the Vietminh. Suddenly, Ho and Giap gained access to safe havens and American weapons captured from Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalists. Vietminh training schools were established behind Mao’s frontier. Hundreds of Chinese military advisers attached themselves to Giap’s troops. In the north-west of Vietnam, the French began to suffer calamitious attrition. They were striving to hold the country with forces largely confined to the roads, against an enemy of the jungle and mountains. One ambush on Route 4, which twisted through mountain defiles just below the Chinese border, cost a column of a hundred vehicles half that number, and most of the occupants were butchered. The French were obliged to relinquish swathes of territory.

One of the most extraordinary human stories of that period concerns Le Duan, who would later succeed Ho Chi Minh. Born in 1907 in central Vietnam, he was a committed communist revolutionary a decade before Ho returned from exile, serving two long terms of imprisonment. He now acted as secretary of COSVN, the Vietminh’s southern directorate. Where other leaders had their own huts, bodyguards and cooks, the grimly austere Le Duan chose to sleep in a sampan moored deep in the Mekong delta, from which he worked with two aides. Among their couriers was a pretty, French-educated girl named Nguyen Thuy Nga. She was in love with another revolutionary, but the province Party committee had terminated the relationship, because the man had a wife and family elsewhere.

One day in 1950 Le Duan asked Nga to join him for breakfast. She was somewhat in awe of the ferocious energy and commitment that had earned him the nickname ‘two hundred-candlepower’. Tall, lean, gaunt, his clothes were in rags. Chain-smoking incessantly, he seemed to have no thought for anything save the revolution, and was twice Nga’s age. Before long, however, he announced that he had chosen her as his bride. She remonstrated that he, like her previous lover, already had a wife and children in the north. Le Duan shrugged that he had been victim of an arranged marriage, and had known nothing of his ‘wife’ for twenty years. Their wedding was held at COSVN jungle headquarters with Le Duan’s close comrade Le Duc Tho acting as matchmaker. The couple’s new life was scarcely domesticated: there was no trousseau, for the bride owned only a single pair of trousers. When they shifted camp, taking what little they owned in sampans, often Nga had to leap into the water alongside the men and push the boat over shallow places. They were always hungry, and seldom found more than a few jungle roots and vegetables with which to flavour the meagre rice ration.

Through 1951–52 Nga worked devotedly as Le Duan’s political secretary, and gave birth to a daughter named Vu Anh. Her husband seemed to love her, and once astonished her by a gesture of shameless frivolity when she approached COSVN through a patch of elephant grass. Glimpsing her he ran forward, seized her by both hands and swung her joyfully around himself. Here was an almost unique glimpse of human frailty in the life of this icily focused man who would play a role in Vietnam’s wars second only to that of Ho.

From 1951 onwards, the Vietminh emphasised ever more strongly the centrality of ideology, which in earlier years Ho downplayed. The Chinese supplied not merely military tutelage, but also political advice about how to establish a communist society, for which a key imperative was suppression of dissent: in the first two years of Mao Zedong’s rule, he killed an estimated two million of his own people. Now, in many Vietminh-controlled areas, radios were banned, to deny peasants access to information save that dispensed by the Party. Most intellectuals and middle-class adherents of the movement became outcasts.

Because the most fiercely contested battlefields lay in the north, that region’s people suffered dreadfully at the hands of both sides. Nguyen Cong Luan grew up in a small village near Hanoi, which reluctantly accepted French suzerainty. In consequence his father was seized by the Vietminh, subjected to torture, and eventually met death in one of their punishment camps. Yet colonial troops frequently detained his son, and on several occasions the boy feared for his life. France’s definition of its own role in Indochina as a mission civilisatrice was mocked by the reality. Luan wrote: ‘Our submission to the French military authority did not protect us from being looted, raped, tortured, or killed. Every private, whether he was a Frenchman, an African, or a Vietnamese could do almost anything he wanted to a Vietnamese civilian without fear of being tried in a court or punished by his superiors … A sergeant … had the power of a viceroy in the Middle Ages … People addressed him as “Ngai”, a word equivalent to “Your Excellency”, only used in connection with gods and mandarins.’

The colonists’ conspicuously privileged existence enabled the Vietminh to exploit their own austerity as a propaganda gift. Lt. Gen. Sir Gerald Templer, Britain’s security overlord during Malaya’s insurgency, observed with dry wit: ‘You can see today how the communists work. They seldom go to the races. They don’t often go to dinner or cocktail parties. And they don’t play golf.’ Since French draftees were not obliged to serve in Vietnam, most of their army’s rank and file were mercenaries – North Africans, West Africans or Vietnamese. Half the Legion’s men were Germans. A licensed indiscipline prevailed among off-duty troops, with widespread alcoholism. The scent of burning caramel revealed the proclivity of old hands for opium-smoking as surely as did their yellow complexions and an oily smudge on the left forefinger. When Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny assumed proconsular powers in December 1950, he began to create an explicitly Vietnamese conscript army. ‘Vietnamisation’ would become a dirty word by 1971, but the French made it so twenty years earlier with their term for de Lattre’s policy – ‘jaunissment’ – ‘yellowing’ the war, or at least its corpses. No one held the new Vietnamese force in much esteem, partly because a fifty-thousand-piaster bribe procured escape from service.

Giap now deployed in northern Vietnam six ten-thousand-man divisions, well-armed with light weapons, though short of food, clothing and equipment. In the early years the Vietminh had no waterproof clothing or weather protection. Only in 1952 were there issues of flimsy coverings, which seemed miraculous to those simple peasants. In the words of a communist soldier, ‘We marvelled that mankind had produced a piece of paper that rain ran off.’

The French continued to have their successes: gunboats in the Red River delta choked rice shipments to communist forces further north. On 25 May 1950, after the enemy bombarded a French camp at Dong Khe, a few miles inside Vietnam’s border with China, parachute-landed reinforcements drove the attackers scuttling away into the jungle. Nonetheless, colonial garrisons in the mountainous far north, holding positions linked by ribbons of road strung along narrow valleys, remained vulnerable, especially when Giap’s regular units acquired mortars and artillery. The French had been rash enough to extend delicate tendrils – relatively small forces – into antheaps crawling with Vietminh. While the colonial power had far more soldiers countrywide, in the north-west Giap could sometimes outnumber his foes.

Early on 16 September, five Vietminh battalions, supported by artillery, once more attacked the French base at Dong Khe. The communists had spent weeks preparing and planning, a hallmark of all their important operations. Early in the battle, Giap’s headquarters was alarmed by reports that one regiment had lost its way, failing to reach the start line, and that initial casualties were heavy. But Ho Chi Minh, who had walked many miles to witness the assault, urged calm and perseverance. After fifty-two hours of fierce fighting, the attackers prevailed: Dong Khe fell at 1000 on the 18th. An officer and thirty-two Foreign Legionnaires escaped just before the end, emerging from the jungle to rejoin French forces after a terrible week-long march.

Giap now embarked upon a banquet at his enemy’s expense in the mountainous Chinese border region. The French resigned themselves to abandoning another camp at Cao Bang, twenty miles north of Dong Khe. On 3 October its foul-mouthed but popular commander Lt. Col. Pierre Charton led forth a truck column bearing 2,600 mainly Moroccan soldiers, five hundred civilians including the personnel of the town brothel, together with a tail of artillery and heavy equipment. Charton had ignored orders to abandon such baggage: he determined to retreat with dignity and honour, a gesture of stubbornness that cost hundreds of lives. In defiles nine miles south of Cao Bang his straggling caravan was checked by a succession of blown bridges and ambushes. Within twenty-four hours the retreat stalled, amid teeming enemy forces firing from dense vegetation on higher ground.

Charton’s predicament represented only one-half of a horror story, however. A second force, designated Task Force Bayard and composed of 3,500 mainly Moroccan troops stiffened by a crack paratroop battalion, was dispatched north to meet the Cao Bang column and support its passage to safety. Bayard left That Khe on 30 September, commanded by Col. Marcel Le Page. As the force approached Dong Khe it too was halted by Vietminh, raking and pounding the column with machine-gun and mortar fire. Higher headquarters ordered Le Page to adopt desperate measures: burn his vehicles, abandon his guns, take to the jungle, march his men around the Vietminh to meet Charton. The experience that followed was dreadful indeed. In accordance with his almost deranged instructions, Le Page led his men away from the French lines, ever deeper into a wilderness, to link hands with another doomed force.

