Part II - The French Indochina War

6 The Birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

David G. Marr

The frail-looking man who addressed the mass gathering in Hanoi on September 2, 1945 (Figure 6.1), was unknown to almost everyone present, yet his independence message made an indelible impression, and soon reverberated around the country. After vigorously denouncing eighty years of French colonial practice, Hồ Chí Minh, the president of the newly proclaimed Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), turned his final remarks to immediate diplomatic circumstances. He announced the cancellation of all treaties signed by France that dealt with Vietnam. Then he concluded:

Vietnam has the right to enjoy liberty and independence, and in fact has become a free and independent country. The entire Vietnamese people (dân tộc) are determined to devote their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and possessions, in order to safeguard that liberty and independence.¹

Of course, Hồ Chí Minh knew that it was one thing to declare independence, quite another to gain external recognition. In his speech Hồ Chí Minh expressed hope that the Allied powers would adhere to relevant statements made at the Allied conferences at Teheran in 1943 and San Francisco in April 1945. He was concerned that Allied leaders meeting at Potsdam in late July had designated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese Army to take the Japanese surrender in Indochina north of the 16th parallel, and British forces to the south of that line. The most pressing question in early September was whether French troops would accompany either Allied contingent. General Lu Han, the Nationalist Chinese commander, proceeded to rebuff French attempts to reintroduce units that had fled to Yunnan following the March 9 Japanese coup against the French colonial administration. In Saigon, by contrast, British General Douglas Gracey employed Japanese forces together with British-Indian and some French units to drive DRVN adherents to the countryside. Popular Vietnamese euphoria gave way to fury at British actions. Cries of “Independence or Death!” echoed from south to north.

Figure 6.1 Hồ Chí Minh proclaims the independence of Vietnam in Hanoi (September 2, 1945).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

At this moment we can imagine Hồ Chí Minh reflecting soberly on Vietnam’s past encounters with powerful foreign forces. Classical strategic doctrine delineated three choices: negotiate; fight; or concede defeat. Despite popular belief, Vietnam’s monarchs had usually tried negotiations first. Ngô Sĩ Liên, the famous 15th-century historian, had advised rulers first to bring “words” to imminent invaders, even to offer them precious gems and silk. If these did not succeed, then battles had to be fought, vowing to resist unto death.² Words had failed with the French in the 1860s and 1870s. Armed resistance collapsed a decade later. Anticolonial literati at the turn of the century grappled with this bitter chain of events.

By 1945, Hồ Chí Minh had lived through decades of war, revolution, and the failure of numerous efforts to restore international stability. The United Nations offered new hope in 1945, but only sovereign states were eligible. And with France a permanent member of the Security Council, Hồ Chí Minh probably doubted that much could be accomplished there. He clearly hoped that the United States might provide counterweight to French, British, and Chinese ambitions, but nothing learned in September offered room for optimism. In this precarious situation, the most immediate task was to build a DRVN state that could credibly promote Vietnamese independence on the global stage.³

State Creation

The kind of state that Hồ Chí Minh and other Vietnamese elites hoped to build was one that possessed a defined territory, hard borders, a governing hierarchy, a common identity and culture, and undivided sovereignty. Interestingly, no decree signed by provisional president Hồ Chí Minh defined the territorial or maritime borders of the DRVN. Only a decree listing provinces and cities to participate in a national election offered guidance. Those units were identical to French colonial demarcations for the three regions of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. No DRVN claims were made on neighboring territories, nor was there any mention of possible claims by neighbors on Vietnam’s territory.

Early DRVN decrees and public pronouncements revealed a strong preference for centralized government, the result of ten centuries of monarchical rule, eighty years of French statism, and twenty years of intellectual fascination with the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany. The capital, Hanoi, would possess a full complement of ministries, bureaus, and departments, as well as a National Assembly. Three regional committees would implement policies in the north, center, and south. Province committees would provide the linchpin between the center (trung ương) and the district and commune committees below. Soon every state document, and much citizen correspondence, possessed the heading “Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Independence, Liberty, Happiness.”

Vietnamese employees of the former colonial system were ordered to remain on the job, and the majority did so. Agents of the French Sûreté (colonial security and police service), mandarins, court clerks, and tax agents tried to make themselves scarce. Hồ Chí Minh signed more than fifty decrees in September, each one telegraphed to the newly formed regional and province committees. Message traffic from below was extensive as well. The PTT network – both staff and equipment – was perhaps France’s most valuable gift to the DRVN. The “wiring” of the colonial state more broadly had largely survived, to be used by new masters.

The DRVN’s most serious domestic challenge, indeed a test of its right to rule, was to ward off another terrible famine. In early 1945, 1 million or more people had died of starvation in Tonkin and northern Annam. In mid-August, the Red River had broken through dikes to inundate one-third of Tonkin’s summer rice crop. Efforts to transport surplus rice from Saigon northward were terminated by the British on arrival in mid-September. Fast-growing replacements (corn, yams, beans) were planted wherever possible. Distribution was supervised. About ten thousand people still died of starvation before the May 1946 rice crop was harvested, which was still fewer than those who died from cholera or typhoid fever.

The revolutionary spontaneity of August carried through in the countryside for some weeks in September. Symbols of the colonial past were trashed, landlords thrown out of their homes, village notables humiliated, alleged traitors incarcerated or killed. People celebrated Hanoi’s elimination of the hated head tax, then were upset to hear that the new government intended to collect most other colonial-era taxes. Having found the Imperial Vietnam treasury almost bare, and the Bank of Indochina still guarded by Japanese soldiers, the government mounted a series of patriotic donation campaigns. Young women proved most adept at convincing families to donate rice on a monthly basis. Cash or jewelry obtained was mostly used to purchase arms and ammunition. This left very little to pay continuing civil servants. The government urged state employees to apply for leave without pay, anticipating that many would still continue to work. Relying on a combination of family ingenuity and free food on the job, thousands of employees took this option. Particularly in the provinces, continuing participation in the administration offered some protection against revolutionary harassment. Young civil servants sought transfer to the National Guard, where their past was less likely to be challenged.

Although the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was easily the most influential political organization in Vietnam, it did not control the DRVN civil administration, its fledgling National Guard, or even the majority of the self-proclaimed “Việt Minh” groups that had cropped up around the country. Many ICP members returning from jail or hiding found the exuberant crowds, speechmaking, media ferment, and government regulations quite disorienting. Young Việt Minh activists honored the past anticolonial efforts and personal sacrifices of ICP returnees, but often found it hard to work with them. Central party publications described an open, ideologically forthright status for the ICP. Some veterans from the 1930s assumed that the ICP would function like the French and Italian communist parties, with members seeking election to the National Assembly. Such expectations came to an abrupt halt on November 11, when Hồ Chí Minh announced the “self-dissolution” of the ICP to placate Chinese Nationalist commanders. Although this caused considerable confusion, some members probably felt more comfortable returning to clandestine practices. The police no longer pursued them, of course. Indeed, the ICP would become the only political organization permitted to communicate secretly. The party’s priority now was to gain leadership over all the Việt Minh committees. In central Vietnam this would take a year or more.

Saigon and the Mekong Delta

In Cochinchina, events unfolded quite differently. Here the Communist Party had yet to recover from severe French repression in 1940. Two different regional committees claimed leadership. Two religious movements, the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo, had grown large and confident, partly due to Japanese protection. Following the overthrow of the French in March 1945, the Japanese had encouraged the formation of the paramilitary Vanguard Youth (Thanh niên Tiền phong). Cao Đài adepts, former colonial functionaries, monarchists, Trotskyists, and ICP members jostled for leadership of Vanguard Youth branches. ICP fortunes received a major boost when word arrived of Tokyo’s surrender and the Việt Minh takeover in Hanoi four days later. Armed Vanguard Youth units bearing Việt Minh flags soon occupied government facilities in Saigon. A huge September 2 meeting on Norodom Square, timed to coincide with Hồ Chí Minh’s independence declaration in Hanoi, descended into chaos when shots rang out from an adjacent building. Bands of Vietnamese then pursued, assaulted, and in several cases killed French civilians.

When British General Gracey arrived in Saigon on September 12, he immediately ordered his Gurkha escort to accompany a Japanese unit to evict the DRVN-affiliated Southern Provisional Executive Committee from the former governor-general’s palace. Trotskyists had already condemned the ICP for being dupes of the Allies. Now they advocated an immediate attack on the British before reinforcements arrived. The executive committee instead declared a general strike, which Gracey used to justify proclaiming martial law. On September 22, Gracey rearmed previously interned French soldiers and civilians, who proceeded to rampage through Saigon. Vietnamese bands struck back ruthlessly the next day, killing more than 150 French civilians, including women and children. Meanwhile, armed ICP squads began to track down and kill a number of Fourth International/Trotskyist adherents. No leader – British, French, or Vietnamese – was in a position to reverse the cycle of bloodshed and widespread torching of property. On October 3, the French cruiser Triomphant debarked the first thousand-man, battle-hardened army contingent from the metropole.

In the Mekong Delta in August, the alternative ICP “Liberation” Regional Committee had organized rallies and takeovers at Mỹ Tho and several other towns. Cao Đài and Vanguard Youth groups took control elsewhere. The most serious domestic confrontation anywhere in Vietnam began on September 8, when ICP adherents killed or wounded several hundred Hòa Hảo members marching into Cần Thơ. Hòa Hảo devotees were quick to exact revenge, killing a hundred or more ICP and Vanguard Youth members. Elsewhere, the substantial Khmer minority mounted demonstrations in favor of national independence for Cambodia. Mobs of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) later attacked a number of Khmer villages in what amounted to pogroms.

Given pre-existing political, religious, and ethnic animosities in the Mekong Delta, it seems unlikely that anyone could have prevented these serious outbreaks of domestic violence following the Japanese surrender. Attempts by the Southern Region Executive Committee to build a grand coalition were bound to fail. There was almost no awareness of what the Việt Minh represented beyond the flag and some slogans upholding DRVN independence and the territorial unity of Vietnam from the Chinese frontier to the Cà Mau peninsula.

Word of the September 22 French rampage in Saigon and Vietnamese retaliations the following day spread quickly through the country. Henceforth the date “September 23” was a marker of national resistance. Nonetheless, Hồ Chí Minh instructed the Southern Region Executive Committee to negotiate an immediate ceasefire with General Gracey. Several meetings did take place, and shooting dropped off, but during those eight days British and French forces went from a vulnerable 1,500 men up to more than 12,000 troops equipped with artillery, armored cars, and trucks. Gracey gave the Vietnamese twenty-four hours to lay down arms, but serious fighting soon resumed. Separate bands of Cao Đài, former Garde Indochinois soldiers, and Vanguard Youth suffered heavy losses trying to resist Allied and Japanese advances beyond Saigon. Vietnam was already at war in the South.

The Southern Advance

Hearing earlier that the French might well be coming back to Saigon with the British, groups of young men in the North and center began heading down the coast. Province committees sponsored battalion or company-size contingents, and the public donated food, clothing, money, and medicine. The first well-organized unit arrived from Quảng Ngãi on September 25, just as Saigon descended into chaos. The first northern unit, battalion-size Detachment 3 (Chi đội 3), arrived in Biên Hòa on October 7. Detachment 3 had been raised among ethnic minority men in the Việt Bắc hills, then incorporated Kinh platoons along the way in Hanoi, Thanh Hóa, and Nghệ An. Approaching the Saigon River, Nam Long, the commander, was ordered to disable the rotating arch on the Bình Lợi bridge, only to be stopped by intense machine gun fire from a British-Indian unit on the opposite side. A Japanese officer then approached and advised Nam Long to withdraw quickly, as the British had just ordered a Japanese attack from the rear. The retreat became chaotic, with some Detachment 3 members ending up with southern units for the war’s duration, others making it east to Xuân Lộc, where they joined more than a thousand rubber plantation workers to occupy trenches dug by the Japanese nine months earlier. British armored cars and Japanese infantry overran Vietnamese defenders at the end of October. Survivors straggled to Phan Thiết, 125 miles (200 kilometers) further east.

By this time newspapers and radio broadcasts were touting a grand “Southern Advance” (Nam tiến) movement coming to the aid of beleaguered countrymen. This term had been employed previously to characterize the migration of ethnic Kinh from north to south over a period of 700 years. Early twentieth-century writers, influenced by Social Darwinism, had extolled the Nam tiến as proof of Vietnamese superiority compared to neighboring “races” (chủng tộc). At each railway station down the coast, Nam tiến units encountered big crowds, women offering food and drink, officials making speeches, slogans being yelled, and everyone joining in patriotic songs. Former members of the colonial Garde Indochinois were well represented in these units. Many desired to demonstrate loyalty to the DRVN and impart skills to the other volunteers, most of whom had no military experience.

At Phan Thiết, additional Nam tiến contingents kept arriving from points north, intent on pressing toward Saigon. Suddenly everyone had to face a Japanese battalion arriving by sea with British orders to disarm all natives. Three days of combat saw Vietnamese defenders forced into the countryside, where some joined locals to begin to learn how to fight guerrilla-style. Detachment 3 managed to retreat northeast to Phan Rang, where they caught the Japanese post by surprise, killing ten and capturing a quantity of arms and ammunition. Residents organized a victory banquet, with speeches, songs, banners, drums, and the ringing of temple and church bells. Detachment 3 was now exhausted, having fought four battles in six weeks, taken heavy casualties, and been reduced from 700 to only 250 men. On November 27 it withdrew toward Nha Trang, only to be thrown into action the next day.

