No More Vietnams (4 page)

For France the result was the first Vietnam War. From 1946 to 1954, the French battled Vietnamese insurgents in a vain attempt to stay in Indochina. The United States from the outset urged France to give the colonies their independence. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower all pushed for decolonization. But it took over $5 billion in military expenditures and 150,000 casualties before the French government was forced to follow that advice.

France's principal enemy was the Communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. During World War II, Ho had taken carefully calculated steps to position himself to strike for power afterward. At the war's end, his opportunity came. Through ruthless and adroit infighting, he had eliminated his nationalist rivals as significant military forces. When the sudden surrender of Japan produced a vacuum of power in Vietnam, Ho moved quickly to exploit it. In 1945 he seized power in northern Vietnam and declared the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

In 1945, when the French returned, they easily reestablished their control in southern Vietnam and extended their rule to
northern Vietnam through the March 6, 1946, agreement with the Viet Minh. The French controlled all important cities but had no sound strategy to retake the countryside. They poured resources into building fortifications and spread themselves too thinly in widely scattered outposts. After relations between the French and the Communists broke down, the Viet Minh adopted the tactics of the weak—constant skirmishes, hit-and-run attacks, ambushes along jungle roads, always avoiding anything approaching an even test of strength. They also built a parallel government alongside the French colonial administration to organize those who supported them and to subdue or liquidate those who did not. Despite these efforts, the French continued to hold the upper hand through the 1940s.

The Vietnamese people had divided allegiances. Some, including many who were not Communists, joined the Viet Minh because it was the only group offering military resistance to the French. Others, including many nationalists, supported the French, apparently preferring foreign rule to Communist rule. The fact that 200,000 Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese joined the French-controlled Armed Forces of the Associated States of Indochina suggested the Viet Minh Communists were even more despised than the French colonialists. But the vast majority of the Vietnamese people remained neutral. Mindful of the costs that backing a loser can carry in Asian politics, they patiently waited to see which way the prevailing winds would blow.

The United States kept the French war at arm's length. Truman wanted non-Communist governments in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, but he did not want to taint American policy with colonialism by cooperating with the French in their war against the Viet Minh. He understood that the Indochinese needed to be given a stake in the battle against communism; they would not fight indefinitely in order to keep Indochina for the French, but they would do so if they were defending their own governments. Still, Truman believed he had little leverage to force the French to decolonize. His priorities were
in Europe, where he needed French help to ward off a bellicose Soviet Union, and therefore he was reluctant to antagonize France over Indochina.

The fall of China to Mao's Red Army in 1949 swept away previous assumptions. The French, who had planned to grind down their weak opponent, now had to fight an enemy who, as a result of assistance from the Chinese, was better armed and supplied. Ho, who had waged a poor man's war, now could turn up the heat on the French. Truman, who had considered the war a colonialist misadventure, now saw it as a necessary element in his strategy to contain the expansion of communism. And when Communist Chinese troops intervened in the Korean War in late 1950, Truman came to regard the French in Indochina as the means to draw at least some Chinese forces away from the Korean peninsula.

Chairman Mao became Uncle Ho's godfather. He overhauled the Viet Minh's primitive forces, training its troops at Chinese bases and providing them with combat advisers, trucks, artillery, and automatic weapons. With six 10,000-man divisions, Ho had an army that could engage the French in positional warfare. Over the next three years, the Viet Minh cleared the French out of the areas adjacent to China but failed to take any major population or agricultural centers. In 1954, Ho's forces retreated toward Laos, but the French pursued them, establishing their principal base at Dien Bien Phu.

The French decision to entrench their forces there was a cataclysmic strategic miscalculation. Those who supported it were defending the defense of the indefensible: Dien Bien Phu was an isolated island of French power in a sea of Viet Minh territory. The French base invited attack. Supplies could reach it only by air, and it was situated in a basin dominated by surrounding high ground held by the Viet Minh. Ho would have been a fool not to hit it with all the force he could muster. Ho was no fool.

The battle began in March 1954. The Viet Minh captured the outlying defensive positions in the first two weeks and then used its five-to-one advantage in troops to launch massive
human-wave attacks. They surrounded the 16,000-man French garrison and then inexorably tightened the noose. They pummeled French positions with artillery shells, expending over 350,000 rounds by the end of the siege, and encroached on the fortress with a network of trenches reminiscent of World War I. With their airstrip pockmarked with artillery craters, the French were prisoners in their own fortress. They could not evacuate the wounded. Supplies and reinforcements had to be dropped in by parachute, and when the weather turned bad, little got through at all. By early April, the situation looked hopeless.

The battle of Dien Bien Phu dealt a death blow to French morale. Because only about 5 percent of French forces in Indochina were involved, even total defeat at Dien Bien Phu could not have been decisive in the outcome of the war. But it had taken on symbolic importance out of proportion to its significance and proved to be a mortal psychological defeat. Ho Chi Minh had once said, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

He turned out to be right. The Viet Minh suffered over three times as many casualties as the French did at Dien Bien Phu, but it was the French will to resist that was broken. Opposition to the war had been building in France. Now it snowballed. In the end, the war was lost on the home front in France rather than on the battlefields of Vietnam. No one dreamed that the same thing would happen to the United States twenty years later.