Marchers soon began to fall out and vanish, never to be seen again: a man wounded was a man fated to die. Each climb and descent was agony for heavily-laden infantry, drenched by rain that also denied them air support. The Vietminh were weary too, after days of strife and pursuit, but they enjoyed the peerless thrill of winning: they knew the French were in desperate straits. Giap issued an exultant 6 October order of the day: ‘The enemy is hungrier and colder than you!’ Charton and Le Page met next day, their columns alike shrunken by losses, lacking water, food, ammunition. Then the Vietminh struck again – fifteen battalions pouring fire into their exhausted enemies. The Moroccans broke in panic. Their commanders ordered dispersal into small parties, what became almost literally a ‘Sauve qui peut!’ Charton was wounded and taken prisoner; most of the other fugitives were killed piecemeal. Just six hundred men eventually reached French positions further south; some 4,800 were listed as dead or missing, while material losses were immense: 450 trucks, eight thousand rifles, 950 automatic weapons and a hundred mortars. Giap celebrated by getting drunk with his Chinese advisers, for what he later claimed was the first time in his life.

On 18 October the French abandoned another northern camp at Lang Son, where huge stocks of munitions fell into communist hands. The cost of these battles was high for the Vietminh – an estimated nine thousand casualties. But whereas the world quickly discovered the scale of the French disaster, now as in the future the communists suppressed all tidings that might tarnish their triumphs, demoralise their supporters. Not all the fighting went one way: during the early months of 1951 Giap failed in a succession of large-scale assaults. In January when the Vietminh attacked a base thirty miles north-west of Hanoi, French air power and especially napalm inflicted crushing losses – six thousand dead, eight thousand wounded. The lesson for the communist commander was that he must still expect to be beaten when he committed large forces within reach of French air- and firepower.

A Western general who suffered such a succession of defeats as did Giap in the spring of 1951, creating such hecatombs of his own men’s corpses, would have faced a political and media storm, almost certainly been sacked. The Vietminh politburo, however, faced no public scrutiny. Ho Chi Minh, the only arbiter who mattered, kept faith in his general. Giap, like Marshal Zhukov in World War II, was never held to account for the shocking ‘butchers’ bills’ his victories imposed. This gave him an important edge over an enemy whose people were reading daily, in newspapers back home in France, about the anguish of their army in Indochina.

2 WASHINGTON PICKS UP THE TAB

Perhaps the most famous lines in Graham Greene’s novel set in Saigon during the late French era are delivered by his protagonist, the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who says of The Quiet American Alden Pyle: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused … impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.’ The most historically important trend in the war was that as the French reeled before its soaring cost, they turned to the Americans to pay the bills. Which, from 1950 onwards, they did. Far away in Washington, policy-makers became ever more alarmed by the notion that South-East Asia might follow China, submerged beneath a communist inundation. Moreover, the US sought leverage to reconcile a bitterly reluctant France to the rearmament of Germany. Dollars, not francs, soon paid for almost every bomb and bullet expended on the Vietnam battlefield.

American largesse was prompted by communist threats to the stability and democratic institutions of many nations, notably including Greece, Italy, France, Turkey. George Kennan, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and author of the famous 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow, characterised Soviet assertiveness as a ‘fluid stream’ that sought to fill ‘every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power’. Stalin and later Mao supported revolutionary movements wherever these seemed sustainable. On 12 March 1947 America’s president proclaimed before Congress what became known as the Truman doctrine: ‘At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one … I believe that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’

Yet while the international communist threat was real, and the Western commitment to resist it deserves historic admiration, it caused the US and its allies to commit some grievous injustices. For almost two generations Washington acquiesced in the fascist tyranny of Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, and also sustained Central and South American dictatorships whose only merits lay in their protestations of anti-communism. In southern Africa, the British and Americans indulged white minority rule for decades after its indefensibility had become apparent. And in Indochina the French persuaded the West’s Croesus-state that the cause of colonialism was also that of anti-communism. After Mao Zedong’s forces swept China, conservative Americans appalled by the ‘loss’ of their favourite Asian nation demanded stern measures to ensure that such an outcome was not repeated elsewhere. Henry Luce, proprietor of Time-Life and a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists, threw the weight of his empire behind the anti-communist cause in Vietnam, for which it remained an advocate through two decades.

The Sino–Soviet treaty of February 1950 seemed to create a real threat of a Red Asia. The American conservative Michael Lind has written in his revisionist study of Vietnam: ‘On the evening of February 14, 1950, in a banquet hall in the Kremlin, three men whose plans would subject Indochina to a half century of warfare, tyranny and economic stagnation, and inspire political turmoil in the United States and Europe, stood side by side: Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh … There was an international communist conspiracy, and Ho Chi Minh was a charter member of it.’ Kim Il-sung’s June invasion of South Korea galvanised a frightened West. US and allied forces hastened to the Korean peninsula where they fought a three-year war, latterly against the Chinese. The Korean experience goes far to explain why the Americans threw their support behind French colonialism in Indochina, without diminishing the rashness of the policy.

At the State Department Dean Acheson and his assistant secretary Dean Rusk were haunted by memories of the disasters that had followed the democracies’ 1930s appeasement of fascist dictators. The Democratic administration faced mounting congressional pressure to show steel towards the ‘Moscow–Beijing axis’. Sen. William Fulbright observed later that it was essential to judge contemporary US policies against the background of indisputable Soviet expansionism: ‘Here we were in this deadly confrontation with the Russians, and we thought it our duty to thwart them everywhere.’ The McCarthyite witchhunt for left-wing sympathisers in the US government caused the foreign service officers who knew most about Asia to be winnowed out of the State Department, leaving behind an awesome ignorance, especially about Vietnam.

Not everyone in Foggy Bottom, however, wanted to see America embrace colonialist France. State’s Raymond Fosdick early in 1950 urged presciently against repeating America’s China blunder, of becoming ‘allied with reaction’. Whatever were residual Parisian delusions, Fosdick wrote, Indochina would soon become independent. ‘Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?’ The French were losing their war not primarily because they lacked guns and ammunition, but because they would offer nothing that any reasonable Vietnamese might want.

In the following year a young congressman from Massachusetts visited Saigon and wrote in his trip diary: ‘We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what the new nations want.’ Here was wisdom from John F. Kennedy, but Americans were in no mood to heed it. George Kennan in old age bemoaned the manner in which his advocacy of containing the Soviets, and later the Chinese, was misinterpreted in Washington to justify employing to this end almost exclusively military tools, whereas political, cultural, economic and diplomatic ones were often more appropriate.

During 1950’s Korean winter panic, when outright defeat for UN forces seemed possible, Washington signed off a massive Indochina aid increase. Thereafter, as France’s will to fight weakened, that of the US stiffened: the colonial army became increasingly an American proxy. Truman and Acheson, far from pressing Paris to negotiate with the Vietminh, urged it to do no such thing. Here was Washington’s first big blunder in Indochina, from which US policy-making never recovered. Its military aid contribution ballooned to $150m, delivered almost without strings – the proud French refused to confide in their paymasters about operational plans. By early 1951 they were receiving more than 7,200 tons of military equipment a month. The imperial power waged its war wearing American helmets, using many American weapons, driving American jeeps and trucks, flying mostly American planes. Under such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that when American soldiers a decade later arrived in Vietnam, they appeared to its people children of their earlier oppressors.

By September 1951 it had become apparent to objective observers that the French had no realistic prospect of holding Indochina. Yet after their warlord Gen. de Lattre de Tassigny staged a brilliantly theatrical personal mission to the US, within four months Washington shipped to his forces 130,000 tons of equipment, including fifty-three million rounds of ammunition, eight thousand trucks and jeeps, 650 fighting vehicles, two hundred aircraft, fourteen thousand automatic weapons and 3,500 radios. This was de Lattre’s last important contribution before his abrupt departure from Indochina, and death from cancer.

By the end of 1953, the new Eisenhower Republican administration was paying 80 per cent of the cost of the war, a billion dollars a year. The British, still important allies and increasingly expert at retreats from empire, deplored this: they believed that no quantity of guns and bullets could avert looming French expulsion from Indochina. The government of Winston Churchill was alarmed by what it considered an ill-directed US obsession. Selwyn Lloyd, a Foreign Office minister, wrote in August 1953: ‘There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China and to a lesser extent Russia which borders on hysteria.’ The Vietminh were branded, of course, as instruments of the satanic forces in play.

3 PEASANTS

A small minority of Vietnamese who were sufficiently educated to think beyond their own villages witnessed the brutalities of the Vietminh, and welcomed the promise of foreign succour. A schoolboy in the north wrote: ‘From the books I read, I believed that the Americans might be at least better than the French … I was sure that like any other country the US must have some interest when it helped its allies, but … the Americans seemed to be generous in assisting poor countries.’ However, it is easy to understand why many Vietnamese adopted a contrary view, and supported a revolutionary movement that promised the removal of an oppressive colonial regime, together with an assault on a landowning class, French and indigenous, that had exploited the peasantry for generations.