Nha Trang, the largest town along the south-central coast of Vietnam, had a sizable Japanese base to care for several thousand wounded from the Burma front. On October 20, under British orders, the Japanese released and rearmed several hundred French colonial soldiers. Armed Vietnamese retaliated by seizing the train station and destroying the power station, but were forced to withdraw under bombardment by French warships. West of the city, Nha Trang evacuees and villagers dug a long trench line, aiming to prevent the French from cutting off movement of soldiers and supplies from north to south. In late January, the French Army launched a dramatic pincers offensive (Operation Gaur), dispatching one armored column through the Central Highlands to the coast just north of Nha Trang, and the second column through Đà Lạt and Phan Rang, then up the coast to Nha Trang. This threatened to trap all Vietnamese defenders in a French meat grinder. Several units managed to escape inland, then traipsed north across the hills to Phú Yên. Others joined local militia groups that would combat the French in Khánh Hòa province until 1954.

Võ Nguyên Giáp, National Guard commander and DRVN interior minister, happened to arrive outside Nha Trang just as the French columns approached. Giáp, who had never seen combat of even company-size magnitude, now witnessed French naval bombardment, artillery fire, air sorties, and armor and infantry units tightening the noose. Ordered by telegram from President Hồ Chí Minh to return to the capital, Giáp first detoured to An Khê, Pleiku, and Kon Tum in the Central Highlands – places he realized could become strategically significant. At a February 15 press conference in Hanoi, Giáp criticized the decision at Nha Trang to dig trenches and try to face the enemy, while neglecting to destroy roads and bridges, mobilize the populace, and begin to learn guerrilla tactics. At that moment it seemed likely the French would continue to advance up the central coast to Đà Nẵng. They chose instead from late February to concentrate on taking control in Tonkin. This gave DRVN adherents in the center precious time to build civilian and military capabilities in what became Region 5 (Khu 5), headquartered in Quảng Ngãi.

Military Organizing in the North

In May 1945, two company-size Việt Minh contingents in the Việt Bắc had merged to form the Vietnam Liberation Army, renamed the Vietnam National Guard in October. Although remaining de facto army commander, Võ Nguyên Giáp’s main job in the first DRVN cabinet was minister of interior. There was not much for a command headquarters to do at this point. More important was establishment of the General Staff (Tổng Tham mưu), headed by Hoàng Vӑn Thái, and the defense ministry, headed for some months by Chu Vӑn Tấn.⁴ Thái recruited intellectually keen young men to fill sections for operations, intelligence, training, and personnel. Hoàng Đạo Thúy, respected Boy Scout commissioner, began building a military communications and liaison system.⁵ A courier net begun earlier in the Việt Bắc was soon extending across the Red River Delta and down the north-central coast.

The fledgling defense ministry blitzed regional and province committees with action orders. Each province was to report: numbers of soldiers; names of unit commanders and political officers; numbers and types of weaponry; quality of ammunition; method of food supply; and “how the problem of uniforms was to be dealt with.”⁶ Each northern province was to send ten men urgently to a platoon leaders’ course in Hanoi. The search began for relevant chemicals to make gunpowder and detonators. Army units were ordered not to frisk women while on patrol or initiating house searches. Any person detained by the military was to be turned over quickly to the police. Military courts would be established to try persons charged with harming Vietnam’s independence. When provinces began to ask about military pay and allowances, they had to be told that the treasury was nearly bare. Provisioning most troops became a province responsibility. Until the May 1946 harvest, the primary limitation on expanding the regular army was the severe shortage of rice.

Creating a national military school naturally followed. Already in the Việt Bắc hills of northern Tonkin, three short classes for platoon leaders and political officers had graduated 234 students. The first class in Hanoi began September 15, with a high proportion of students coming from the city’s secondary schools. A mix of Việt Bắc cadres, former officers of the colonial Civil Guard, and NCOs from the French Army constituted the teaching staff. Political lectures treated the current situation in Indochina and the world at large, the “liberation revolution,” and principles of leadership. President Hồ Chí Minh visited the academy, inspected the mess hall and lavatories, gave a short speech, and reviewed the class in drill formation.

With staff eager to find space for live firing and tactical maneuvers, the school was shifted to Sơn Tây, 21 miles (35 kilometers) west of Hanoi, a place of military significance for centuries. Each student now received one former Civil Guard uniform, a forage cap, and a pair of leather shoes, plus use of a kapok mattress, mosquito net, and wool blanket. With departure of Class 7 on April 16, 1946, the school could count a total of 1,500 small-unit leaders and political officers having graduated since the previous June. Two months later, General Nguyễn Sơn opened the Quảng Ngãi Ground Forces Academy, relying mostly on Japanese officers and NCOs for instruction.⁷ Four hundred men took part in the first class. Everywhere the National Guard was being built along conventional lines, with guerrilla alternatives an afterthought at best.⁸

Founding an army medical corps proved more difficult. As of October 1945 there were only three clinics for military personnel. All National Guard enrollees were supposed to undergo medical examinations, but standards were lax. Most ill soldiers were referred to civilian hospitals or clinics. Despite reports of heavy casualties in the South, and mindful that fighting might break out elsewhere, the General Staff failed to prepare medically for combat conditions. In November, the government suddenly ordered conscription of all doctors (y sĩ) and pharmacists (dược sĩ). This was the only attempt at conscription in the early life of the DRVN, and it failed. One year later, the DRVN health minister could only report 32 out of 182 doctors in the North enrolled in the National Guard. Training of medics proved more rewarding, with some 120 having graduated by July. A new army medical school inaugurated by President Hồ Chí Minh in November 1946 had to be shifted to the Việt Bắc when full-scale war broke out the following month.

The Nationalist Chinese Military Presence

Hồ Chí Minh understood that Vietnamese resistance to incoming Nationalist Chinese forces would be disastrous. Urgent orders went out to province people’s committees to avoid any altercations. Members of the Vietnam Nationalist Party (VNQDĐ) and Vietnam Revolutionary League accompanied Chinese units and pushed aside some Việt Minh groups in towns along the entry routes. Chinese quartermasters searched aggressively for food. Those villagers who failed to hide their grain in time were compelled to exchange it for an alien currency (Chinese “gold units”) of dubious value. On September 16, General Lu Han summoned Hồ Chí Minh to inform him of the exchange rate and discuss feeding Chinese troops. Lu Han could have shoved aside the DRVN government, but almost surely would have faced trouble in the countryside. On September 22, the day after General Gracey declared martial law in Saigon, Lu Han assured Hồ Chí Minh that he had no intention of following the British precedent, providing that public order was maintained. It soon became clear that Lu Han and other senior officers expected the DRVN to accept members of the Nationalist Party and Revolutionary League into a coalition government. Meanwhile, Chinese officers looked for ways to exploit the Indochinese economy down to the 16th parallel.

There were numerous local altercations between Chinese troops and Vietnamese civilians, most commonly in the marketplace. On arrival, the Chinese had simply seized rice warehouses without compensation. President Hồ Chí Minh’s promise to provide monthly deliveries fell well short. Chinese officers flew to Saigon to purchase shipments of rice to Hải Phòng for their troops, but as of November the British had only released 2,000 tons. Assuming that Chinese Army quartermasters had 100,000 mouths to feed, they required at least 2,500 tons of rice each month. The onus often fell on province administrative committees, at a time when many Vietnamese families were only eating one meal a day. As the Chinese began to withdraw in April 1946, province committees were left with large quantities of vastly inflated “gold units” that nobody would accept. Nonetheless, those ICP and Nationalist Party cadres who had witnessed terrible treatment of civilians during the war in China probably breathed a sigh of relief. Hồ Chí Minh appreciated that Lu Han had given the DRVN government six months of de facto protection from French attack north of the 16th parallel.

Learning by Doing

None of the ministers or vice ministers in the provisional DRVN cabinet had life experiences commensurate with their sudden responsibilities. The French had made sure of that. Ministers had to rely on third-echelon former colonial employees to explain decree and edict formats, record-keeping, budgeting, and reporting. Despite this, the new state performed surprisingly well. There was no interruption in telegraph and postal traffic. Food production and distribution took top priority. Personnel issues consumed much attention for several months. Tax collections resumed haltingly. A new Independence Fund (Qũy Độc Lập) began to receive public donations. French properties were requisitioned. Vietnamese properties seized in August became the object of petitions and counterpetitions. Families sought information on fathers and sons who had been taken away. As during the Pacific War, allocation of many commodities, including salt, alcohol, cloth, coal, newsprint, and opium, was subject to government control.

One new responsibility was preparing to elect a National Assembly. The provisional government immediately began drafting the necessary electoral rules and implementing instructions, relying on French-trained lawyers for advice. Each province or city was assigned a specific number of seats to be contested, based on 1937 population statistics. From early December, articles and editorials about the impending election proliferated, nudged on by the ministry of propaganda and Việt Minh activists. Registration of candidates proceeded slowly, and negotiations between Hồ Chí Minh and leaders of the Nationalist Party and Revolutionary Alliance stalled several times. Restrictions were enforced on individual campaigning. Newspapers in Hanoi became election vehicles for specific slates, a media practice learned from the French during the 1920s and 1930s.

National election day, January 6, 1946, took on the aura of a traditional festival in many villages and urban neighborhoods in Tonkin and Annam, with voters putting on their best clothing, flag-bearing youths marching from one street to another, and people converging on the community hall (đình) or office of the local administrative committee. Ballots did not have the names of candidates printed on them, so literate voters wrote in their selections, while illiterate voters who constituted the majority were often helped by Việt Minh youths, with predictable results. In Cochinchina, meanwhile, administrative confusion and French counteraction severely limited voting. The election was hardly an example of popular sovereignty, but it was certainly memorable. Most Vietnamese wanted to believe in the legitimacy of the DRVN, and the January 6 elections were considered proof positive by many.

During February, while Hồ Chí Minh was concentrating on diplomacy vis-à-vis the French and the Chinese, other DRVN leaders prepared to convene the first National Assembly session, which would elect a government of national union, formulate legislative procedures, draft a constitution, and enhance Hanoi’s capacity to direct local affairs. Getting 242 elected delegates to the Hanoi Opera House on the morning of March 2 was an extraordinary achievement – though only one delegate from the South made it. At the opening session, Hồ Chí Minh received assembly approval to add seventy “Vietnamese comrades from overseas who had not had time to participate in our country’s general election.” These Nationalist Party and Revolutionary League members were then escorted into the auditorium amidst calls of “Unity! Unity!” Hồ Chí Minh and Nguyễn Hải Thần, head of the Revolutionary League, were then elected president and vice president, although Thần was already furtively exiting the city.⁹ President Hồ Chí Minh then presented his new coalition cabinet to the assembly. All swore fidelity to the Fatherland (Tổ quốc), as symbolized by an ancestral altar positioned at the back of the stage.

In what must have been disconcerting news to many delegates present, the meeting chair informed everyone that “In face of the current grave circumstances, the National Assembly […] must adjourn today.” The most pressing business was to elect a standing committee and a constitution-drafting committee. The chair then for the first time invited delegates to speak, which triggered more than an hour of animated debate concerning powers of the standing committee. Regarding the powers to declare war and cease hostilities, President Hồ Chí Minh insisted they must rest with the government, not the parliamentary standing committee. Rather than put this weighty question to a vote, the chair simply declared the issue had been decided. Nguyễn Vӑn Tố was elected chair of the 15-person standing committee.¹⁰ The meeting’s chair then told everyone to return to their localities to “continue the resistance,” and to reconvene at a favorable opportunity, which turned out to be late October.

The DRVN’s Most Dangerous Moment

Rounding up C-47 Dakota aircraft from British or American sources, the French Army tried to convince General Lu Han to let it land a combat force at Bạch Mai airstrip in Hanoi. He rejected this idea. In mid-February, Hồ Chí Minh heard from Chinese sources that the French intended to land at Hải Phòng. Dire rumors soon swept through Tonkin. The principal Việt Minh newspaper was shut down by DRVN censors for three days for repeating a Reuters report. In a February 28 Sino-French agreement, French troops were authorized to relieve Chinese units north of the 16th parallel, in exchange for China being granted a free port at Hải Phòng, customs-free transit of goods, and special status for Chinese nationals residing in Indochina. The agreement completely ignored the existence of a Vietnamese authority, much to the dismay of both Hồ Chí Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists who had depended on Chinese support. Hồ Chí Minh immediately stepped up his negotiations with Jean Sainteny, and a Franco-Vietnamese “preliminary convention” was signed on March 6, recognizing the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state,” with its own government, parliament, army, and finances. On the thorny issue of Cochinchina, France agreed to accept the results of a future referendum concerning “reunion of the three Ky (regions).” Vietnam agreed to greet amicably French Army units coming to relieve the Chinese.

Hồ Chí Minh had kept all but a handful of lieutenants ignorant of the negotiating details, which caused other DRVN and ICP luminaries to take contradictory positions in public. The first indication that citizens had of the March 6 decisions was when, the next morning, proclamations were affixed to lampposts and walls in Hanoi and Hải Phòng. Public reaction ranged from quiet relief to vocal outrage. Later on March 7, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Vũ Hồng Khánh (Nationalist Party leader), and President Hồ Chí Minh addressed a large audience in front of the Hanoi Opera House, at what may have been the most critical meeting of Vietnam’s entire independence struggle. Giáp defended the convention on the grounds that the French were going to return anyway, at a time that the country was not ready for war. That left a deal as the only alternative. Khánh spoke next, emphasizing that complete independence was the ultimate objective, but that it would not be achieved in a single leap.