Our primary interest in Vietnam was to prevent the fall of Indochina to the Communists. We wanted to prevent the loss of Vietnam because we believed it would lead to the fall of the rest of Southeast Asia. This came to be known as the “domino theory.” It was first set forth during the Truman administration in 1952. A National Security Council memorandum stated that in Southeast Asia “the loss of any single country would probably lead to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with communism by the remaining countries of this
group.” Dominoes would continue to fall because “an alignment with communism of the rest of Southeast Asia and India, and in the longer term, of the Middle East . . . would in all probability progressively follow. Such widespread alignment would endanger the stability and security of Europe.”

John F. Kennedy, then a senator, expressed the domino theory even more vividly two years after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, when in a speech he described Vietnam as “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, and obviously Laos and Cambodia would be threatened if the red tide of communism overflowed into Vietnam.”

Many would scoff at the domino theory in later years. But it is revealing to note that the siege of Dien Bien Phu was made possible only by the fall of Asia's largest domino—China. With the French war effort in imminent danger of collapse, the United States had to decide what it would do to stop the next domino from tumbling over.

When France asked the United States for help at Dien Bien Phu, its request was for air strikes, not ground troops. Only if the French were to withdraw from Vietnam would ground troops be needed. Having visited Vietnam the previous November, I made the point in a National Security Council meeting that our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden of preventing a Communist takeover later. Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that we use sixty B-29 bombers in the Philippines in night raids to destroy the Viet Minh positions. He also devised a plan, known as Operation Vulture, for accomplishing the same objective with three small tactical atomic bombs. This option was never seriously considered. President Eisenhower later spoke of possibly using diversionary tactics, such as a naval blockade, against the Viet Minh's patrons and principal source of military supplies, the Communist Chinese. This plan was also abandoned.

Both Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
were reluctant to take any of these steps. Like Truman, they believed any direct intervention to help the French would gravely damage our relations with newly independent countries. The President also insisted that we had to have congressional approval before acting. When the administration tested the waters, it found significant opposition to the idea of another military involvement in Asia, especially so soon after the Korean War. Eisenhower concluded that he could bring the Congress along only if the United States acted in concert with its allies.

The proposal for united action ran into a roadblock in Britain: Prime Minister Churchill refused to cooperate. Eisenhower sent Radford for consultations. Churchill bluntly told the American admiral that if the British would not fight to stay in India, he saw no reason why they should fight to help the French stay in Indochina. Eisenhower steadfastly opposed a unilateral American intervention. The French were therefore left to fend for themselves.

On May 7, 1954, after fifty-five days of gallantly defending a territory that had been reduced to the size of a baseball field, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was overrun by human-wave assaults. The defeat signaled the beginning of a complete and rapid withdrawal of the French from all of Indochina and left the United States as the only power capable of blocking further Communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

Our first critical mistake in Vietnam was not to have intervened in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The military situation was tailor-made for the use of our air power. The Viet Minh's siege required them to concentrate huge stores of matériel and hordes of soldiers in a relatively small area, and the terrain restricted them to only a few supply routes. The French air force in Indochina, which consisted of only 100 tactical bombers, was too weak to exploit this vulnerability. But if we had sent in fleets of heavy bombers to drop conventional explosives, we could have crippled the Viet Minh in a matter of days.

The French were in a much stronger position in Indochina
as a whole than the plight of their isolated garrison indicated. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev wrote that in 1954 the situation for the Viet Minh was “very grave” and that “the resistance movement in Vietnam was on the brink of collapse.” Khrushchev also reported that Zhou Enlai had said that unless the Geneva Conference concluded a cease-fire soon, the Viet Minh would not be able to hold out against the French. According to an official North Vietnamese history published in 1965, the Communists were seriously worried about the effect a possible American intervention would have on the balance of power in the war. Mao's support of the Viet Minh had kept
his
friends' hopes alive. We could have dashed them permanently if we had given our friends the support they needed at a pivotal moment.

By standing aside as our ally went down to defeat, the United States lost its last chance to stop the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia at little cost to itself. We should have intervened alone if necessary to help the French because they were the strongest regional power fighting Communist aggression. If we had saved Dien Bien Phu, the French still probably would have withdrawn and finally given their colonies independence, as we had urged for so long, but they would have done so in a deliberate and responsible manner rather than in a headlong rush for the door.

An obsessive fear of associating with European colonial powers blinded successive American administrations to a very simple fact: Communism, not colonialism, was the
principal
cause of the war in Indochina. Colonialism complicated the prosecution of the French phase of the war, because it allowed the Communists to obscure the issue, but the war itself originated in Ho Chi Minh's willful push for total power and was sustained by Communist China's massive support of the Viet Minh. Our mistake was failing to understand that the issue was not whether colonialism would succeed, but what would succeed colonialism.

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The Geneva Conference of 1954 temporarily settled the question of who would be the successors to the French. Its declaration divided Vietnam into two countries: Communist North Vietnam and independent South Vietnam. But the long-term fate of Vietnam and of America in Vietnam was intertwined with the destinies of two leaders: Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem.

If Ho Chi Minh's popular image is any indication, he must have had the world's best public-relations organization working for him. Madison Avenue at its cleverest can only bow in deference. The typical line on Ho runs like this: Ho, though he was a Communist, was first and foremost a nationalist. He was variously described as a charismatic Vietnamese George Washington who led his people against French colonialists; an Asian Tito who turned for help to the Soviet Union and Communist China only after being spurned by American administrations obsessed with the Cold War; and a humanitarian Uncle Ho who preached about the need for liberation, literacy, and land reform.