Such was the poverty of rural Vietnam that a man with a primary school certificate was respected as an ‘intellectual’. Some couples owned only a single pair of trousers, which husband and wife took turns to wear. Much of the peasants’ daily labour involved paddling water uphill to irrigate the paddies, often by moonlight because the days became so hot, in good times singing as they worked. The rice had to be fertilised once, weeded three or four times, cut twice. The spring crop accounted for three-quarters of the harvest, because it profited from higher rainfall. Poor villagers might supplement their income by trekking into the wildernesses to gather firewood for sale. Some migrated to towns to work. Those burdened by the worst indebtedness hired themselves out as field labourers.

Family and village were the dominant social institutions. Beside nearly every hut stood its wooden altar, containing offerings of fruit and sweets: the richer the family, the grander its altar. Few parents felt embarrassed by establishing a hierarchy of affection for their many children, rooted in a judgement about which were the ablest and most hard-working. A father’s word was law, though mothers arguably wielded the real power. There was a popular saying: ‘Without a father you could still enjoy rice and fish, but without a mother you might expect to eat only fallen leaves.’ Beyond family, peasants said, ‘The king rules – subject to village regulations.’ Most Catholic communities had a bell tower, Buddhist ones a temple and magnolia trees. There might also be a meeting hall called the dinh, and maybe a carpenter’s and a tailor’s shop.

Villages were subdivided into hamlets in which much of life and labour was shared: at new year people worked together to make rice cakes that were cooked overnight, then threaded on fine strands of bamboo. They gathered to wish parents long life, health and wealth: the Vietnamese, like most Asians, believed that each year conferred upon the old an additional accession of wisdom. After a pig had been slaughtered, children might beg its bladder as a plaything. They played hide-and-seek, shot ‘jute guns’ made from bamboo pipes – like Western pea-shooters – or competed at another game, ‘hitting stick’. At festivals they might taste jam, sweets, peanuts, birds’ eggs and squashes coated in sugar. For the most part, however, they knew only rice and vegetables – and were thankful to get them.

Some Vietnamese later idealised the simplicity of peasant life before war descended. One said: ‘Everybody knew each other and never closed doors.’ She waxed lyrical about ‘the beauty of togetherness’, shared tasks and pleasures. Yet such nostalgia was rare among the vastly greater number who recalled only hardship, persecution and near-starvation. Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh was born east of Hanoi in 1948, daughter of a poor peasant who cultivated four hundred square yards of rice. Her parents and their six children occupied a thatched hut in a hamlet of some thirty families, none of which owned a radio set or bicycle. Few inhabitants could read: when an occasional newspaper reached them, people gathered under a tree, while a literate villager with a good voice perched on a branch to read aloud to them interesting items.

Such people grew up without photographs of parents or children, because none owned a camera. Pyjamas, ba ba dress, brown in the north and black in the south, was the clothing of peasants which only incidentally became the uniform of guerrillas. Infant mortality rates were appalling, partly because it was customary to sever umbilical cords with fragments of broken glass. Villages frequently had to be abandoned because of flood or famine. Binh had no memories of childhood happinesses: life was merely an unremitting struggle for existence, in which children gathered snails to supplement the family diet. At twenty she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party, regarding Ho Chi Minh with quasi-religious fervour as ‘the indispensable, incomparable leader’.

Although Ho’s armed supporters in the south-west never matched the spectacular military successes achieved by Giap’s formations in the north, his movement won widespread support on the single issue of land redistribution. Even prosperous tenant-farmers craved ownership: many were hopelessly in thrall to creditors who appropriated up to half their production. Debtors could become body-slaves, enlisted to rock a landlord’s hammock. They eagerly supported the secret land-redistribution plan of the Vietminh, one of whose cadres told Norman Lewis in 1950: ‘Our enemies are slowly converting us to communism. If it is only by becoming communists that we shall achieve our liberty, then we shall become communists.’

A historian has described Giap’s soldiers as ‘simple men whose world view was formed entirely by their own and their families’ immediate experience … coloured by oppression and hardship over generations’. The foremost strengths of Vietminh fighters were discipline, patience, ingenuity; a genius for fieldcraft and especially camouflage; tolerance of hardship and sacrifice. Above all there was motivation: they yearned to share the fruits of a political, economic and social revolution. Itinerant communist cadres launched political-education programmes and composed folk songs to help villagers learn their alphabets. There was a ‘learn through play’ programme for children. Virtuous as that may sound, it was reinforced by compulsion: cadres caused villagers to display banners decorated with flowers, proclaiming ‘Long live the fighters against illiteracy’. In some places non-readers were wantonly humiliated, forced to crawl through mud to go to market. As ever when communist doctrine was imposed, victims were reminded that this was cruelty with a purpose, for the ultimate good of The People.

As for more drastic penalties, even an official Party history admitted later that ‘not a few innocent people were killed’. Simple country folk serving the Vietminh assumed that any man who affected blue trousers and a white shirt with a tailor’s label must be a French spy. Whereas the Mafia employed the euphemism of sending an enemy to ‘sleep with the fishes’, in the equally watery words of Vietnam’s communists he was dispatched ‘to search for shrimps’. Killings were conducted with maximum brutality and publicity: Vietminh death squads favoured burying victims alive or eviscerating them in front of assembled neighbours. ‘Better that a possible innocent dies than that a guilty man escapes,’ ran a Party catchphrase. In the ‘liberated zones’ the Vietminh established notorious punishment camps. When Nguyen Cong Luan’s father died in one of them, a cigarette lighter was the only possession his jailers grudgingly returned to the widow.

In 1947 the Vietminh conducted an ideological ‘cleansing’ campaign, in which a large though never quantified number of ‘class enemies’ were murdered. Any landlord or government office-holder lived under threat of a death sentence which extended to his family. The Catholic religion bore the taint of foreign ownership, and thus its adherents were vulnerable. Local denunciation sessions – dau to – held in the courtyard of a pagoda or landlord’s house, inspired the dread their organisers intended. Farmers or peasants, often impelled by grudges, rehearsed landlords’ alleged crimes before people’s courts run by Vietminh cadres. If death sentences were pronounced, a victim might there and then be shot, stoned to death, hanged, or face a crueller death. At My Thanh in the Mekong delta a Cao Dai functionary, about to be buried alive, pleaded for a merciful bullet. His killers observed contemptuously that ammunition was being conserved for ‘the pirates’ – the French.

As a peasant child, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh remembered landowners hiding from their accusers by immersing themselves in the nearby pond and covering their heads with reeds, while others adopted crude disguises. Some failed, and she stood among her fellow-villagers watching their trials. Even as a loyal Party cadre, she later admitted that ‘a lot of those people were wrongly accused’. In the north a ‘people’s court’ was often staged as a theatrical event, held at night in an area the size of a football pitch, ringed by bamboo torches. A presidium of seven judges, poor peasants, was attended by a Land Reform cadre and sometimes also Chinese advisers. Behind the stage hung portraits of Ho, Mao and Stalin, together with painted slogans such as ‘Down with the Treacherous Reactionary Landlords’.

As for summary executions, one peasant retained an indelible childhood memory of the Vietminh visiting his northern village in 1952, seizing two unarmed soldiers in French service who had called to wish friends a happy new year, and beheading them behind his family’s house. This twelve-year-old said later: ‘I can still hear the sound of their necks being cut through.’ Then the guerrillas left, and French troops arrived. They accused neighbours of responsibility for the men’s death – and burnt every surrounding house. In 1953 the Vietminh sentenced the child to spend two weeks in re-education camp, conducting self-criticism: ‘Everything that I did wrong, or my parents or grandparents did wrong, had to be written down. Everybody had to think hard what to write.’ When Stalin died, all prisoners were obliged to assume black mourning bands. Soon after, a French offensive forced the guerrillas to flee, liberating the boy. He and his family briefly returned to their house, then fled to Hanoi.

The struggle’s seesaw fortunes imposed continual strain. A poor peasant in the Mekong delta expressed his delight during a period of Vietminh reverses, when their economic blockade was lifted and he was for a time free to sell his produce: ‘The people were very happy … I myself said many times, “I hope that just one side will control us – no matter which one. Living under the control of both is too much.”’ Anh, a daughter of landowning parents, joined the Vietminh because she sought the expulsion of the French, married a fellow-fighter, gave birth to a son, and shared the hardships of life as a guerrilla in the Mekong delta. In 1952, however, she quit: ‘I saw too many frightening things. The communists were grabbing all the power and killing off the nationalists.’ She attributed her own survival merely to the fact that she was too young to pose a threat.