Taking the rostrum last, President Hồ Chí Minh asked rhetorically, “Why in fact sacrifice 50,000 or 100,000 men when we can by means of negotiation attain independence, perhaps in five years?”¹¹ Nonetheless, the immediate danger was that unruly youths would attack French civilians, or that rogue militia would shoot at arriving French soldiers. Extensive patrolling by Chinese troops helped to prevent this from happening. On March 9, the ICP standing bureau issued an “instruction” to members titled “Compromise in order to Advance.” While predicting that reactionary French colonialists would try to sabotage the preliminary convention, starting with the question of Nam Bộ/Cochinchina, the standing bureau also saw a “New France with a new spirit of freedom.” Therefore, the new party slogan was “Ally as equals with New France.”¹² On March 18, a French column of 220 vehicles with 1,200 troops traveled from Hải Phòng to Hanoi with no incident.

Patriots/Traitors

In August–September 1945, probably no feeling was more widespread than national solidarity – the joy expressed when “the people” join together to defend the “nation,” or, more colloquially, “our country” (nước ta). Simultaneously, however, rumors of sedition swept Vietnam’s towns and villages. Alleged “Vietnamese traitors” and “reactionaries” were detained, humiliated, beaten up, and sometimes killed. At the September 2 mass meeting in Hanoi, Võ Nguyên Giáp told the audience that “division, doubt, and apathy are all a betrayal of the country.” Toward the end of the meeting, when Hồ Chí Minh was given the ceremonial sword of former emperor Bảo Đại, he joked that henceforth it would be used to “cut off traitors’ heads” rather than oppress the people as before. In the following weeks, the government failed to provide any definition of treason or sedition.¹³

A host of “secret investigation” (trinh sát) units had cropped up earlier, often not reporting to any government committee or political party. The ICP possessed a central investigation committee, headed by Trần Đӑng Ninh, which worked to insert ICP members into local investigation units.¹⁴ From early 1946, the government tried via the police to exercise more authority. The Nationalist Party condemned secret investigation units for striking fear into citizens, ignoring due process, and siphoning off resources better allocated to the military. A quiet but intense struggle for control of the police (Công an) took place, with the independent and respected interior minister, Hùynh Thúc Kháng, unable to prevent the ICP from shoving aside his appointee as general director.¹⁵

One of Hồ Chí Minh’s early decrees had authorized the “security service” to arrest persons “dangerous to the DRVN” and send them to deportation camps (trại an trí). Subsequently local committees were ordered to either release people who were confined or send them to the nearest deportation camp. Most province committees managed to ignore Hanoi requests to supply political detainee names and locations. Droves of petitions addressed to President Hồ Chí Minh sought information on family members believed to be detained somewhere.¹⁶

Nine military courts were decreed in September to punish past “enemies of the revolution” and delineate what constituted treason against the new democratic republic. It took some months to select judges and begin taking cases. Perhaps the first trial took place in Huế, with the prime accused being Nguyễn Tiến Lãng, former mandarin and director of emperor Bao Dai’s cabinet. Condemned as a French lackey, Lãng was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and the loss of two-thirds of his property.¹⁷ Lãng’s better-known father-in-law, Phạm Quỳnh, had been killed earlier in Huế by the ICP city committee. Military courts soon fell behind in their 1946 case calendars, with an increasing number of cases dealing with acts taking place after establishment of the DRVN.¹⁸

The most significant challenge to DRVN authority came from the Vietnam Nationalist Party. ICP/Nationalist competition had existed earlier among political prisoners in colonial jails, and between émigrés in southern China during the Pacific War.¹⁹ The ICP jumped ahead of the Nationalist Party in early 1945, as its Việt Minh message attracted thousands of enthusiasts in Tonkin particularly. Nationalist Party members coming into Tonkin with the Chinese Army garnered followers along the way, but then suffered a major setback when General Lu Han decided to work with Hồ Chí Minh. The Nationalist Party’s daily newspaper, Việt Nam, offered a lively counterpoint to Việt Minh papers. Party leaders secured positions in the DRVN cabinet of national union, but once the Chinese Army began to leave the ICP stepped up its pressure. Its tactic, as delineated by Trường Chinh, head of the ICP’s Standing Bureau, was to win over some members, exacerbate divisions, then repress the “traitorous elements.” By July, armed Nationalist Party units were forced northward, thence across the border. A few Nationalist Party delegates to the National Assembly remained on in a figurehead capacity. In the countryside, to be labelled a Nationalist Party member became synonymous with treason.²⁰

ICP Operations

“Self-dissolution” of the party in November 1945 did not slow down the de facto standing bureau’s efforts to gain hegemony over Việt Minh groups everywhere. After acknowledging how many workers, peasants, youths, and intellectuals were devoted passionately to the revolution, Trường Chinh instructed subordinates: “Have confidence in them, employ them boldly, guide them patiently, but do not forget to control them” [his emphasis].²¹ The Vietnam Democratic Party (Đảng Dân chủ Việt Nam), proud member of the Việt Minh Front since 1944, resisted ICP efforts to infiltrate and dominate. Its daily newspaper, Độc Lập (Independence), offered readers significantly different interpretations from the ICP-run Cứu Quốc (National Salvation). Democratic Party members could be found in most government ministries and Việt Minh committees operating in northern towns. The party’s National Congress in September 1946 counted 235 delegates present from as far away as Huế. Debate was wide-ranging and lively. If war had been averted, the Democratic Party would have played a more significant role in Vietnam’s history than proved to be the case.²²

Trường Chinh was quite disturbed about ICP behavior in Cochinchina. In August 1945, he had favored the Liberation regional committee. Subsequently Trần Vӑn Giàu and Phạm Ngọc Thạch were told to disband the overall Vanguard Youth organization, then ordered to come to Hanoi for disciplinary action.²³ Trường Chinh criticized cadres in the South for allowing “all sorts of opportunists, provocateurs, and persons of complicated background” to enter the party. He subsequently chose Lê Duẩn, a native of Quảng Trị, but possessing many southern friends from shared prison time, to return south to form a committee to reorganize the party in Cochinchina. It appears that many Vanguard Youth adherents gravitated instead to southern National Guard units under the command of Nguyễn Bình, who was not an ICP member.²⁴

In late July 1946 in Hanoi, the ICP organized its first central cadres conference, to communicate the current line and signal a push for more political power. Each comrade was to nominate one new member to his party cell, higher echelons would open training classes for lower echelons, and pamphlets would be printed for cells to use in study sessions. In the party’s mass mobilization efforts, priority would be assigned to workers, women, and youths. In mid-October, Trường Chinh chaired a military conference that marked an unmistakable move by the ICP into the realm of defense policy. Much discussion was devoted to the question of how to increase ICP control within the National Guard. The party set a goal of at least one cell within each National Guard company within two months, which would not be achieved until much later.²⁵

At commune (xã) and village levels, Việt Minh activities continued to be sparked mostly by members of the Youth National Salvation and Women’s National Salvation groups. Any available ICP member tended to be older and probably not yet in contact with higher echelons. Party pronouncements from Hanoi often did not reach local members for months, if at all. A party meeting in Huế criticized members for terrorizing or denigrating petit bourgeois intellectuals, state employees, and shopkeepers. Comrades within the government failed to “submit to party discipline.”²⁶ By the end of 1946, total ICP membership may have climbed to 25,000 compared to the scattered 5,000 in August 1945. This still only amounted to perhaps one ICP member per 800 of the population. And most recruitment took place on a personal, ad hoc basis, with very little organizational vetting and no indoctrination.

Trường Chinh and others made no secret of the ICP’s determination to monopolize power. The ICP gained hegemony over much of the police in 1946, and aimed to do the same with the National Guard. But it seems that Hồ Chí Minh, Võ Nguyên Giáp, and Hoàng Vӑn Thái had other priorities, even though all three were party members. The DRVN civil administration and National Guard continued to function distinctly from the ICP, although senior party members undoubtedly shaped policies. Only after establishment of the People’s Republic of China in late 1949 did Trường Chinh and others have the opportunity to engineer an ICP takeover of the DRVN state.

Popular Organizing

From August 1945, newly minted DRVN citizens came together to talk politics, form groups, demonstrate loudly, occupy colonial properties, and seek out contacts beyond their own village or neighborhood. Young men and women took the lead, scornful of elders who cautioned against haste or intemperance. Vietnam’s villages had a rich history of organizing groups for multiple purposes, but public oratory, clapping, marching, and yelling slogans was new. Revolutionary imagery, dramatic skits, and patriotic music captivated audiences. Most compelling of all was the red flag with yellow star, which quickly came to symbolize the nation for all but a small minority. Thousands of meetings began with a solemn flag-raising ceremony. Catholic groups took the flag as national standard, despite its ICP/Việt Minh Front origins. The marching song “Advancing Army” (Tiến Quân Ca) by Vӑn Cao and Đỗ Hữu Ích was already becoming the national anthem.²⁷

Forming a local militia (tự vệ) group took top priority among young men. Most carried only a machete or bamboo spear, with perhaps several individuals boasting a shotgun or old musket. A former Civil Guard member might teach basic drills. Every tự vệ member took turns standing guard at the village gate and patrolling at night, while tilling fields the rest of the time. Militiamen often aspired to be accepted into a provincial-level National Guard battalion. Young women were free to form their own militia group. Militias not only prepared to fight foreign invaders, but often took part in local power struggles. Some dared to harass agents of higher authority, notably tax agents. Local administrative committees and Việt Minh committees sometimes competed for control of the militia.

Literacy classes cropped up around the country. Early on, Hồ Chí Minh had listed the “ignorance bandit” (giặc dốt) for elimination, along with the “famine” and “foreign aggressor” bandits. When his efforts to redirect colonial-era education inspectors and senior pedagogues toward a mass literacy campaign became bogged down, Hồ Chí Minh turned to Youth and Women’s National Salvation groups to take the initiative. In the preface to an early literacy textbook, Hồ Chí Minh pointed out that “Women especially need to study, since they have been held back so long. Now is the time for you sisters to work to catch up with the men, to demonstrate that you are part of the nation, with the right to elect and be elected.”²⁸ Many literacy instructors had only three or four years’ schooling themselves. Crude slates and chalk had to suffice in the absence of paper and pens. Outside, individuals who could not read a patriotic slogan or recite the alphabet were publicly shamed. The most humiliating village practice was to set up a “Gate for the blind,” through which all illiterates had to pass while being jeered by children mobilized for the occasion. National Guard members proved the most disciplined literacy pupils.²⁹

Probably an additional 300,000 citizens could read a newspaper article or leaflet as a result of the mass literacy campaign, far fewer than wished. The outbreak of full-scale war in December 1946 disrupted the campaign for several years. Still, village cadres knew they could not fulfill their responsibilities without at least acting as if they could read the burgeoning number of handwritten permits, authorizations, and requests that came their way. The operative slogan soon became “We must be literate to emerge victorious in the Resistance.”³⁰

Health challenges faced the DRVN government from the beginning. Epidemics had to be tackled, the colonial-era medical system upgraded, and the populace informed on health realities. Given financial constraints, however, there was no hope that the state would soon address the ambitious modernizing agenda that Vietnamese health professionals had in mind. As noted earlier, the highest priority was assigned to building an army medical corps. Next the ministry of health increased vaccine production and inoculation efforts. It also tried to sustain the modest existing hospital system and train more nurses in particular. Newspapers recruited Western-trained physicians to write a health column. District and village Việt Minh groups took up the challenge of convincing citizens to improve public hygiene and sanitation. Wherever such hygiene efforts succeeded it was because they formed part of a wider mass mobilization strategy. “To be hygienic is to love your country” was daubed on walls. Cadres also employed peer pressure, and came back again and again to ensure compliance. Military units set the best example, boiling drinking water, burying feces, disposing of garbage, treating cuts, and showing high regard for their medics.³¹

Young women wishing to engage wholeheartedly in the revolution faced many more problems than young men. Often they remained under pressure from their families to stay at home, get married, and bear children. Those young women who did “emancipate” (thoát ly) themselves from home and village still faced a political culture dominated entirely by men. Women of all ages joined the Women’s National Salvation Association in order to be able to convene away from men, share experiences, make a public contribution, and, they hoped, carve out some political space for themselves. Association members collected donations, cultivated secondary crops, organized literacy classes, enforced hygiene rules, and assisted families of absent soldiers. Chairs of women’s committees routinely served on Việt Minh committees, and interacted with chairwomen in adjacent villages.³² At the central level, however, only eight out of 290 National Assembly delegates who convened in late 1946 were women.³³ Female representation in the higher echelons of the ICP was no better.

Imagining the Country

In mid-1946, a newspaper article published in Huế artfully described an exchange about the “Fatherland” (Tổquốc) between a Catholic village elder and a young intellectual. The elder invoked the communal house (đình), pagoda, church, graves, family, village rice fields, and “all the achievements of my ancestors.” The youth scorned this vision as narrow-minded and provincial. “The Fatherland is our mountains and rivers, our cultural inheritance, the history bequeathed by our ancestors,” he insisted. To this the elder replied, “Your Fatherland is remote, insipid, lifeless.” When the two of them began to debate Marshal Pétain’s wartime slogan of “Work, Family, Fatherland,” the DRVN censors terminated the article in mid-sentence.³⁴

Most intellectuals considered “fatherland” too remote a term. They much preferred the more emotive đất nước (literally “land-water”) or variations thereof, such as nước nhà. One respected writer took nước nhà to link personal feelings with collective demands:

All hearts for country and home.

