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.
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