In the ‘liberated zones’ of the north, rather as some British people in old age became nostalgic for the legendary ‘blitz spirit’ of 1940, Vietminh later looked back on wartime as a halcyon era. Guitarist Van Ky, who became a guerrilla strolling minstrel, enthused, ‘The spirit was marvellous! We imagined that we were all part of one big family.’ Volunteer canteens were formed, known as ‘soldiers’ mothers’ restaurants’, at which local women provided free food for fighters. Ky and his trio walked hundreds of miles to perform: ‘There was something very interesting and wonderful about this. Even though we were in a war zone where the fighting was very fierce, every night we would organise a show, and draw big crowds. The songs I sang weren’t very good, and we did not harmonise well, but we would tell stories, recite poetry.’ Often the lights around the stage had to be masked, to escape French attention. Ky performed as far south as Hue, where he slept on the bank of the Perfume River, ate food brought out from the city, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and briefly fell in love with a girl in one of his audiences.

Ky persuaded his English-speaking fellow-performer Hai Chau to read aloud to them from the Reader’s Digest, to help him learn English phrases, in preparation for life after the war. Some of these were unexpected, such as ‘I have a surprise for you in my pocket.’ Periodically on their travels they would be abruptly awakened by a voice shouting ‘Tay can!’ – ‘French sweep!’ As the enemy approached, Vietminh fighters would say wearily, ‘The buffalo are out.’ Hai Chau wrote a song with that title, which soldiers loved, satirising the occupiers. Ky was one among many revolutionaries who discovered romance in their shared experience. It offered Vietnamese what the French had for a century denied them: self-respect. Moreover the passage of each month, then of each year, increased the belief of millions of Vietnamese that the best reason to support the communists was that they were destined to win. A little peasant girl sat up far into the night with her mother and sisters in their hut near Hue, making Vietminh flags, ‘red with the yellow star, because we knew that the people would want them to celebrate … victory’.

Yet it seems mistaken uncritically to accept Van Ky’s picture of the war years as a romantic idyll: the privations and sacrifices were terrible. Tensions increased between the revolutionary movement’s peasant supporters and its bourgeois ones. Nguyen Duc Huy, born in 1931 the son of a poor farmer, was sent to study at the new Vietminh military academy in China, where he found the atmosphere poisoned by class struggles and relentless self-criticism sessions. A cadet who had been decorated for bravery in battle killed himself under ideological interrogation. Huy was variously accused of running a French spy network and a nationalist assassination team, then imprisoned for seven months in an underground cell. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘The injustice of it all is impossible to describe.’ What seems extraordinary is that after such experiences he served as a company commander against the French, then led a battalion against the Americans, without losing faith in the Party.

Throughout Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan’s early years with the Vietminh she was harassed about her background in a wealthy dynasty. Her father was a member of the royal family who had served in the emperor’s cabinet. With Giap’s army, at first she was merely described dismissively as ‘bo doi nhoc’ – ‘a kid soldier’. Later, however, despite her passion for the cause, comrades said scornfully, ‘This girl went to a French school – why have they sent her here? How can a mandarin’s daughter live with the Resistance?’ Toan said later: ‘They made things hard for me. I was very unhappy.’ She herself remained nonetheless loyal to the Vietminh, but the enthusiasm for the guerrillas of another bourgeois, sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky, waned: ‘For them the Resistance movement was not merely about expelling foreigners. It was about turning the tables, becoming rulers, revenge.’ Ky eventually took an army commission with the French, becoming a pilot.

Despite heavy losses in clashes around Hanoi, the Vietminh continued to expand their northern ‘liberated zones’. By 1952 they were estimated to control a quarter of the south’s population; three-quarters of the people of central Vietnam; over half in the north. The French wasted immense resources on fortifications. The so-called ‘De Lattre line’, created to protect the Red River delta, poured fifty-one million cubic yards of concrete into 2,200 pillboxes, each one of which was allotted a number prefaced by ‘PK’ – poste kilométrique. This suited the Vietminh strategy of grignotage – gnawing away at French strength: they progressively eliminated such isolated positions, always in darkness. The first that defenders knew of their nemesis was the explosion of a pole charge in the barbed wire, followed by cries of ‘Tien-len!’ – ‘Forward!’ – from attacking communist infantry. By dawn the Vietminh would be gone, leaving only corpses, often mutilated, and blackened patches where mortars or rockets had exploded on earth or concrete. And in Hanoi or Haiphong, one French staff officer would mutter to another, ‘Did you hear what happened to PK141 last night?’

The war threw up many larger-than-life French leaders, such as the huge, red-bearded Col. Paul Vanuxem, a fifty-year-old intellectual warrior, qualified to hold tenure as a professor of philosophy. Maj. Marcel Bigeard had gone into World War II as a sergeant, and parachuted into France in 1944. Col. Christian de Castries was a cavalryman and a dandy, never without his silk scarf, who cherished his reputation as a ladies’ man. There were famous women, too – the likes of Valérie André, a doctor who was also a helicopter pilot, and the highly decorated airborne nurse Paule Dupont d’Isigny.

In the autumn of 1952 Giap concentrated three divisions on the east bank of the Red River, tasked with seizing Nghia Lo, a strategically important ridge. Thanks to night marches and brilliant use of daylight concealment, each man looking to the backpack camouflage of the soldier in front of him, they deployed unnoticed by the French. Then, in a series of assaults that began on 17 October, they overran a chain of posts. Marcel Bigeard’s para battalion covered the retreat of the surviving detachments towards the Black River, in a series of actions that became a nightmare legend. They were obliged to abandon their wounded, and local people later reported finding Bigeard’s trail adorned with the severed heads of those left behind, set on stakes by the Vietminh. The major and those of his men who survived were greeted as heroes when at last they reached the French lines, but the Nghia Lo battles had been a significant disaster.

In April 1953 the communists opened a new front in Laos, to disperse French strength. By June, Chinese deliveries of supplies and munitions had risen from 250 tons in the same period the previous year to two thousand tons a month, together with Molotova trucks and bulldozers. Meanwhile French forces were running short of officers and NCOs, many of the North African troops were scarcely trained, and nobody retained much confidence in the spirit of 110,000 locally recruited soldiers. Gen. ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel, senior US Army officer in the Pacific, visited Saigon in the summer of 1953, soon after Gen. Henri Navarre became commander-in-chief. With characteristic bombast the American urged the French to stir their stumps – adopt a more aggressive military posture. The Korean experience had shown that when lightly-armed Chinese troops caught Americans in the open, they sometimes prevailed. But where circumstances were contrived in which US forces held prepared positions covered by air- and firepower, they became almost invincible. Why could not the French exploit the same realities? Navarre agreed. He cast about for a battlefield on which French strength and Vietminh weakness could be laid bare before the world. He chose Dienbienphu.

3
The Fortress That Never Was
1 WAITING FOR GIAP

So many ‘fatal decisions’ were made in Indochina that it would be invidious to single out any for primacy, but that which was made in November 1953 removed any lingering doubt about who was to become the victor, who the vanquished. Dienbienphu was a relatively small battle, engaging on the colonialist side barely a division. Yet it assumed decisive moral significance, because it was launched as a French initiative, with the explicit purpose of bringing the Vietminh to battle, and was then lost for reasons that reflected epic bungling. Navarre’s bosses in Paris were in those days almost as confused as was the general himself, being unwilling either to give up the struggle or to continue it. France’s Committee of National Defence concluded at a November meeting that the strategic objective was ‘to oblige the enemy to recognise the impossibility of achieving a decisive military outcome’. This could only be achieved by delivering punitive blows at some or all of Giap’s six regular formations, deployed in the north. Yet Adm. Georges Cabanier was thereupon dispatched to Saigon, bearing instructions for Navarre to attempt nothing ambitious: everything important should henceforward be left to the politicians.

On 2 November, however, the general had determined to reoccupy in strength an old camp at Dienbienphu, 175 miles west of Hanoi and close to the border with Laos. The decision was made without much intelligence about the enemy’s whereabouts or intentions: Giap was always better informed than his French counterpart, partly through well-placed communists in Paris, whose first loyalty was to the Party rather than to the tricolor. Nonetheless, Navarre said afterwards, ‘We were absolutely convinced of our superiority in defensive fortified positions.’ His deputy responsible for Tonkin, Maj. Gen. René Cogny, was a big, self-important forty-nine-year-old who had endured Gestapo captivity in World War II. Cogny favoured concentration upon defence of the Red River delta, but acquiesced in Navarre’s new plan.