If anyone doesn’t understand,

Heaven will instruct him.³⁵

Interestingly, reversing nước nhà to nhà nước produced the blunt, unemotional designation for “the state.” Patriotism was literally “to love one’s country” (yêu nước), which is why the English term “nationalism” fails to express Vietnamese sentiments.

Much of Vietnam’s political vocabulary was quite new. Forty years earlier Vietnamese literati had encountered Japanese and Chinese words that had only recently been coined from Western language terminology. These included: nation, society, struggle, progress, modernity, democracy, republic, independence, freedom, and sovereignty. The new intelligentsia of the 1920s and 1930s had begun to integrate these new words into the Vietnamese language, but it was not until 1945 that the population at large began to take them on via speeches, slogans, banners, leaflets, and literacy classes. When talking among themselves, the intelligentsia continued to use French terms like nation, état, unité, societé, progrès, révolution, réactionnaire, modernité, élan, and mobilisation when talking among themselves.

How was the name Democratic Republic of Vietnam selected? Being a shortwave news addict at his Tân Trào camp during the summer of 1945, Hồ Chí Minh would have heard quickly about a number of eastern European states occupied by Soviet troops being given new titles. There was the Polish People’s Republic, Hungarian People’s Democracy, Socialist Republic of Romania, People’s Republic of Bulgaria, and People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Hồ Chí Minh undoubtedly assumed that Stalin was directly involved. Deliberately avoiding rank imitation, Hồ Chí Minh chose a name with some semantic elbow room. “Democratic republic” was internationally unique. It was approved at the very brief National People’s Congress on August 16 and reaffirmed at the Independence Day mass meeting on September 2. Meanwhile, however, Hồ Chí Minh and some others employed the title “Republic of Vietnam” when communicating in French or English. And the March 6, 1946, preliminary convention, signed by Hồ Chí Minh, Jean Sainteny, and Vũ Hồng Khánh, spoke of the Republic of Vietnam, not the DRVN. This may only have been diplomatic cosmetics. But it is also possible that Hồ retained the option of dropping “democratic” in the nation’s constitution being drafted in Hanoi while he was in Paris. If so, he doesn’t seem to have raised the idea upon his return in October.

Peace and War Conflated

Franco-Vietnamese armed conflict unfolded in various parts of Indochina throughout the sixteen months from September 1945 to December 1946. First Cochinchina was embroiled, then southern Annam. The General Staff Agreement signed April 3, 1946, in Hanoi was adhered to north of the 16th parallel for some months. French intransigence at a Franco-Vietnamese conference in April–May at Dalat shocked the twenty prominent Vietnamese intellectuals who participated. On June 1, Indochina’s new high commissioner, Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, announced the formation of the Autonomous Republic of Cochinchina. When President Hồ Chí Minh heard of this in Cairo, en route to Paris on an official visit, he considered returning home. French forces seized Pleiku and Kontum on June 21. Four days later they took over the former governor-general’s palace in Hanoi as it was being vacated by Nationalist Chinese forces, triggering a general strike.

On August 3, a large French convoy en route from Hanoi to Lạng Sơn came under sustained machine-gun fire as it passed through Bắc Ninh town, with fifteen French soldiers killed and more than thirty wounded. Perhaps some senior ICP cadres had linked up with an army unit based in Bắc Ninh and the local militia. Realizing the gravity of this attack, Võ Nguyên Giáp worked together with French officers to prevent further such incidents.³⁶

A modus vivendi signed by Hồ Chí Minh in Paris on September 14 was a big disappointment at home. The noncommunist press dissected it critically. Trường Chinh convened the ICP standing bureau to discuss war. “Sooner or later, the French will attack us and we certainly will have to attack them,” the meeting concluded.³⁷ The only tangible result of the modus vivendi was a ceasefire in Cochinchina and southern Annam, which held for a couple of days before armed confrontations resumed. Hồ Chí Minh and d’Argenlieu exchanged messages reiterating bluntly the most important issue at stake between the two sides: was Cochinchina part of Vietnam or France? The French Army then took advantage of a dispute in Haiphong over customs duties to send tanks into the city and bombard whole neighborhoods with naval gunfire, killing thousands of people. Vietnamese newspapers immediately grasped the gravity of events, and the ICP/Việt Minh general headquarters published a rousing declaration that assumed war was inevitable.

In early December, Jean Sainteny told Hồ Chí Minh that DRVN troops must be withdrawn from Cochinchina, Haiphong would remain under French control, Radio Bach Mai should be relinquished, and France would be free to suppress all terrorism. The French Army wanted the Vietnamese to attack first. Hồ Chí Minh tried hard to make contact with León Blum, the new Socialist Party prime minister, without success. Instructions went out to prepare for nationwide attacks, but the subsequent execution order gave units only seven hours to get into position. Assaults in Hanoi were poorly coordinated and mostly failed to achieve their objectives. Elsewhere the element of surprise was lost when French units received word of the fighting in Hanoi before coming under attack themselves.

The clash of two political forces intent on regaining or gaining national honor and a sense of collective purpose had made compromise impossible. For many Vietnamese participants it was the Anti-French Resistance (Kháng chiến chống Pháp) that was now underway, not the Indochina War or the Vietnam War.

Thousands of DRVN civil servants evacuated the capital in late December, mostly lacking information on where to go. Some had already sent their families to home villages, others left them in Hanoi, still others brought them along to an uncertain fate. President Hồ Chí Minh and other cabinet members headed westward toward a planned “safe area.” In late February, Hồ Chí Minh visited Thanh Hóa province to consider whether to move the central government down there or not. Thanh Hóa had the merits of a large population and extensive rice fields, but any French offensive that forced the government into the hills would have left them vulnerable to enemy attack from Laos. In early March, a French armored sortie from Hanoi westward convinced Hồ to shift the government northward to the Việt Bắc hills.³⁸

For the National Guard to endure during the summer of 1947, regiments had to disaggregate to battalions, and commanders often found it necessary to disperse companies to different districts to obtain food and shelter. In early October, the French Army began a three-pronged offensive (Operation Léa) in the Việt Bắc designed to capture or kill the DRVN leadership, destroy supply depots hidden in limestone caves, and sever contacts with China. Trường Chinh was almost captured, and one senior government official killed.³⁹ After three months the French withdrew, except for several new bases along the Chinese frontier. The DRVN central government would not again be seriously threatened during either the First or Second Indochina War.

Power, Authority, and Legitimacy

Việt Minh groups seized power in Hanoi and vicinity in late August 1945, enabling Hồ Chí Minh to announce the establishment of the DRVN and declare Vietnam’s independence. Elsewhere, groups waving Việt Minh flags took over public buildings, formed committees, and received their first DRVN telegrams from “the center.” Next, the government had to forge authority so that people would obey rules and practices, whether new or continuing, without significant opposition. Communication of this new order was achieved by print, radio, speeches, and word of mouth. Authority required Hồ Chí Minh and his ICP lieutenants to work together with members of the progressive intelligentsia and former colonial employees to address immediate issues of food, defense, finances, and foreign affairs.

Legitimacy derived in the first instance from people believing that the DRVN government could prevent France from retaking Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin. It soon became clear that the government intended to push each and every citizen to take part in this patriotic endeavor. There were repeated millenarian calls to sacrifice, to fight, and perhaps die in defense of the fatherland. Additional Việt Minh groups organized by gender, age, occupation, religion, and ethnicity sprang up in most villages and urban neighborhoods. Unless Vietnamese were very young or very old it was nigh on impossible to avoid joining up. Not surprisingly, some citizens felt this was compulsion, not voluntary support for what they agreed was a legitimate cause.

Considering how many restrictions the French colonial system had placed on “native” schooling, personal advancement, or political responsibility, the DRVN civil administration, National Guard, and growing Việt Minh network were performing remarkably well in late 1946. The claim that the DRVN was “no more than a skeleton” overlooks this unexpectedly strong performance during its first year of existence. Instead of the skeleton metaphor, the DRVN is more usefully understood as an “archipelago state.”⁴⁰ Of course, the French colonial state was also an “archipelago,” albeit one built primarily around the control of urban “islands.” In Cochinchina, the French occupied Saigon and then portions of the Mekong Delta, where the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo sustained enclaves as well. They then moved into the towns of southern Annam, followed by Hải Phòng, Lạng Sơn, Hanoi, parts of the Red River Delta, and Huế.

The main “islands” of the DRVN “archipelago” in 1947 were the Việt Bắc, Zone III in the southern Red River Delta, Zone IV in northern Annam, and Zone V in southern Annam. In the Mekong Delta, smaller DRVN islands could be found in Zone VII (The Plain of Reeds) and Zone IX (the Cà Mau peninsula). As Goscha points out, communications proved vital to connecting the islands of the archipelago state. DRVN radio-telegraph networks continued to function. Lower-priority messages went via the labor-intensive courier system that operated in French-held areas as well as the “islands.” Each zone had its own printing presses for newspapers and broadsides.⁴¹

Evidence suggests that DRVN legitimacy persisted for many people living in French-controlled areas after 1946. One can see this in the lightly censored Saigon press of 1946–7, as most papers backed DRVN independence and the territorial integrity of Vietnam, while condemning Cochinchina “separatists.” The most credible participant in Admiral d’Argenlieu’s Cochinchinese council, Nguyễn Vӑn Thịnh, realizing that he had neither power, authority, nor legitimacy, committed suicide on November 10, 1946.⁴² DRVN legitimacy was further enhanced by French attempts to “deport” DRVN supporters from Cochinchina. In March, the French commander of the Biên Hòa region told representatives of Nguyễn Bình, head of DRVN Military Region VII, that all “Tonkinois” personnel would be sent back to Tonkin, and that Bình himself would be flown to Hanoi. In reply to the French colonel, each delegation member proudly identified himself as coming from the south, center, or north of a united nation.⁴³

If Cochinchinese residents had been given the referendum opportunity mooted in the March 6, 1946, accord, it is reasonable to suppose that a majority would have voted for unification. Of course, to imagine what might have happened subsequent to such a vote is speculative. What actually unfolded is clear enough: despite Hồ Chí Minh’s best efforts to find a peaceful path to independence, the fate of the DRVN and all of Indochina was to endure a massive and savage war that would last for almost a decade and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The “Anti-French Resistance” would arguably become the bloodiest of all of the wars of decolonization that erupted around the globe after 1945; it would also draw attention and eventually direct interventions from other foreign powers, including the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union. Amid the carnage and the escalating superpower rivalry, Trường Chinh and other ICP leaders would gradually secure their control over DRVN institutions and policies, especially after 1950. The result by 1954 was a state that looked and functioned very differently from the nascent DRVN state that emerged during 1945–6, while Indochina was still suspended between war and peace. The consolidation of one-party rule would have profound and lasting consequences for Vietnam, both during the era of the “Vietnam War” and down to the present day.

7 France’s Indochina War

Pierre Grosser

Legislative measures often determine the official chronology of a war, both its start and finish. After careful discussions starting in 1950, the French government approved the creation of a “Commemorative Medal for the Indochina War” on August 1, 1953. This official medal established the starting date of the “Indochinese campaign” on August 16, 1945. Legislation passed on January 29, 1958, set the end of the war on August 11, 1954, when the ceasefire brokered during the Geneva Conference officially entered into effect. During this conflict, in all, some 21,000 French soldiers from Metropolitan France had died. This represented, however, less than a quarter of the total 89,000 military deaths suffered by the French Union camp: 11,500 North Africans, 3,700 Africans, 9,200 Foreign Legion soldiers, 27,000 indigenous (mainly Vietnamese) auxiliary personnel, and 17,000 members of the armed forces of the Associated States of Indochina (the majority of whom were Vietnamese).¹ As many as 500,000 Vietnamese died during the war, civilians and combatants alike.

There are many ways to study the French side of the Indochina War. Here we focus on the international context, examining the complex issues French decision-makers faced at the crossroads of imperial, global, and regional events. Stuck in a difficult position since the humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany in the spring of 1940, French policymakers were particularly sensitive to the international dimensions of the Indochina War.

How the War Began, 1945–7

The Indochina War began at the intersection of three phenomena. First, although Europeans had realized during World War II that their empires needed to be modernized and reformed to make room for the demands of the elites of the colonized peoples, many still considered them to be an essential component of international power and prestige. During World War II, Free France relied heavily on the African empire, a source of manpower for a Free French army. Liberated by the Allies in 1944, the French counted on their empire to help rebuild a war-torn economy and return the country to the world stage. Empire would also allow the French room to maneuver between the two post–1945 giants, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Second, the humiliation of 1940 followed by the Axis occupation of France in Europe and Indochina in Asia imposed upon the French after the war the pressing need to recover their territorial possessions ante bellum. It was essential to erasing the stain of 1940 and affirming the “white man’s prestige” in Indochina. French settlers, officials, and businessmen in Indochina were traumatized by the Japanese coup de force of March 9, 1945, which brought French Indochina down. And because the French could not intervene when the Japanese capitulated to the Allies on August 15, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh and the nationalist front he created in 1941, the Việt Minh, took advantage of the power vacuum to declare Vietnam’s independence on September 2, 1945. This meant that the French would have to reconquer Indochina in order to reestablish their sovereignty there. The context in which this would occur would be one of nationalist turmoil, a result of the economic, social, and political consequences of the world war, the sudden disappearance of the Japanese empire, and anticolonial sentiments which the Japanese had fanned. It was a difficult situation for the French. Losing the Indochinese link in the imperial chain could set a precedent, encouraging nationalists in other parts of the empire to follow suit. Nonetheless, it was still possible that this anti-imperialist effervescence could still be quickly suppressed and controlled, as it had been after World War I. Or at least that’s what some French leaders thought. In any case, the French, on left and right, wanted their empire back.