By creating a powerful air–land base so far west, they reasoned that its garrison could sally forth to interdict Vietminh movements, and give the enemy a bloody nose if he dared to attack the camp. Occupying the cluster of hamlets known as Dienbienphu would deny Giap access to a big rice- and opium-growing area. Though its airstrip lay far from Hanoi, Cogny could call upon sixty-nine C-47 Dakotas to meet the garrison’s eighty-ton daily supply requirement. Most of the perils to French forces were deemed to lie in the initial drop onto a ‘hot’ DZ, where a Vietminh battalion was known to be encamped.

Navarre, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of World War I, thought the risks acceptable. He was a chilly, personally fearless and strikingly handsome officer, with little experience of senior command, but a formidable presence and indeed conceit. He had arrived in Indochina the previous May with the sort of mandate that became grimly familiar among his American successors: to create conditions for an exit negotiation from strength. In Washington John Foster Dulles, the dour, unyielding, messianic sixty-five-year-old lawyer who served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, cited the precedent of Korea, where United Nations forces had fought fiercely to the end – only six months earlier – to empower the UN delegation parleying at Panmunjom. Whatever Navarre’s subordinates said afterwards, there is no convincing evidence that any supposed the downside risks of Dienbienphu to be more than tactical headaches – certainly not that they might precipitate a disaster.

The first two battalions of French and Vietnamese paratroopers jumped at 1035 on Friday, 20 November, just before Navarre met Cabanier, his visitor from Paris. The general almost certainly knew the nature of the directive the admiral bore – not to stick his neck out – and had deliberately pre-empted this. Unfortunately, the French initiative perfectly conformed to the hopes of Ho Chi Minh, Giap and chief ideologist Truong Chinh. At an October meeting in a simple bamboo house deep in the mountains, they had agreed that contesting the Red River delta merely enabled the French to apply forces and firepower close to their own bases. The Vietminh objective must be to tempt them instead to disperse, then strike where their troops ventured furthest. With a characteristic gesture and figure of speech, Ho raised his clenched fist and likened it to French strength in the east, then said, ‘But if you spread your hand, it becomes easy to break the fingers, one by one.’ Navarre, by extending a finger westward to Dienbienphu, fulfilled Ho’s appointed role for him.

The opening gambit was played when French and Vietnamese paras began to leap from C-47s over their designated objective, as dispatchers gave the repeated ‘Go! – Go! – Go!’ that propelled them from the dim fuselages and engine roar into brief sunlit coolness six hundred feet above the steamy landing zone. Foremost among the tough, unyielding French officers swaying beneath their canopies was Col. Pierre Langlais, a forty-four-year-old Breton of boundless courage but limited intellect and notoriously vile temper. They landed into the firefight they had expected: a medical officer, making his first combat drop, took a bullet in the head before he hit the ground. By nightfall the attackers had forced the Vietminh to withdraw with substantial losses: they secured a perimeter, at the cost of fifteen of Langlais’ men dead and thirty-four wounded. He himself was cursing even more freely than usual, because he smashed his ankle in the drop, as many parachutists do, and had to be evacuated to spend a month in plaster.

Next day US-built C-119 Flying Boxcars droned overhead, dropping heavy equipment and vehicles – nothing could yet land on the strip, cratered by the Vietminh. By the time the struggle at Dienbienphu finally ended, the French would have used there almost sixty thousand parachutes, so that white and coloured blotches, plague spots, came to dominate aerial photographs. Once bulldozers had rendered the airstrip serviceable, a stream of reinforcements arrived, enlarging the garrison towards its eventual peak of twelve thousand men.

The camp’s appointed commander was Col. Christian de Castries, a fifty-one-year-old military aristocrat who boasted a marshal, an admiral and nine generals in his family tree. A famous off-duty equestrian who had won many medals and suffered grievous wounds from a mine in Indochina, he was afterwards accused of cowardice by his critics, who claimed that at Dienbienphu he lurked in his bunker. De Castries’ record makes such a charge implausible. On the moral side, however, the verdict is less assured: he lacked any gift for inspirational leadership. As his predicament became ever more burdensome, he lapsed into gloomy fatalism. He cannot justly be blamed for the outcome – Navarre and Cogny were the battle’s architects. But he made many tactical errors, both of commission and omission.

The word ‘fortress’ was repeatedly used to describe Dienbienphu, yet it was never anything of the sort. Rather, it was a chain of low hills amid a plain overlooked by densely-wooded mountains, and now entrenched with shocking casualness. Scarcely any of the defensive positions created in the months before the Vietminh assault were adequately fortified: many of the garrison’s men were courageous enough, but regarded digging with disdain. Their commanders took for granted a 24/7 air link with Hanoi.

Meanwhile, far away in the hills, Giap learned of the deployment: the French press, of which his staff were assiduous readers, reported Navarre’s intention to stand and fight. The Vietminh general’s decision directly to challenge the enemy commander-in-chief – to commit large forces to attack the camp – was founded upon a shift in the military balance, at first unknown at French headquarters in Hanoi. The Chinese had supplied the Vietminh with American-built M2A1 105mm howitzers captured from the defeated Nationalists, together with 120mm mortars and 37mm anti-aircraft guns. These provided Giap’s artillerymen with much-enhanced hitting power, and above all range – a 105mm shell could reach targets from gunpits twelve thousand yards away.

The most important, and indeed historic, call Giap made, in which his Chinese advisers played an unproven but possibly influential role, was logistical: to convince himself and the politburo that his men could drag these weapons, each of which weighed over two tons, five hundred miles over some of the most intractable terrain in Asia, and sustain for months supplies for a four-division siege force. To achieve this, on 6 December a general mobilisation was decreed across the ‘liberated zone’, to muster a rotating host of peasant porters, each of whom served at least a month before stumbling home exhausted, emaciated, racked by disease. To motivate these men and women, new emphasis was placed on the imminence of land reform, their prize for victory. Alongside the familiar army slogan ‘Everything for the front, everything for victory!’ there now appeared a new one: ‘The land to the peasants!’

Giap shifted his advanced headquarters three hundred miles, to a cluster of bomb-proof caves and man-made tunnels nine miles from the French camp, where he laid out his map table on 5 January 1954. His staff began to publish a bulletin for the troops. Among its news reports and exhortations were lurid cartoons. One such depicted France as a grossly ugly woman who has given birth to Dienbienphu, and lies beset by tiny black-clad figures who are severing the umbilical cord of the air link – as indeed they would do, just a few weeks later.

Communist logisticians and engineers laboured on their supply route, some stretches capable of accommodating Soviet Molotova trucks which operated in relays, offloaded and reloaded by gangs of porters. Rice was rafted part-way from China, down the Black River. Giap demanded a battlefield stockpile of a thousand tons of ammunition – each 105mm shell weighed forty-four pounds. Vietminh infantry began moving towards Dienbienphu, where on arrival they were presented with spades to wield, ropes to haul. Along the length of the trail, close attention was paid to camouflage. In jungle, treetops were lashed together to form a tunnel, while bridges were created, invisible beneath river surfaces. In open country gangs followed trucks, brushing away telltale tracks. When French aircraft anyway caught them, the only succour for the wounded was provided by medical students, equipped with rags and peasant palliatives.

As for the guns, Vietminh officer Tran Do described a routine repeated through weeks: ‘Each night when freezing fog descended into the valleys, groups of men mustered … The track was so narrow, [and] soon an ankle-deep bog, that the slightest deviation of the wheels would have caused a gun to plunge far into a ravine. By sheer sweat and tears we hauled them into position one by one, with men playing the part of trucks … We existed on rice either almost raw or overcooked, because the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. On ascents, hundreds of men dragged the guns on long ropes, with a winch on the crest to prevent them from slipping. The descents were much tougher, the guns so much heavier, the tracks twisting and turning. Gun crews steered and chocked their pieces, while infantry manned the ropes and winches. It became the work of a whole torchlit night to move a gun five hundred or a thousand yards.’ Vietminh propaganda made a posthumous hero of a man who threw himself beneath a wheel to check a slipping gun’s escape into a chasm.

French intelligence, striving to monitor this fevered activity in the north-west, estimated that Giap could muster just twenty thousand porters, who could feed only a matching number of soldiers. In reality, however, the communists mobilised sixty thousand. Strengthened bicycles became a critical link in the supply chain, each bearing a load of 120lb, rising in emergencies to 200lb. Communist leaders inspired not only their fighters, but also the porters, to levels of physical effort and sacrifice that few Frenchmen or mercenaries proved capable of matching. A prisoner was deeply impressed when ten Vietminh raised their hands in response to a cadre’s call for volunteers to dispose of delayed-action French bombs.