Third, the imperative of reconquering and controlling the empire led to a wave of repressive violence from North Africa to Vietnam by way of Madagascar.² In East Asia, this wave of colonial violence combined with the brutalization of Asia societies during World War II, under the Japanese, and at the hands of a host of armed groups used by the Japanese, the British, and the Americans, to say nothing of the associations and paramilitary organizations the Japanese had operated among the young. The legitimacy of the empire and the repression used to restore it enjoyed widespread support at the time in the French ruling class. In the early years, the French Communist Party (FCP) was not yet an advocate of decolonization. Not only did the FCP want to show its nationalist credentials acquired during war against the Nazis, which guaranteed them electoral successes immediately after 1945, but the communists were also of the mind that France, for cultural and historical reasons, could and should still do much for the colonial peoples. It was also important for the PCF to protect French colonies against US imperialist ambitions.

Starting in 1943, the French provisional government led by Charles de Gaulle in Algiers sought to prepare the liberation of Indochina by force, and, to this end, de Gaulle did his best to incorporate Free France’s Indochinese strategy within the wider plans of the Allied Powers. The French provisional government begged for Allied help in arming and transporting some troops. However, the Japanese coup of March 9, 1945, not only eliminated a good deal of the underground resistance inside Vietnam, but Paris quickly realized that the liberation of Indochina would occur without the French. The Americans seemed to want to keep the French at arm’s length in the Far East. At the Potsdam Conference in mid-1945 (to which the French were not privy), the Allies decided that the Republic of China would disarm the Japanese in Indochina north of the 16th parallel while the United Kingdom would do the same below that line. Surprised by the unexpectedly early Japanese surrender, de Gaulle could not accept this. He actively pursued the departure of the Chinese and British troops and their replacement with the French Expeditionary Corps whose soldiers, upon arrival, would have the right to circulate freely in all of Indochina.

De Gaulle wanted Indochina back in the empire. The problem is that this would not be so easy. Taking advantage of the Japanese overthrow of the French in March, followed by the Japanese capitulation to the Allies on August 15, the independence leader and founder of the Việt Minh, Hồ Chí Minh, declared the independence of Vietnam on September 2, 1945. The Vietnam the French had eliminated from the map of the world in the late nineteenth century was back and would not be sidelined so easily again in the mid-twentieth. Based out of the capital of Hanoi, the new nation-state was called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN). It claimed all of Vietnam in a single territorial state – the regions the French called Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin to refer to the colony in the South and the protectorates in central and northern Vietnam, respectively.

De Gaulle and most of the French political class at the time still thought in these prewar colonial terms. The framework of the Gaullist Indochinese policy had been hammered out by the provisional government on March 24, 1945. An Indochinese federation consisting of five “regions” (Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos) would be created and join a French Union, the new name for the empire but which had yet to be formally created.³ In negotiations with Hồ, the French were determined to create a French Union and to place Indochina within it, including Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam. Annoyed by Emperor Bảo Đại’s abdication in late August 1945 and his support of Hồ’s national government, de Gaulle had turned to another member of the royal family to help him recover French Indochina, Prince Vĩnh San. Nothing came of this royalist card, though: the latter died in a plane crash in December 1945.

Upon arriving in Saigon in early September, British General Gracey facilitated the return of the French to southern Indochina below the 16th parallel. The situation in Saigon was, however, very complicated. Vietnamese revolutionary committees, not all of them under Hồ Chí Minh’s control, had operated freely since the Japanese surrender a few weeks earlier. Thousands of Japanese were awaiting disarmament and repatriation. US officers who had arrived, too, sent reports to Washington on events in Indochina. Meanwhile, French settlers made no secret of their desire to see colonial rule re-established quickly, nor did they hide their disdain for the envoys from metropolitan France who counseled patience and compromise. Hostilities broke out in this explosive southern mix when Gracey allowed colonial troops imprisoned by the Japanese in March to dislodge Hồ Chí Minh’s officials from Saigon. The troops of the French Expeditionary Corps, sent by de Gaulle and led by General Leclerc, landed in southern Indochina in October and began to reestablish French sovereignty below the 16th parallel by force but not before a Vietnamese massacre of around a hundred French settlers in Saigon. War had effectively begun below the 16th parallel.

The Chinese were reticent to facilitate the return of the French to their zone of responsibility in northern Indochina, fearful of setting off a colonial war above the 16th parallel as the British had just done below it. As a result, the Chinese effectively allowed Hồ Chí Minh’s government to continue to operate from Hanoi while war raged in the south. The French realized that they would have to negotiate with the Vietnamese government in Hanoi and the Chinese occupation forces in order to return to Indochina above the 16th parallel. The treaty signed with the Chinese in February 1946 secured the withdrawal of Chinese troops. Most left in June, with the last soldiers withdrawing in September. At the same time, the French signed an accord with DRVN President Hồ Chí Minh, on March 6, 1946. This document allowed the French to transfer 15,000 troops above the 16th parallel to replace the departing soldiers. The French did not, however, have the right to overthrow the government they now recognized as part of a future Indochinese federation. The accord also stipulated that the French forces would withdraw from the DRVN within five years. In mid-March, General Leclerc entered Hanoi as French troops assumed positions in the main cities in upper Indochina. To maintain order, French military commanders joined with their counterparts in the DRVN to eliminate anticommunist nationalists who had rejected any compromise with the French in March. Meanwhile, hardliners in Paris felt that the French had given away too much to Hồ (they derided the March 6 agreement as a new “Munich”), particularly the annex limiting the duration of the French military presence in Vietnam.

Between March and December 1946, a “strange war” occurred. French officers who believed that the military situation was improving in their favor felt that it was now possible to adopt a tougher line in negotiations. On the other hand, those who believed the situation remained fragile pleaded for additional military reinforcements. Follow-up negotiations took place in Vietnam (in Đà Lạt first, which was to be the capital of the Indochinese federation) and then in France (in Fontainebleau). The question of the diplomatic representation of the DRVN was a major point of contention. The French were concerned about DRVN efforts to gain international recognition and affirm its national sovereignty as an independent state. But for Paris, there was no question about responsibility for the Union’s diplomacy – it would be the French, not the Vietnamese. Another dispute concerned the unity of Vietnam claimed by Hồ Chí Minh. De Gaulle’s high commissioner for Indochina, Thierry d’Argenlieu, who at this time enjoyed the support of the postwar government in Paris, insisted that Cochinchina was a French colony separate from Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam – a position backed by most settlers and certain other elites in the region.

On the French side, there was no common position in these negotiations. During 1946–8, a large part of the political battle for Indochina was played out in Paris. The hardliners opposed to decolonization succeeded in imposing themselves through bureaucratic micro-actions, such as political appointments or budgetary arbitration. The colonels of the colonial army within the National Defence General Staff were influential, too, working in cooperation with officers advising French officials in Indochina. Meanwhile, d’Argenlieu was urged to act like Gallieni and Lyautey, both of whom had confronted Paris with imperial faits accomplis in the nineteenth century. The unstable political landscape in the metropole allowed the high commissioner to do this. Even following de Gaulle’s resignation in early 1946, d’Argenlieu took advantage of the changing governments in Paris in 1946 to advance his policy to retake all of Indochina. Events came to a head in late 1946 when the Fourth Republic finally came to life. D’Argenlieu and fellow hardliners in Indochina and France suspected Léon Blum, the newly appointed socialist leader of the republic, of wanting to make concessions to Hồ. These men enjoyed the support of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) and encouraged d’Argenlieu to act against the DRVN. They would cover him. Socialists who had colonial responsibilities, such as Marius Moutet, also supported the aggressive line on Vietnam.

The French bombing of the port city of Hải Phòng in November 1946 was one of those faits accomplis pushed by the hawks working with d’Argenlieu at the helm in Indochina. The heavy-handed reoccupation of Haiphong came at the cost of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Vietnamese civilian lives. The high commissioner was angered by the partial application of agreements by the DRVN thus far. He also wanted to expand France’s colonial grip whenever and wherever he could, as well as to be in a position of strength to launch wider military operations if necessary. After Haiphong, leaders on both sides were losing patience with the voices calling for conciliation. Unless one side ceded on its claims to sovereignty over all of Vietnam, war was inevitable by late 1946. Their backs to the wall, the Vietnamese attacked the French on the evening of December 19, 1946, setting off full-scale war in all of Vietnam. The Vietnamese massacre of dozens of French settlers in Hanoi during the street fighting in late December allowed the hardliners to put an end to the “farce” that had constituted the talks with the Vietnamese, who, in their view, had shown their duplicity and barbarism just like the Japanese before them. It was, in fact, a pretext to retake all of Indochina by force if necessary – just as de Gaulle had directed d’Argenlieu to do upon naming him high commissioner in September 1945.⁴

Several goals guided French military operations following the outbreak of full-scale war. First, the army sought to free central Vietnam from the DRVN’s hold, considered “frightening but not invincible.” Second, toward the end of 1947, the French would attack the resistance government in the Northern Highlands by capturing its leadership and destroying its army with an airborne operation known as Opération Léa. It came close to achieving the first goal, but failed on the second. Third, although the French had backed Vietnamese expansionists, ambitions upon building Indochina at the turn of the twentieth century, they now supported all those who had problems with the Vietnamese government led by Hồ. The French warned the Cambodians, Cochinchinese, and the minority peoples living in the Highlands of the dangers of “Annamese imperialism.”

In late 1947, as the French Expeditionary Corps went on the offensive against the DRVN, the new high commissioner for Indochina, Emile Bollaert, terminated negotiations with Hồ Chí Minh and initiated talks with Bảo Đại. The former emperor was now living in Hong Kong, where he had gone into exile after a brief stint as advisor to Hồ Chí Minh’s government. The French now sought to win over Bảo Đại and have him lead a noncommunist Vietnam in association with them and fellow states in Laos and Cambodia, all of them part of the French Union. The man behind this postwar royalist project was Léon Pignon, political advisor to d’Argenlieu in 1945–6 and then high commissioner for Indochina between 1948 and 1950. The accords of June 5, 1948, signed by the French and Bảo Đại in Hạ Long Bay, allowed for the territorial unification of the three colonial regions (Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin). However, Bollaert encountered resistance from the MRP while French settlers continued to oppose the unification of Vietnam, whether under Hồ Chí Minh or Bảo Đại. Faced with Chinese communist victories to the north and thanks to support from Britain and the United States, Pignon finally succeeded in winning over Bảo Đại’s support for the creation of a less-than-independent noncommunist Vietnam in exchange for the territorial unification of the country, something that the French had denied Hồ Chí Minh a few years earlier.⁵ Bảo Đại returned to Vietnam in 1949 to serve as the head of state of the Associated State of Vietnam (Etat associé du Vietnam), working in tandem with sister associated states for Laos and Cambodia. All three states were officially ratified in 1949. Together, they were part of a wider federal structure known as the Associated States of Indochina. The United States, Britain, and others formally recognized Bảo Đại’s Vietnam in early 1950, following the Chinese communist victory and Mao Zedong’s recognition of the DRVN.

The forces of the French Union fought in Indochina as part of an effort to maintain the “imperial security” of not only Indochina but the entire French empire. From 1947 onward, it became a question of the “collective security of the French Union.”⁶ Many ranking French decision-makers were convinced that a third world war was possible. Some considered the maintenance of the French Union even more important than that of the United Nations. The French negotiated the acquisition of bases in Indochina, not only for local military use but also as part of a wider security calculus for the entire French Union. They did so with their eye on what the Americans were doing in the Philippines. The results were mixed. By 1956, France retained just one military base in Laos.

French colonial troops helped hold this imperial line in Indochina. The number of nonwhite troops coming from the empire increased proportionally as the war dragged on. These deployments were ordered despite early concerns about African racism toward Asians, fears that these troops might commit acts of violence against Vietnamese civilians, as well as concerns about the nationalist “infection” that these troops (especially if they were taken prisoner) might “contract” in Vietnam and then “spread” to Africa upon their return in the form of an “independence virus.” As in previous decades, the French Army recruited ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) to serve as auxillaries and soldiers, even though officers believed Indochinese populations had little taste for fighting (except, they supposed, when they had been radicalized by the DRVN). Although Bollaert still believed in the summer of 1947 that only one army, that of the French Union, could exist, the French failure to destroy Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam and the reluctance of Paris to send more metropolitan troops (already in short supply due to a permanent recruitment crisis) forced the French to mobilize the Vietnamese. Upon creating the Associated States of Indochina, the French had agreed to begin creating armed forces for each of the Associated States, operating within the French Union and committed to the defense of the empire. Yet French authorities in Indochina remained ambivalent about these new armies. Training remained a problem. Troop morale was low despite increasing American military aid. Bảo Đại would complain that “one cannot count on the Vietnamese army (to fight) and then refuse to give it the right to exist.” Little progress was made until General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny arrived in Indochina in late 1950 and accelerated the expansion of the Vietnamese Army, referred to at the time as the “yellowing” or jaunissement of the conflict.