The campaign developed in slow motion, with a lapse of more than a hundred days between the initial parachute landing on 20 November and Giap’s first assault in March. From the outset, French attempts to advance beyond their perimeter were punished: in December two para battalions that probed towards a village nine miles distant were mauled by the besiegers and obliged to retire. Navarre gave new orders to de Castries: he must simply hold the camp at any cost. Once the French had landed four 155mm guns, as well as 105mm howitzers and 120mm mortars, they felt confident about outgunning the Vietminh. Yet it proved frustratingly difficult to pinpoint targets: the poor quality of local maps impeded air and artillery observers; the enemy’s heavy weapons were seldom visible.

Through December the French high command received a steady trickle of intelligence that disturbed Navarre and Cogny – though not nearly as gravely as it should have done. They now knew that four Vietminh divisions were moving in the northern mountains, but remained uncertain of their destination – enemy diversionary actions in the Central Highlands and the Red River delta fed vacillation in Hanoi. Throughout the war hitherto, Vietminh assaults that met strong French resistance were aborted: the generals thus believed that Giap’s army would respond to a costly repulse at Dienbienphu by folding its tents. A correspondent of Le Monde who visited the camp told his readers that the prevailing spirit was On va leur montrer! – ‘We’ll show them!’

As the year end approached, Navarre became aware that the Vietminh were deploying howitzers: on 31 December he reported to Paris that the camp might become indefensible. Yet through the first weeks of 1954, boredom was the garrison’s principal enemy. Col. Langlais returned from hospital with a heavily-strapped ankle, and rode about on a little pony. Patrols suffered a steady stream of casualties. Many men yearned for the Vietminh to attack, so that they might be hurled back into their mountain fastnesses, freeing the defenders to adjourn to the fleshpots of Hanoi. Yet some also were apprehensive: Lt. Col. Jules Gaucher wrote to his wife on 11 January: ‘Time passes slowly and nothing interesting happens. They tell us of hard times coming, that will shake us out of our routine. Rumour has it that we are destined for sacrifice.’

During the weeks that followed, the garrison launched several sorties against the enemy’s artillery, all of which failed. Attempts to interdict Giap’s supply routes from the air were also unsuccessful, partly because of the limitations of French B-26 Marauder crews: Langlais once found his positions undergoing an apparent Chinese air attack, then discovered that they had been hit by an errant Frenchman. This was unsurprising when many bombloads were released from twelve thousand feet. Far away from Dienbienphu, the Vietminh staged night commando attacks designed both to sap French air strength and to distract Navarre’s attention. Twenty aircraft, most of them precious C-47s, were destroyed in raids on airfields around Hanoi and Haiphong.

From December onwards Navarre and his colleagues had ample intelligence, shared with their superiors in Paris, to show that they faced the prospect of a full-blooded disaster. Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder. If the garrison of Dienbienphu had been evacuated, nobody outside Vietnam would ever have heard of the place. There would have been merely a local withdrawal of a kind that had become familiar. Navarre bears principal responsibility, but France’s entire political and military leadership deserves to share. It was the country’s misfortune to be governed and commanded by men burdened with the humiliations of the previous decade, and thus constrained in every decision by a yearning to restore national honour, revive la patrie’s glory. In a spirit of defiance they perpetrated one of the least inevitable military fiascos of the twentieth century.

During the last week of January, the defenders were placed on high alert: intelligence reported that the Vietminh would launch their big assault within hours. Intelligence was right: that was the plan; but then Giap changed it. The foundation stones of the Vietminh commander’s recent successes had been meticulous preparations. To the frustration of his subordinates, Giap now decided that conditions at Dienbienphu were insufficiently propitious. His men were there, sure enough, but not the massive stockpile of artillery and mortar ammunition that he wanted. He postponed the scheduled assault.

His new, revised timetable meant that the impending battle must continue into the wet season, which in that region would be very wet indeed. Giap calculated that his own men, deployed on the hills, would suffer less than the garrison on the plain. In Paris a senior officer agreed, observing gloomily that by April, at the camp command post de Castries would be paddling in a foot of water: ‘We believed we could destroy three of the best Vietminh divisions. Instead the enemy has tied down an important portion of our forces, and it is he who manoeuvres around us.’ There was further discussion of evacuation, but such a course would have meant abandonment of huge stocks of materiel and almost certain extinction of the rearguard. Instead, Navarre reinforced.

For a further seven weeks, which seemed interminable alike to besiegers and besieged, the rival forces gazed at each other across the scrub and hills. Planes came and went. There were skirmishes beyond the perimeter, and a stream of distinguished visitors – military and political grandees, the novelist Graham Greene, the US Army’s Mike O’Daniel – all of whom departed unscathed. Meanwhile air attacks on the Vietminh supply line made little impact. Aircrew were inexperienced, and they dubbed their battered old planes les pièges – ‘the deathtraps’. Many of the 650 French airmen who died in Indochina were victims of human error or mechanical failure rather than of enemy action. The Vietminh learned that while raids were noisy, they inflicted surprisingly few casualties. A young man who survived a strike on his village wrote: ‘Bombing and shelling scared people more than it really hurt them … Repeated bombardments can make people less afraid.’ Moreover, around Dienbienphu aircraft faced increasingly fierce ground fire from Soviet-made 37mm guns. In December, fifty-three planes were hit more or less seriously. Thereafter, as the weather suffered its usual seasonal deterioration, pilots reliant on World War II navigation technology faced ever greater hazards, which caused a steady stream of losses.

From Navarre’s viewpoint, more alarming even than the battlefield story was news from Europe which overnight lofted the stakes at Dienbienphu: there was to be a Big Power summit conference; a negotiation. Soldiers sensed in the air a stench wretchedly familiar to Frenchmen: that of looming betrayal. Unwilling as they were to acknowledge that their own efforts to shoot and shell a path to victory in Indochina were failing, they professed now to see themselves about to fall victim to the machinations of politicians whom they despised.

In the US and Europe, dismay had been growing about the Indochina war. During the early years of the wartime Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bombs, British prime minister Winston Churchill displayed naïveté and even insouciance about its implications. A decade later, however, even despite increasing senility the old statesman was far more sensitive to the perils of unleashing nuclear weapons than were many Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower. Churchill and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden understood that the newly-created H-bomb was not just another toy of war; that even to threaten its use in fulfilment of foreign policy objectives was a supremely grave proposition.

As the US administration pondered options, prominent among these was that of bombarding China, to punish Mao Zedong for backing the Vietminh. Such a prospect appalled Britain. Although only a few Americans – some wearing uniforms which bore generals’ stars – spoke explicitly of ‘nuking’ the Chinese, once conflict started there was no knowing where it would end. The British cherished a belief in diplomacy that the Eisenhower administration, increasingly contemptuous of its ally’s perceived timidity, did not share. American conservatives denounced as appeasement Britain’s willingness to engage diplomatically with China and the USSR.

The French exit process from Indochina was precipitated by a tense, difficult January 1954 foreign ministers’ meeting in Berlin. Vyacheslav Molotov, for the Russians, urged the convening of a conference at which communist China – hitherto excluded from international gatherings, at American insistence – would be represented. This would address outstanding issues in Asia, notably Korea and Indochina. US secretary of state John Foster Dulles balked. The notion of attending a conference with the communist usurpers of China was anathema. Yet Eden strongly endorsed the idea, with the backing of Churchill. For France, Georges Bidault concurred: the tottering government of which he was foreign minister was desperate to open a dialogue with Beijing about its support for the Vietminh. Dulles then grudgingly acquiesced. On 18 February the foreign ministers announced that a conference would begin in Geneva on 26 April, to which all interested parties would be invited, chaired jointly by Britain and Russia.

Both armies in Indochina were now impelled by a new urgency, to achieve the strongest possible battlefield position in advance of negotiations. Navarre and his subordinates abandoned the seesawing predictions they had made since December, and expressed vacuous hopes of victory. Emboldened by the soldiers’ confidence, the Paris government dismissed out of hand a proposal from India’s leader Jawaharlal Nehru for an immediate Indochina ceasefire. It remains unlikely that the Vietminh would have accepted such a truce, but there it was: the French rejected a chance – the last conceivable chance – to retrieve their stakes from the table at Dienbienphu.

2 DISASTER BECKONS

Far from Paris, amidst the red earthworks, scurrying jeeps and sporadic shellfire of that wilderness outpost in western Tonkin, the French discerned another unexpected development in the enemy camp. Conventional wisdom demanded that artillery should be deployed on reverse inclines, beyond immediate reach of the enemy. Yet Giap, making new rules, sited his howitzers on forward slopes, where their barrels looked down on de Castries’ positions, with sufficient reach to claw most. The guns remained nonetheless almost invulnerable to French counter-bombardment, because they were lodged in tunnels until dragged forward to fire. The plain of Dienbienphu lay a thousand feet above sea level; the loftiest French positions rose six hundred feet higher. Yet only five thousand yards away, the communists held a hill line with an average elevation of 3,600 feet. Giap’s artillery would soon be able to ravage every French movement.

De Castries’ guns and mortars stood in open pits, hideously exposed. A few dismantled eighteen-ton Chafee tanks were flown into the camp and reassembled, providing mobile firepower. But French officers began to understand that they faced an ordeal by bombardment such as few of their men had ever experienced. Increasingly lively communist shelling meant that few men on outlying positions could avail themselves of the joys of the camp’s two field brothels. By mid-February, though no serious Vietminh attack had taken place, 10 per cent of the garrison had already become casualties. Diminished availability of C-47s caused worsening shortfalls in deliveries of supplies and munitions.

On 11 March, Vietminh artillery began to pound planes parked beside Dienbienphu’s runway. From the 13th every take-off and landing came under fire: airspace became unsafe below seven thousand feet. On the 12th René Cogny paid what proved his last visit: his plane departed amid a flurry of incoming shells, which the garrulous general was fortunate to survive. For weeks Giap’s troops had been digging, digging, digging on a scale such as no army had matched since the Western Front in World War I. One of them wrote: ‘The shovel became our most important weapon.’ They created around the perimeter a network of tunnels and trenches which provided both shelter and covered approaches. The French positions focused upon nine hills, to each one of which was allotted the beautiful name of a woman. Isabelle and Béatrice were deemed the strongest, though a newly-arrived para officer noted with dismay the vulnerability of their trenches and emplacements: the garrison might have fared better had its men spent the previous weeks digging as energetically as the besiegers.

On the morning of 13 March, Giap’s 312th Division was read a message from Ho Chi Minh, then joined in singing the Vietminh anthem. That afternoon, its soldiers mustered to attack Béatrice, the eastern French position, less than two miles from the airstrip. At 1705, as the defenders saw the Vietminh beginning to move, they were about to order defensive mortar and artillery fire when Giap pre-empted them. A storm of shells and heavy mortar bombs descended not only on Béatrice, but on widely dispersed targets throughout the camp, especially gun positions and headquarters. The bombardment was extraordinarily accurate, perhaps assisted by Chinese advisers among the Vietminh gunners, who had enjoyed weeks of leisure in which to calibrate ranges and scrutinise de Castries’ strongpoints. Vietminh patrols had reconnoitred with courage and infinite patience, crawling for hours in darkness amongst the French wire and trenches. In particular, they pinpointed the wireless antennae that marked command centres.

Pierre Langlais’ group survived only by a miracle. The colonel himself was standing naked beneath a pierced-fuel-drum shower when the barrage began, and ran unclad into his bunker, seconds before a shell exploded on its roof. He and his officers were left stunned in a chaos of fallen timbers, debris, earth and wrecked equipment; yet a second shell failed to explode. Elsewhere, a red and yellow fireball marked the eruption of the camp’s fuel and napalm dump. All but one of de Castries’ spotter aircraft were wrecked.

As the light faded on 13 March, defending commanders found themselves crippled. Many phone lines had been cut, and radios were working poorly in the usual evening atmospheric mush. The 450-strong Foreign Legion battalion holding Béatrice was understrength and short of officers. Commanders expected an attack, but not before nightfall. The Vietminh had excavated trenches within fifty yards of Béatrice’s perimeter, and from these their infantry stormed forward amidst a cacophony of cries and bugle calls, followed by detonations as bangalore torpedoes exploded beneath the defenders’ wire. Artillery dealt the deadliest blows: at 1830 a shell devastated Béatrice’s command post. As darkness deepened, the occupants of each bunker on the hill were obliged to fight isolated battles beneath the glow of flares. Some Legionnaires imposed heavy losses upon the attackers before succumbing. Within an hour, however, and exploiting a ruthless disregard for their own casualties, the Vietminh occupied positions deep inside the defences.

One French company commander continued to radio for gun support even as his trenches were overrun: ‘Right 100 … 100 nearer … 50 nearer … Fire on me! Les Viets are on top of us!’ Then there was only a hiss of static, as the voice fell silent. Col. Gaucher, who had gloomily predicted to his wife that he and his comrades were ‘destined for sacrifice’, was mortally wounded. Langlais was ordered to take over, but lacked phone and radio links. Soon after midnight the Vietminh secured control of Béatrice, having killed over a hundred defenders and captured twice as many, most of them wounded. Just a hundred men led by a sergeant-major made good their escape. When sunrise came at 0618 on the 14th, a strange silence overhung the battlefield, under a drizzle that turned to heavy rain. The camp’s medical staff emerged blinking and exhausted from their stifling bunker, having handled ten abdominal and ten chest cases, two cranials, fifteen fractures and fourteen amputations. Debris lay everywhere: blackened and burnt-out vehicles, smashed aircraft and equipment. A belated and futile air attack was launched against the Vietminh gun positions.

Then a wounded officer prisoner, Lt. Frédéric Turpin, staggered across from Béatrice to Dominique, bearing from the Vietminh the offer of a truce to evacuate casualties, which Cogny’s headquarters authorised. This was a shrewd psychological move by Giap, since it passed to the garrison responsibility for eight badly wounded men, and acknowledged his army as local victors. Turpin was fortunate enough to secure air evacuation to Hanoi. As for the men who remained, Pierre Rocolle wrote: ‘A stupor fell upon all those not engaged in urgent tasks. Officers and men could not stop asking themselves: “How could a Legion unit have been so swiftly overcome?”’ Cogny’s response was to reinforce the garrison with yet another battalion of paratroopers.

Giap prepared to repeat his success against Gabrielle, further north, defended by the 7th Algerian Tirailleurs, who ate supper in anticipation of a busy night. Sure enough, at 1800 on the 14th, just before sunset, men of the Vietminh’s 308th Division hurled themselves forward. A bitter struggle continued into darkness, lit by flares dropped from an orbiting Dakota. For some hours the defenders clung on, with French artillery harrowing the Vietminh infantry. At 0330 on the 15th, however, renewed communist fire fell on the hill, scoring a hit on the command post which killed or wounded most of its occupants. The French hoped to counter-attack at daybreak, and defending officers were heartened by news of tanks and paras concentrating in readiness. The Algerians had had enough, however. At 0700 on the 15th the first Vietminh soldiers appeared on the crest of Gabrielle. The Tirailleurs, including one company which had not been engaged, scrambled out of their trenches and ran pell-mell down the hill. The communists took possession, and found the battalion’s concussed colonel among 350 prisoners and eighty dead. The newly-arrived Vietnamese battalion was committed to counter-attack across open ground, but in the face of shellfire its men faltered: the assault was abandoned as Tirailleur fugitives trickled into the camp’s shrunken perimeter.

French leaders reeled under this second blow within twenty hours, and chose to attribute blame for Gabrielle’s loss to its officers. Navarre observed in a letter to Marshal Juin in Paris that the collapse of morale had been ‘most conspicuous in the command elements, which had previously displayed high confidence (too much of it, indeed) and tended to veer from one extreme to the other’. The general dispatched two volunteer colonels to Dienbienphu to replace those who had fallen. With the air force conspicuously failing to interdict Giap’s supply routes, Navarre instead proposed a ludicrous scheme to seed rainclouds over the jungle, inundating the communists.

In the camp, several of de Castries’ headquarters officers suffered nervous collapses: the chief of staff sat motionless in his bunker, refusing to remove his helmet. De Castries himself exercised command, but not leadership: he offered his men no ringing oratory nor comradely cheer, instead apparently resigning himself to the administration of a descent towards disaster. Communist howitzers turned their attentions upon French artillery, of which the gunners suffered terribly: one-third of 155mm crews and more than 50 per cent of de Castries’ 120mm mortarmen became casualties. By the third day of battle, half the garrison’s stock of twenty-seven thousand shells was already expended. The French had lost their forward observation positions, so that their remaining guns were forced to fire almost blind, dependent for targets on air photographs of Giap’s lines processed in Hanoi, then parachuted into the camp.