Indochina Becomes a Cold-War Battlefield, 1949–51

The Chinese communist victory of October 1949 changed the nature of the Indochina War. The French had already been following closely the course of the Chinese civil war opposing Mao Zedong’s communist forces against those of the Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-shek. French officials worried that hostilities in China might spill over into the northern Vietnamese border areas where overseas Chinese communities lived, transforming a colonial war of pacification in Indochina into a wider Franco-Chinese conflagration. France and China had gone to war seventy years earlier at the time of the French conquest of Tonkin. Between 1949 and 1953, the French disarmed and relocated retreating republican Chinese troops fleeing the border into northern Indochina. With the Chinese communists now providing diplomatic and military support to Hồ Chí Minh and his Vietnamese army, the French looked to their Atlantic partners, the Americans and the British in particular, to help them to protect Indochina’s northern border, to recognize the Associated States of Indochina, and to aid the French and, through them, their Indochinese partners. This international support would serve to legitimate the French war effort in the eyes of the peoples of Indochina. It was now more than a simple “colonial reconquest.” In early 1950, the Americans, followed by most of their allies in Europe and Asia, formally recognized the three Associated States of Indochina.

After hesitating for a considerable amount of time, the French finally refused to recognize Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) created in October 1949. Like the French, the Vietnamese also grasped the advantages accruing from making their struggle for national liberation part of this Global Cold War. Mao helped break the DRVN’s diplomatic isolation by recognizing the DRVN in January 1950 and by persuading the communist bloc, including a rather reluctant Joseph Stalin, to do the same. It is doubtful that the French could have stopped Mao from aiding Hồ Chí Minh, even if they had recognized the PRC.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 seemed like a godsend for those in French ruling circles who wanted to keep Indochina. The North Korean invasion of the South allowed the French to claim that they had been fighting a similar kind of war in Vietnam since 1946 against the communist threat posed by Hồ Chí Minh – and that they had been holding the line alone. The French sent one battalion to Korea to fight alongside the Americans and thereby show that the wars in Korea and Indochina were part of the same regional and global struggle. With the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now bogged down in Korea, the French also saw the chance to strike their Vietnamese enemy in Indochina hard. Things, however, did not work out as they hoped. In late 1950, the French Union forces lost a major battle on the Chinese border at Cao Bằng to a DRVN army now much strengthened by Chinese arms shipments and training. The Cao Bằng catastrophe sent shockwaves through the French political class, as thousands of French Union soldiers were marched off as prisoners. The newly professionalized People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had just won its first set-piece battle and opened a direct supply route to China.

The battle of Cao Bằng coincided with the massive entry of Chinese troops into Korea in October 1950, raising the specter that something similar could occur on French watch in Indochina. As far as French military leaders were concerned, they were now fighting two wars, and it was essential that France was not forced to fight alone on either front. The first war focused on helping the Associated States of Indochina fight against “serious internal rebellions.” The second conflict was a conventional war against the PAVN. It had started at Cao Bằng in late 1950 when PAVN troops clashed with those of the French Union. It spread increasingly to northern and central parts of Vietnam by 1954. The French were tempted to invite the Americans in to help them in their battles against the PAVN and possibly the Chinese. In the end, though, the French chose to remain in charge in Indochina, but to rally the Western bloc behind their war effort and bring the Indochinese populations into the war through mass mobilization laws approved by de Lattre and Bảo Đại in mid-1951. The French would thus do their best to obtain maximum support from the West while maintaining close control over the conduct of the war. The French expected the Americans to provide assistance but not to infringe French sovereignty in Indochina, given the sacrifices the Union forces were now making on the front lines for the “Free World.” Similarly, the French also expected the leaders of their Associated States of Indochina to contain their own attacks on the legitimacy of French rule. The French were willing to transfer their war of pacification against the “rebels” to the Associated State of Vietnam’s army, so that they could concentrate on defeating the PAVN. But only if the French remained in overall control.

In late 1950, Paris dispatched the prestigious General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny to Indochina as the new high commissioner and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces there. His tasks were to turn the military situation around and to demonstrate at the same time to the Americans the French resolve to fight on this second front of the Cold War in Asia (Korea being the other one). De Lattre’s arrival in Vietnam coincided with the massive US retreat toward southern Korea in the face of the Chinese invasion of the north. In this dire situation, the French and the British feared that the Americans might use the nuclear bomb to turn the tide – and in the process suck them into a third world war. Some felt that the United States, blinded by its anticommunism symbolized by the virulent McCarthy years, was the main threat to world peace. Others reminded their listeners of what had happened in the 1930s when the Europeans appeased the Nazis. To abandon an ally, no matter how far away, was not only disgraceful but also sure to encourage further aggression from the communist adversary.

From this point a new political line emerged in France explaining why the conflict in Indochina should continue. On the one hand, the French felt that it was important not to undertake any adventurous operations in Asia (beyond US involvement in Korea and that of the French in Indochina). Such actions in Asia would only strengthen the Soviet hand, since Moscow sought to divert Western attention from Europe. This, too, is why it was important not to trigger any direct Chinese interference in Indochina, since it would also require the West to turn away from Europe. At the same time, there would be no withdrawal from Asia, whether in Korea or Indochina. It was important to contain the communists at the Indochinese pass so as to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into hostile hands, as had occurred during World War II when the Japanese seized vast territories rich in rice and natural resources. Communist control of Southeast Asia could potentially change the global balance of power. The French were thus determined to hold on in Indochina with material assistance from the United States. The creation of a Vietnamese army would help them do that; it would also free up French troops for the defense of Europe where, it was thought at the time, the main threat resided.

The Chinese question was essential. The French fell somewhere between the hardline US view and the more supple British position, but they had to toe the American line on China, given their needs in Indochina which only the Americans could meet. London was more sensitive to the opinions of Asian leaders and was ready to extend a hand to the Chinese, in particular, in order to avoid an escalation of tensions on the part of the Americans. In a strange way, containing the Americans became almost as important as stopping the communists.

The French also wanted to avoid being sucked into an American crusade or being forced to continue the Indochina war beyond reason. By 1953, with the signing of the Korean ceasefire, the French were open to the idea of negotiating with the Chinese and the Soviets to end their support for Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam. However, France did not have a bargaining chip to use in its negotiations with China. Only Washington had the ability to make the concessions that China wanted, such as entry into the United Nations, or resolution of the Taiwan question. The Americans, however, did not want to make a global bargain with China over Korea, and were even less inclined to do so on Indochina.

Moreover, the French needed the United States to carry on in Indochina and only Washington could dissuade the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese communists from going too far. French leaders believed that nothing would be more dangerous than a US return to the isolationism of the interwar period, should the French fail to convince the Americans of their mettle in Indochina. The US might be tempted to return to its peripheral strategy in Europe, leaving France vulnerable to invasion, as in 1940, or to dismantle the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Such a scenario would leave the French vulnerable not only to the Soviet threat but also to a resurgent (West) Germany, even a rearmed one. The French thus believed they had to carry on in Indochina in order for the Americans to remain committed to defending them in Europe.

During the second half of the Indochina War, the French sought to convince the Americans (and the British too) that they were part of the great power club, again, equal in standing at least to the United Kingdom. To fight in Indochina was to show the country’s determination and virility, essential to changing the widespread image since 1940 of France being the “sick man” in the Atlantic alliance, divided and in decline, with a political regime that de Gaulle referred to as a “eunuch.” The French bet on the geopolitics of the Indochina War to help them do this: Tonkin provided them with the geopolitical “bolt” or the “wall” in northern Vietnam. It was essential to the protection of Southeast Asia from the communists, just as France was essential to the Atlantic defense of Europe and Africa, thanks to its North African empire. Moreover, with their return to the club of the “Big Powers,” the French could participate in major decisions taken by the “Free World” in a Cold War that was truly of a global kind. The absence of the French from major Allied conferences during World War II had badly injured France’s global position since 1940. By continuing to fight in Indochina, the French had restored France international status, but had not yet been able to influence major decisions. The new questions raised by the intensification of the Cold War, symbolized by the Korean War, offered the French the chance to influence choices linked to their security and those of a global kind. The French strategic goal in the early 1950s was the creation of a NATO capable of supporting the French in Indochina and North Africa, led by three great powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. In order to serve as a great power, however, the French required diplomatic, military, and financial assistance. Again, the French received this aid thanks to their war in Indochina. In other words, the French were a great power based on “credit” and acquired it through a form of blackmail by pleading the country’s limited resources, even while emphasizing the sacrifices of its army in the Far East.

As such, the de Lattre “business card” was designed in part to demonstrate to the United States that the French were fighting valiantly. The French Union forces had repulsed the offensive on the Tonkin Delta led by general Võ Nguyên Giáp in 1951 thanks in no small part to considerable American aid (airplanes, communications equipment, the refurbishing of ports, roads, and air bases, and the distribution of napalm) and the fact that the Chinese could not assist their Vietnamese allies effectively as they had to focus on fighting the Americans in Korea. De Lattre requested troop reinforcements from the metropole. However, Paris balked. Its priorities remained focused on Europe and North Africa. For de Lattre, the priority in 1951 had to be Indochina, even if it meant diverting troops briefly from the European theater for the simple reason that French credibility was on the line in the eyes of the Americans. While Europe remained important, the most immediate need was for France to prove its mettle in Asia, where the hot war was taking place.

Endgames, 1952–4

By 1952, it was clear that French forces in Indochina had lost the initiative de Lattre seemed to have provided them a year earlier. The French Union soldiers were fairly good at adapting to battle situations, innovating technically, in mounting pacification operations that incorporated American and British experiences. General Raoul Salan, the new French commander-in-chief who knew Indochina well, searched for ways of countering his adversary’s maneuvers. It was said of Salan that “you will never have an Austerlitz with him; but you won’t have a Waterloo either.” Some observers complained that Salan reacted to present circumstances rather than devising a military strategy for the future. In any case, Salan’s overriding goal was to hold his ground until a political solution could be reached.

Officials in Paris, however, were impatient for action, like officials in the United States and the United Kingdom, because the Indochinese problem prevented the French from dedicating themselves to the defense of Europe and to the ratification of the European Defence Community (EDC). Even though the French had devised the idea of a European army themselves in order to control the rearming of Germany and stave off a possible Soviet attack, the proposal soon divided the French political class. Critics worried that the French military risked becoming a minor player, reduced to checking the Germans and the Soviets, while Britain would retain its status as a great power and partner of the United States. Britain’s admission to the “nuclear club” in 1952 only heightened these fears.

To the Allies, France seemed inscrutable: the French asked for assistance and solidarity but they fought half-heartedly, saying they did not want to provoke the Chinese into intervening. They also resisted granting real independence to the Associated States. Yet France was essential to Allied plans for the defense of Europe and Southeast Asia (including British positions in Singapore and Malaysia). The French wanted more assistance but opposed the measures needed for victory: increased military spending, an expanded draft to send French boys to Indochina, independence for the Associated States, tolerance of American influence in Indochina, and alignment with Washington’s hardline opposition to Beijing. The French had “Vietnamized” the war (and the casualties) but they still wanted Washington to pay the bill. They also wanted the armies of the Associated States to fight on but refused to give up command. Accusations of ingratitude were rife, between the Americans and the French, no less than between France and the Associated States.

1953 was a watershed year. The arrival of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and the increased influence of the Republican Party created hope on the French side that American aid would increase its commitment to containing China. At the same time, American hostility toward Beijing reduced the chances of a political settlement in Indochina while increasing the pressure on France to ratify the EDC. The Americans stepped up their visits to Vietnam and vaunted their success in building a South Korean army, seemingly forgetting that the two wars were very different. They asked the French to launch a real offensive against the PAVN divisions rather than “trying to sponge up water without turning off the faucet.”

The PAVN invasion of Laos in April 1953 confirmed that the war had become a truly Indochinese one. The highland populations and the opium trade became components of the war, just as people and rice were in the northern delta. French defenses could not be arranged in a linear fashion but were organized instead around strong points such as air bases. But these were difficult to supply over long distances. Paris refused to bring the Vietnamese invasion of Laos before the United Nations for fear of interference in French Indochinese affairs. Meanwhile, the French devaluated the Indochinese piaster, angering the leaders of the Associated States of Indochina who had not been consulted. Their demands for full independence became more strident. French business leaders stepped up their withdrawal from Indochina. An increasing number of French politicians began to call for an end to the war without necessarily proposing a realistic solution to do it. They did so even though the cost of the Indochina War for France had actually diminished because of rising American assistance. Just as the British had closed their “dollar gap” by selling Malaysian rubber to the Americans, French soldiers in Indochina guaranteed the flow of dollars needed to shore up French currency reserves.

With the death of Stalin in spring 1953 and the Korean ceasefire that summer, new possibilities for peace emerged. French decision-makers hoped for a détente that could end many of their dilemmas. Some even imagined an alternative to the Atlantic Alliance: overtures to the Soviets, the Chinese, and even the DRVN for the purpose of ending the Indochina War and the EDC in Europe. This proposed diplomatic reset tempted both Gaullists and French communists, as well as the left in the MRP and the radicals gravitating around Mendès France. The potential shift toward a new foreign policy track, one that foreshadowed de Gaulle’s in the 1960s, was a major development in French politics.

But the Americans had other ideas. Having accepted a stalemate in Korea, they now pushed France to take the offensive in Indochina while warning China of dire consequences should Beijing intervene directly. The Laniel government’s strategy in mid-1953 appeared a coherent attempt to balance these competing priorities. It proposed to “perfect” (parfaire) the independence of the Associated States of Indochina while simultaneously taking the offensive with the Navarre Plan. Both moves aimed to mollify the Americans while opening the way for negotiations. An increase in American aid would strengthen the Associated States armed forces in order to prepare the way for a hand-off of power when the time came. Laniel also wanted to take advantage of the spirit of détente that had emerged to enter into the multilateral negotiations with other “great powers” in which France had traditionally shone. But Laniel had no interest in striking a grand bargain with Moscow for the sake of getting out of Indochina. Peace in Indochina would not be purchased at the price of abandoning the European Defense Community.