De Castries’ artillery commander, the jolly, roly-poly Col. Charles Piroth, had rashly promised that he could suppress any guns the communists deployed. Now he suffered a lacerating verbal assault from Langlais about the failure of his batteries during the first two nights’ fighting. The colonel retired to his bunker, sobbing despairingly, ‘I am completely dishonoured.’ In truth, it was his superiors who merited disgrace, for choosing to fight a battle in such a place, pitting twelve thousand French and colonial troops against five times their number of Vietminh, led by a commander of brilliance. Piroth nonetheless clutched a grenade to his body, then jerked forth the pin. De Castries sought to conceal the colonel’s suicide, but the news quickly leaked, and was published in Le Monde. On the night of 14 March several shells fell on the main dressing station, killing fourteen men in the triage room and nine post-operative cases, as well as destroying the X-ray facility. Thereafter the wounded suffered terribly: before the end, doctors and surgeons treated 2,665 men, performed 934 operations and watched 319 patients die. The camp’s airstrip continued to be raked by fire which destroyed ten aircraft stranded by bad weather.

The next two days, 15–16 March, passed almost without incident. Vietminh propaganda loudspeakers broadcast surrender appeals to the defenders in French, Vietnamese, Arabic and German. These were not without effect: Cogny had included in Dienbienphu’s garrison, against de Castries’ strongly-expressed wishes, one Vietnamese and two Thai battalions that were known to be unreliable. French officers had always feared that peace negotiations must precipitate a catastrophic unravelling of their local forces, and so it proved. Following the announcement of the looming Geneva conference, many Vietnamese in French service saw who was winning the struggle for Indochina – and that it was not the colonial power. During the night of 15 March, the first trickle of what swelled into a river of desertions took place from the Thai battalion manning position Anne-Marie, a mile and a half south-west of Gabrielle: one strongpoint was entirely abandoned. Shortly afterwards Vietminh bombardment precipitated a wholesale flight. A French forward observer radioed laconically: ‘The Thais are off.’ Anne-Marie 1 and 2 fell into Giap’s hands almost bloodlessly, and he promptly repositioned there his own mortars and recoilless rifles.

Garrison morale was now crumbling in such a fashion that Giap’s formations could probably have overrun the entire camp – as his subordinate officers chafed to do. De Castries wrote later of the chasm between the spirit of the defenders and that of the enemy as being ‘between the men of a national army fighting for independence … and a mercenary force honouring a contract’. Giap, however, refused to be hurried. Dogged, methodical preparation had served him well. Moreover, his formations had bled heavily for their early successes: around a quarter of the infantry attacking Béatrice are thought to have fallen, and one of the battalions assaulting Gabrielle lost 240 dead. Six half-trained Vietminh medics struggled to tend seven hundred wounded.

Amid cascades of shell and mortar fragments, the besiegers paid dearly for their lack of steel helmets, and for early ‘human wave’ attacks. They laboured all night, every night to deepen trenches and extend saps: timber props were carried miles from the nearest forest to the battlefield. A wholesale call-up of reinforcements, many of them untrained teenagers, was undertaken across communist-controlled northern Vietnam: the martyrdom which took place at Dienbienphu was by no means exclusively a French one.

Giap each day studied graphs of supply deliveries – ‘the moving red line’. One morning he demanded of his logistics chief why not a single ton of rice had been delivered the previous night, and was told there had been torrential rain. The general responded, ‘Whether it rains or hails, we cannot allow our soldiers to fight on empty stomachs!’ This was cynical verbiage: he knew full well that many of his men were starving. They received scarcely any meat or vegetables, and by mid-March were eating ‘rice so rotten that we did not know how to cook it’, in the words of a man of the 312th Division. They were deprived of cigarettes, reduced to foraging for edible wild roots and plants.

Yet Giap chose to persist with his assault in the manner he had started it, painstakingly ensuring the success of each thrust, denying to the French any revival of hope. His 37mm flak guns inflicted a crippling toll on aircraft, so that scarcely one returned from the camp unscathed. Through the days and weeks that followed the fall of three of de Castries’ nine hills, Vietminh artillery harried the airstrip. The landing of each of the diminishing procession of medevac flights precipitated a panic-stricken surge of would-be passengers, wounded and otherwise. Photojournalist Jean Péraud filed a dispatch describing the scene, which he likened to 1945 Germany: ‘Cries. Tears. Stampede of wounded towards the door. Never seen anything like it since concentration camp.’ On the 17th the Vietminh made another skilfully-judged ‘humanitarian gesture’, presenting the garrison with eighty-six wounded prisoners. These, of course, merely increased the pressure on the camp’s overburdened medical facilities: among the doctors’ embarrassments was disposal of a mound of amputated limbs.

French medevac crews earned no plaudits: on 23 March an H-19 helicopter landed against orders on a notoriously exposed site. As it was being loaded with wounded its crew wandered away, thus escaping the destruction by shellfire of their machine and its helpless occupants, including general’s son Alain Gambiez. A French writer observed bitterly, ‘Certainement, the helicopter crews had not been chosen from the best elements of the Air Force,’ and de Castries deplored their lack of guts. Soon, hard things were also being said about fixed-wing aircrew, who were both exhausted and demoralised. American mercenary pilots of the CIA’s airline CAT flew a growing number of resupply missions, displaying more skill and steel than their French counterparts. Especially hair-raising were napalm sorties: as one C-119 roared down the runway towards take-off, its pilot raised the undercarriage prematurely, causing the plane to career on its belly along the tarmac in a cascade of sparks, amid four tons of ‘hell-jelly’ and 1,500 gallons of aviation spirit. By some freak of fortune, the crew survived.

As for the garrison of Dienbienphu, most of the French units remained staunch, but contempt for their colonial brethren rose by the day. Not only had the Vietnamese paras failed to regain Gabrielle on the 15th, but their French officers ‘had given a deplorable example’, in the words of Pierre Rocolle. An Algerian battalion abandoned its positions and drifted away into the scrub and villages beyond the perimeter, where some hundreds of ‘the rats of Nam Youm’, as they became known, lingered for the rest of the battle, living off pillaged supplies. North African gunners and engineers remained impressively steady, but suffered fifty casualties a day even when no big attack was taking place.

It was not de Castries who became the soul of the defence, but instead Langlais, who in the words of an admiring fellow-Legionnaire ‘sang the Marseillaise for fifty-six days. He never weakened.’ The colonel, however, was no more a thinking soldier, nor indeed a tactician, than are most career heroes. De Castries confided to Navarre, ‘He has the weaknesses of his virtues.’ On the 16th Langlais was joined by Maj. Marcel Bigeard, a new arrival though an old comrade, who became another legend of the siege. The son of an impecunious Toul railway worker, after one bloody action Bigeard had recommended every para in his unit for a Croix de Guerre. This man of iron was always known by his radio call-sign, Bruno. Yet both Langlais and ‘Bruno’ were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.

A couple of successful sorties gave a modest boost to the garrison’s morale, but de Castries was obliged to weigh the gains of such actions, and even of routine patrolling, against the lives they cost. The plight of the wounded worsened: a certain Sgt. Leroy suffered shrapnel wounds on Isabelle on 16 March, and was at the hospital recovering when it was shelled, wounding him again. He was driven back to Isabelle in time to encounter a new bombardment which killed the driver of his truck. After rescue from the wreckage he somehow survived a stomach operation, then spent the ensuing three nights in a drainage ditch before being flown to Hanoi on 25 March.

Between the 13th and the 27th, 324 casualties were evacuated, but on the 28th Vietminh artillery wrecked a Dakota on the airstrip. Giap’s guns now ranged at will, and Maj. Bigeard led twelve hundred paras in a desperate sortie against them. In that day’s fighting the Vietminh were reckoned to have lost 350 men killed, together with many flak mountings destroyed. But the French suffered 110 casualties – a company written off, for no decisive result – and de Castries had fewer lives to play with. The airstrip’s utility was at an end: the ‘air bridge’, on which the whole Dienbienphu plan had been founded, was rent asunder. Soldiers began to lift pierced steel plank from the runway to roof trenches and bunkers: planes would not again need them.

Thereafter, the sufferings of the wounded became terrible indeed. Supplies ran short of vinogel, wine concentrate, which provided the stimulant that had been the lifeblood of generations of French soldiers. On 29 March the miseries of both sides were intensified by torrential rain, which persisted through the remaining weeks of the battle: men fought and died in a sea of mud. Now that the garrison was dependent upon parachute-dropped supplies, the inadequacy of air support was laid bare. Flak forced transports to abandon low-level daylight operations, and resort instead to high-altitude night drops, which caused an increasing volume of material to descend into Giap’s hands. The Vietminh commander observed dryly that ‘enemy parachutages constituted a not-negligible source of supplies, which literally fell out of the sky!’

The most famous French defence of the twentieth century was that of Verdun in 1916, where Gen. Philippe Pétain’s forces were sustained by a single tenuous supply road that passed into history as the ‘voie sacrée’. On 22 March Col. de Castries observed in a personal letter to Gen. Cogny that Dienbienphu was becoming an Indochinese Verdun, with one critical deficiency: there was no voie sacrée.

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