Demands on the French from the Associated States of Indochina, especially from Vietnam and Cambodia, to grant them full independence made it ever harder to justify the war to the French public. It would also make negotiations more complicated when the time finally came. Some State of Vietnam (SVN) leaders wanted to negotiate with the DRVN in order to avoid a Korean-like partition of the country. Others refused any contact with the enemy. Meanwhile, Paris failed to communicate clearly to Navarre that he would have to adjust his ambitions to the actual means at his disposal. Partly due to pressure from the Americans, who wanted him to strike the enemy on the battlefield, Navarre changed his initial plans to focus on the deltas and took a stand at Điện Biên Phủ in northwest Vietnam in order to block an enemy march on Laos. The Americans by early 1954 were financing almost 75% of the French war effort in Indochina and did not want the French to negotiate with the communist camp. French visitors to Điện Biên Phủ before the battle were convinced that the DRVN would be in a stronger position the longer the war dragged on. But they opposed any negotiations with the DRVN even though they agreed that only a political solution could end the war. In early 1954, several of them, as well as some officers, began to suggest the solution of dividing Vietnam in two.

In early 1954, there was still hope on the French side. By underestimating the capacity and the determination of the DRVN to win in set-piece battle, the French still believed they could stop any enemy offensive wherever it occurred. Such was Navarre’s confidence that he did not abandon his plans to liberate lower-central Vietnam, no doubt with an eye on a possible division of the country at the negotiating table. The minister of foreign affairs, Georges Bidault, convinced the other powers to add the Indochinese question to an upcoming meeting in Geneva a few months later. The discussions would include China.

The French now had what they wanted: a central role in international negotiations. If there was ever a time for the French to make good on their “Indochinese calling card” (carte de visite), as a great power, this was it: they had to convince the Americans that they were committed to containing Beijing and Moscow, but also needed to juggle pressure coming from the French Communist Party’s propaganda machine calling for direct negotiations with Hồ Chí Minh. They also had to consider the possibility of American sabotage at the peace talks. Yet they also knew that the Chinese and Soviets would be reluctant to see France replaced in Indochina by a more aggressive United States.

For French leaders, the spring of 1954 was extremely tense. On the one hand, they worried about the intense public attention focused on Điện Biện Phủ, and on how the fall of the garrison would recall the humiliations of 1940. (Newspaper press runs following the surrender were the highest in French history, surpassed only by France’s soccer victory in the 1998 World Cup.) On the other hand, leaders also feared that US intervention to save Điện Biên Phủ would lead to the internationalization of the conflict. In the end, American inaction enabled France to take the lead at the negotiations, despite the defeat at Điện Biên Phủ. It also allowed Paris to distance itself somewhat from Washington, and to deal directly with the Soviets and Chinese.

Negotiations on Indochina began at Geneva on May 8, 1954, the day after Điện Biên Phủ fell to the PAVN. As the MRP minister of foreign affairs and a man deeply involved in the Indochina War from the start, Georges Bidault wanted to show that France was ready to carry on if an acceptable peace could not be reached. However, the effects of the resounding French defeat at Điện Biên Phủ remained unclear. Would the DRVN launch a new offensive on the delta? Had the French lost a battle or was it the war itself? The French asked the Americans to issue clear warnings to dissuade the enemy from going any further. The military priority was to preserve the French Expeditionary Corps. Meanwhile, France’s Vietnamese allies in Indochina seemed to have lost all faith in the French. For one, Bidault did not include Bảo Đại in the diplomacy at Geneva, going against the principles of the French Union. The French entered into contact with Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in Vietnam and at Geneva. The Americans asked the French to hold on to Tonkin, essential in their view to protecting Southeast Asia, and to accord full independence to the Associated States of Indochina but without proposing any kind of concrete assistance to the Associated States. To the French, the Americans seemed to want to undermine the Geneva Conference. The French wanted to negotiate an end to hostilities in Indochina with international guarantees, including a political solution to accompany a ceasefire. The division of Vietnam into two halves at Geneva quickly presented itself as the best solution for reaching a negotiated settlement, with the DRVN in charge of the northern half and the French and their Vietnamese allies at the helm of a southern state whose political nature remained to be defined. The new French leader, Pierre Mendès France, endorsed such a solution in principle when he became President du Conseil on June 18, 1954.

Mendès France was less worried about the Cold War balance of power than the need to reach a settlement, while keeping the Americans “on board.” The British concurred. The Americans were not absolutely opposed to a negotiated settlement but pushed for the creation of a Southeast Asian security organization so as to show the “Free World”’s commitment to the region and facilitate a possible future intervention if needed. Committed to getting out of Indochina, Mendès France relied on alarmist statements made by his generals to justify his desire to end the war and the concessions needed to achieve that goal. Yet he still wanted everyone on board, unwilling to be known as the leader who sold out Indochina to the communists. He approved of the French Army’s decision to pull back to areas around Hanoi in Operation Auvergne, allowing the PAVN to seize large areas previously under French control. The combined effect of the French Army’s withdrawal to urban centers after Điện Biện Phủ and the opening of negotiations without the direct participation of Bảo Đại’s government sowed panic and anger throughout the ranks of the Associated State of Vietnam, including mass desertions in its armed forces. Bảo Đại’s newly named prime minister, Ngô Đình Diệm, protested French actions. The situation became so tense that the general in charge of the French Expeditionary Corps, Paul Ely, actually feared his Vietnamese allies would turn on his troops out of their anger for what they perceived as a French betrayal.

After Geneva, some of Mendès France’s compatriots accused him of failing to extend his hand sufficiently to the Vietnamese and Chinese communists while others agreed with American criticisms that he had conceded too much in the talks. Both groups complained that he had sacrificed the possibility of a continued postwar French presence in Indochina. His diplomatic success in Geneva became a failure to preserve French influence in Asia. Worse, this French policy effectively left the Americans in southern Vietnam and the Vietnamese communists in the North – a situation almost certain to breed future conflict.

In the wake of the Geneva Accords, signed on July 21, 1954, the French could have remained in Indochina to serve as the guarantor of the ceasefire and political settlement (Figure 7.1). But it was not to be. Both Vietnams were deeply skeptical of French motives. In the North, the DRVN state demanded French cooperation on key provisions of the implementation of the Geneva Accords, including the organization of elections in 1956, the transfer of people, property, and equipment between the two zones, and the return of prisoners of war. In the south, Ngô Đình Diệm’s State of Vietnam (soon to be reinvented as the Republic of Vietnam) aspired to complete the process of decolonization and ultimately spurned Ely’s offer for continued French aid and advice. Any remaining French desire to remain in Indochina was removed by the outbreak of the war in Algeria in November 1954.⁷ In 1956, the last units of the French Expeditionary Corps withdrew from Saigon. In 1958, French legislators easily agreed without fanfare or controversy to set the official end of the Indochina War retroactively to August 11, 1954. The process of sorting out the complex and contradictory French memories of the conflict would prove far more difficult.

Figure 7.1 Representatives of the Associated States of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam sign treaties with France that would give economic, financial, and monetary independence to the Indochinese states (December 31, 1954).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

8 China and the French Indochina War

Chen Jian

Introduction: “I am Hồ Chí Minh”

One day in late January 1950, an old man accompanied by a group of young guards appeared at Vietnam’s border with China. “I am Hồ Chí Minh,” he told the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers who stopped him, in fluent Chinese. He was the Vietnamese communist leader, he said, and he had come to China to confer with his old friends Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing.

Mao was then in Moscow for meetings with Stalin. Liu Shaoqi, the second-in-command of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), acted in Mao’s stead during the Chairman’s absence. Liu knew that a high-ranking Vietnamese communist delegation would be visiting China, as the Chinese and Vietnamese parties had exchanged telegrams after a letter, written in August 1949 by Hồ Chí Minh to Mao requesting Chinese aid in all forms, was delivered to the CCP leadership by two high-ranking cadres from the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).¹ But Liu did not know that Hồ Chí Minh himself would come to China. He immediately instructed that Hồ be “warmly welcomed” at the border and “secretly escorted” to Beijing.²

Liu’s was a natural response. Hồ Chí Minh was an old friend and comrade of many CCP leaders. He had worked with Zhou Enlai and Zhu De as early as the 1920s in Paris. Thereafter he met Mao in Guangzhou. He and other Vietnamese communists had since accumulated extensive connections with the Chinese communists. Upon receiving Hồ’s August 1949 letter, CCP leaders made two decisions: first, to invite a high-ranking Vietnamese delegation to Beijing to “discuss all important issues,” and second, to dispatch to Vietnam Luo Guibo, a PLA commander with extensive guerrilla war experience during China’s war of resistance against Japan.³ Luo departed Beijing for Vietnam on January 16 as the CCP’s liaison representative to the ICP. On January 18, a few days before Hồ Chí Minh arrived at the Chinese border, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) formally recognized Hồ Chí Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) – the first country in the world to do so. Hồ Chí Minh had arrived in China at an opportune moment.

Planning Support for the Vietnamese Communists

Hồ Chí Minh arrived in Beijing on January 30. Liu met with him the same evening. Hồ Chí Minh told Liu that he had “walked barefoot for seventeen days before setting foot on Chinese soil,” and reiterated that he had come to Beijing to seek extensive Chinese support. Liu cabled Mao with Hồ Chí Minh’s requests, suggesting that the CCP should “satisfy all of them.” Mao agreed completely.⁴ Hồ said that he also would like to meet with Stalin and Mao in Moscow and obtain military, political, and economic assistance from the Soviets too. Mao immediately telephoned Stalin to convey Hồ Chí Minh’s request. Stalin replied that Hồ Chí Minh could pay a secret visit to Moscow.⁵ Hồ Chí Minh left Beijing by train on the evening of February 3 and arrived in Moscow one week later.

Hồ Chí Minh’s reception in Moscow was lukewarm. Stalin’s attitude toward him was skeptical. The Soviet leader agreed to recognize Hồ Chí Minh’s government. But, as his primary concerns lay in Europe and he was unfamiliar with – even suspicious of – Hồ Chí Minh’s intentions, and also doubtful about the DRVN’s capabilities, Stalin directed Hồ Chí Minh’s request for support to the Chinese. To Hồ Chí Minh’s great satisfaction, Mao and Zhou promised, first in Moscow and then in Beijing (Hồ had accompanied the two on their train ride back to China from Moscow), that the CCP would do its best “to offer all the assistance needed by Vietnam in its struggle against France.” This included military aid for the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), as the DRVN military forces were now officially called.⁶

The CCP leaders’ enthusiastic response to Hồ Chí Minh’s request for support reflected their belief that it was their mission as communists to promote an Asian revolution modeled on China’s. It was also the result of a “division of labor” agreement that Liu reached with Stalin during his secret visit to the Soviet Union in late June through early August 1949, according to which the Chinese should take a larger role in promoting revolutionary movements in East Asia. Furthermore, it revealed the CCP leaders’ belief that standing by their Vietnamese comrades would serve their goal of safeguarding China’s national security interests. In 1949–50, Mao and the CCP leadership were particularly concerned about the prospect of a possible military confrontation with imperialist countries and their acolytes in the Korean peninsula, Indochina, and the Taiwan Strait.⁷ In the case of Vietnam, this view was supported by the fact that some Chinese nationalist units still loyal to Jiang Jieshi had fled to the Chinese-Vietnamese border area, making the area a source of insecurity for the fledgling Chinese communist regime.⁸

When Hồ Chí Minh came to China in late January, Luo had already left for Vietnam. He arrived at the DRVN headquarters in Vietnam’s Northern Highlands in early February. With Luo’s onsite assistance, in April 1950, the ICP Central Committee asked the CCP to send more military advisors to serve at PAVN headquarters and commands at different levels, and to provide the DRVN with substantial materiel and other support. On April 17, the CCP Central Committee decided to honor the request, and to form a “Chinese Military Advisory Group” (CMAG) to render the support to the DRVN.⁹

On June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out. CCP leaders now saw the task of supporting their Vietnamese comrades as even more urgent. Two days later, Mao, Liu, and other top CCP leaders met with the Chinese military advisors who were to work in Vietnam. It was China’s “glorious internationalist duty” to support the Vietnamese revolution, CCP leaders emphasized. Mao assigned the advisors two specific tasks: to help the Vietnamese comrades establish a formal army, and to aid them in the planning and execution of major operations to defeat the French colonists. Liu stressed that Vietnam was an important area for China, that sending Chinese military advisors there would have worldwide significance. If the enemy were allowed to stay in Vietnam, he warned, China would also face a difficult situation.¹⁰

Late in July, the CMAG, composed of seventy-nine experienced PLA commanders, was formally established. Wei Guoqing, a PLA army corps commander, commanded the group, and Mei Jiasheng and Deng Yifan, both PLA army-level commanders, served as deputy heads. Wei and other members of the group arrived in Vietnam in August, and immediately set to work alongside the PAVN forces.¹¹

The Border Campaign

When Hồ Chí Minh and Liu met in Beijing in early February, they discussed the idea of PAVN troops launching a campaign along Vietnam’s border, to link the DRVN’s base areas with China’s Yunnan and Guangxi provinces. In May 1950, the CCP leadership decided to send General Chen Geng, a CCP Central Committee member and one of the most talented high-ranking PLA commanders, to Vietnam to help organize the campaign. CCP leaders also agreed to help train PAVN troops in Yunnan in preparation for the border campaign.¹² Luo arranged for General Võ Nguyên Giáp to meet with Chen in Yunnan (where Chen’s units were stationed) to brief him on the situation in Vietnam.¹³

A CCP Central Committee instruction to Chen, drafted by Liu, outlined his main tasks in Vietnam:

Your primary task, in addition to discussing and resolving some specific issues with the Vietnamese comrades, is to work out a practical, general plan according to conditions in Vietnam … regarding the scope of our assistance (especially the conditions for shipping supplies). We will use this plan as a guide to implement various aid programs, including making a priority list of materials to be shipped, training (Vietnamese) cadres, training and rectifying (Vietnamese) troops, expanding recruitment, organizing logistical work and fighting battles. The plan should … be approved by the Vietnamese Party Central Committee.¹⁴

Chen traveled to the DRVN’s bases in northern Vietnam in mid-July. After meeting with Hồ Chí Minh, Giáp, and other DRVN leaders, he suggested that in launching the border campaign the PAVN should “concentrate their forces and destroy the enemy troops by separating them into isolated groups,” a principle that had proven effective for the communists in the Chinese civil war. Hồ Chí Minh and the Vietnamese accepted Chen’s plan.¹⁵ Originally, the DRVN leadership had hoped to carry out the border campaign aimed at both Lào Cai and Cao Bằng. Due to grain supply problems, in late June, after consulting with Chinese advisors, they decided to “abandon the plan to attack Lào Cai,” and go ahead with the campaign in Cao Bằng first.¹⁶

On July 22, Chen conveyed his plan for the campaign in a telegram to the CCP Central Military Commission (CCMC). The Vietnamese would begin by annihilating some of the enemy’s automotive units “in mobile operations” while destroying a few of the enemy’s small strongholds, so as to gain experience for larger operations and heighten their soldiers’ morale. They would then launch an offensive against Cao Bằng. Rather than attack the town head-on, they would surround it and assault the enemy’s strongholds in the surrounding area one by one, while at the same time intercepting and destroying the enemy’s reinforcements coming from Lạng Sơn. Finally, the troops would seize Cao Bằng. Chen believed that if this strategy succeeded and Cao Bằng was taken, “the balance of power between the enemy and us in northeastern and northern Vietnam would be completely changed in our favor.”¹⁷ Four days later, the CCMC approved Chen’s plan. Experienced CMAG members were assigned to the PAVN’s battalion, regiment, and division headquarters to guarantee the proper execution of Chen’s strategy.

CCMC leaders in Beijing understood that increasing the PAVN’s combat capacity was of vital importance. From April to September, the Chinese supplied their Vietnamese comrades with more than 14,000 guns; 1,700 machine guns; about 150 pieces of different types of cannons; 2,800 tons of grain; and large amounts of ammunition, medicine, uniforms, and communication equipment.¹⁸ Meanwhile, CCP leaders also issued orders to accelerate the completion of roads to the Vietnamese borders in Yunnan and Guangxi, while repeatedly urging party organs in these two provinces to “overcome all difficulties to guarantee the transportation to Vietnam of the grain needed by the DRVN.”¹⁹

The border campaign began on September 16 and ended with a sweeping DRVN victory. Chen and CMAG members played a crucial role in directing the PAVN forces’ operations during each phase of the campaign. In particular, when the French dispatched five battalions of troops to attack the DRVN capital at Thái Nguyên in response to the PAVN offensive against Cao Bằng, Chen insisted upon increasing pressure on Cao Bằng.²⁰ By October 13, according to CCP statistics, the PAVN forces had eliminated seven French battalions – a total of nearly 3,000 troops – forcing the French to abandon their long-standing blockade line along the Vietnamese-Chinese border. The vast territory of the PRC thus became the DRVN’s strategic rear – a development that would prove highly advantageous for the Vietnamese communists. Chen left Vietnam in early November for a new assignment in Korea.

Setbacks in the Red River Delta

Having claimed victory in the border campaign, what would be the DRVN’s next move? Giáp and the PAVN military leadership, after discussing the matter with the Chinese advisors, decided to wage the next phase of the war inside the French-controlled Red River Delta. They hoped that weakening the French defensive system in the delta would further enhance the DRVN’s standing and pave the way toward a final victory in Indochina. Both Beijing and the ICP leadership endorsed the plan.²¹

Meanwhile, the French strategy in Indochina had also changed significantly with General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s appointment as high commissioner and commander-in-chief in Indochina. After assuming his new position in Saigon, he launched a series of moves to strengthen the French position in the delta area. The DRVN’s new offensive plan was now complicated by the efforts of a determined French general.

From late December 1950 to June 1951, the PAVN command sent its best units, including the “iron division” (the 308th Division), to wage three offensive campaigns in the delta, hoping that this “general counteroffensive” would bring them closer to liberating Vietnam. However, the delta was no mountainous border area. DRVN forces were dealt heavy casualties by a robust French defense supported by superior artillery fire. By mid-1951, General Giáp was forced to call off the offensive. Chinese advisors agreed that the DRVN needed a different strategy.²²

But de Lattre would not allow his enemy to simply pivot to a new strategy. He now hoped to capitalize on the momentum gained by the French success in the delta by securing control of Hòa Bình, the key node in the DRVN’s North–South line of communication. If it succeeded, this offensive would allow the French to establish a corridor from Haiphong through Hanoi and Hòa Bình all the way to Sơn La, thus splitting the DRVN’s entire territory in two.

Giáp, Luo, and other Chinese advisors held several urgent meetings against this grim backdrop. Luo suggested that PAVN troops should not only attack Hòa Bình but also dispatch some units into French-occupied zones in the delta to conduct guerrilla operations to harass the enemy and establish bases. The DRVN leadership approved Luo’s plan and decided in late November to start an all-out effort to repel the French offensive. They would deploy four divisions to attack Hòa Bình while sending elements of two divisions behind enemy lines.²³

Giáp’s bid to dislodge the French from Hòa Bình by force did not succeed. During a three-month battle from November 1951 to February 1952, the PAVN sustained heavy losses in repeated assaults on the heavily fortified French positions. Giáp was eventually forced to withdraw. However, as Christopher Goscha has shown, the French victory at Hòa Bình turned out to be pyrrhic. After the PAVN withdrew, French commanders decided they had to abandon Hòa Bình in order to counter the stepped-up PAVN attacks in the Red River Delta. The PAVN were thus able to regain control of this key corridor, even though they had not prevailed on the battlefield. The outcome was a costly lesson for Giáp and his Chinese advisors, but one that would prove highly valuable in the long run.²⁴

Turning to the Northwest

In the aftermath of the heavy PAVN losses sustained in the delta and at Hòa Bình during 1951, DRVN leaders needed a new strategic approach. Luo recommended that the PAVN shift its operational focus to Vietnam’s northwestern region, adjacent to Laos. By forcing the French to fight in these mountainous districts far from Hanoi and the Red River Delta, the DRVN might expose some of the weakest links in the enemy’s military system.²⁵

Early in 1952, the CMAG proposed to the DRVN leadership a new operation, the northwest campaign, which the Chinese advisors believed would further consolidate the DRVN “liberated zone” in northwestern Vietnam, and form the basis for a future strategic counteroffensive.²⁶ On February 16, the CMAG advised the PAVN High Command to focus on guerrilla tactics and small-scale mobile wars for the duration of 1952. This would buy time for their main formations to undergo political and military training in preparation for future combat operations in the northwest.²⁷ That same day, Luo stated in a report to the CCMC in Beijing that PAVN troops might engage in reorganization and training for the first half of 1952 before dedicating the next six months to expelling the enemy from Sơn La, Lai Châu, and Nghĩa Lộ in northwestern Vietnam. Luo further suggested that in 1953 Vietnamese forces might treat northwestern Vietnam as a base from which to launch forays into upper Laos. Chinese leaders in Beijing promptly accepted the plan; Liu commented, “it is very important to liberate Laos.”²⁸ The DRVN leadership also gave their approval. In April 1952, the Politburo of the ICP, which had by then renamed itself the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP), formally decided to initiate the northwest campaign.

Around this time, DRVN leaders inquired with Beijing through Chinese advisors whether China might send “volunteers” to Vietnam to ensure victory in this crucial campaign.²⁹ On July 22, the CCMC categorically rejected the request to send Chinese troops to Vietnam. In its response, the CCMC cited the long-standing principle that Chinese troops should not undertake operations across the border. Instead, the CCMC instructed Chinese advisors to advocate a strategy of “concentrating forces” to deal with “the easiest first and the most difficult last.” This meant seizing the town of Nghĩa Lộ before attempting to occupy the entire northwest. The CCMC also advised the CMAG and DRVN leaders that, while striving for total victory in the northwest by the end of 1952, they should be prepared for a protracted war as PAVN troops still lacked offensive experience.³⁰

In late September 1952, Hồ Chí Minh secretly visited Beijing to confer with CCP leaders. The two parties reached a consensus on the overall strategy for the next stage of the war: PAVN forces would first direct their attention on the northwest (including northwestern Vietnam and upper Laos), then march southward from northern Laos, and finally push eastward toward the Red River Delta. As for concrete steps, Chinese and PAVN military planners decided first to concentrate on Nghĩa Lộ. Upon capturing Nghĩa Lộ, PAVN troops would not immediately attack Sơn La but focus on establishing bases around Nghĩa Lộ and building a highway linking Nghĩa Lộ and Yên Bái.³¹

The northwest campaign began on October 14, 1952. PAVN leaders gathered eight regiments to attack French strongholds in Nghĩa Lộ. In ten days, they annihilated most enemy posts in the area. After a short period of readjustment, PAVN troops continued on to attack French positions in Sơn La and Lai Châu provinces. By early December 1952, large parts of the northwestern provinces were under DRVN control. In February 1953, the VWP leadership decided to move further west to connect the “liberation zone” in northwestern Vietnam with communist-occupied areas in northern Laos. By May, DRVN control extended across upper Laos, greatly augmenting its position in northwestern Indochina.

The Road to Điện Biên Phủ

In retrospect, by summer 1953, the confrontation between the DRVN and the French in Indochina had reached a turning point. The DRVN’s gains over the past two years meant that it could set its sights on attaining overwhelming superiority in the war. Meanwhile, with the end of the Korean War in July 1953, the Chinese were able to pay more attention to their southern neighbor. With the possibility of victory now seemingly in sight, the VWP leadership and the CMAG began to formulate military plans for the upcoming 1953–4 campaign.

Changes also took place on the French side. In May 1953, General Henri Navarre replaced General Raoul Salan (who had succeeded de Lattre in 1952) as the French commander in Indochina. Supported by the United States, Navarre adopted a new three-year strategy to regain the upper hand on the battlefield. He divided Indochina into northern and southern theaters along the 18th parallel; he also planned to eliminate the enemy in southern and south-central Vietnam by spring 1954 and then, by spring 1955, concentrate sufficient strength to fight a decisive battle against the communist forces in the Red River Delta. The United States, released from its heavy burden in Korea, now fretted about the consequences of a French loss in Indochina and boosted its military and financial support to France.

On August 22, 1953, the VWP Politburo, on Giáp’s initiative, decided to revert the focus of PAVN’s future operations from the mountainous northwestern area to the Red River Delta area. The former would remain on the PAVN’s operation agenda would no longer be a priority. Luo, who attended the VWP Politburo meeting, immediately reported this intended change to Beijing.³² The CCP leadership, after reviewing Luo’s report, dispatched two urgent messages to Luo and the VWP leadership on August 27 and 29, respectively. The messages urged that the original plan – to focus on the northwestern battlefield – not be changed. As the CCP leaders stated in the August 29 telegram:

We should first annihilate enemies in the Lai Châu area, liberating northern and central Laos, and then gradually extend the battlefield toward southern Laos and Cambodia, thus putting pressure on Saigon. By executing this strategy, we will be able to limit the enemy’s human and financial resources and atomize his troops, leaving the enemy in a disadvantageous position … The realization of this strategic plan will surely contribute to the final defeat of the French imperialists’ colonial rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Of course, we need to overcome a range of difficulties and prepare for a prolonged war.³³

The VWP Politburo met in September to discuss the dispatches from Beijing. Hồ Chí Minh favored the advice given by the Chinese. The Politburo, after much debate, determined that the PAVN’s operational emphasis would remain in the northwestern area.³⁴ In late October and early November, the CMAG and the PAVN High Command worked out the operation plans for winter 1953 and spring 1954: PAVN forces would continue to focus on operations in Lai Châu, and would try to seize it in January 1954; then, they would attack various French strongholds in upper and central Laos. At the same time, PAVN troops would also move from central Vietnam toward Laos, making lower Laos the target of attacks from two directions. The VWP Politburo approved this plan on November 3.³⁵ Around the middle of the month, five regiments of PAVN forces headed toward Lai Châu.

On November 20, General Navarre responded to the PAVN’s march on Lai Châu by evacuating French forces from the area and dropping six parachute battalions into Diện Biên Phủ, a strategically important yet previously little-known village located in Vietnam’s mountainous northwest. If the French troops controlled Điện Biên Phủ, Navarre believed, they could prevent the communists from occupying the entire northwestern region and attacking upper Laos; moreover, the French could use the town as a “jumping-off point” for offensives against DRVN forces. The French quickly reinforced their troops in Diện Biên Phủ, secured the airstrip, and built defensive works there, transforming a mountain settlement into a fortified military base. Điện Biên Phủ quickly emerged as a focal point of the Indochinese battlefield.

When Wei Guoqing, who by then had returned to his post as head of CMAG after a long sick leave, learned of the French activity in Điện Biên Phủ, he suggested that the PAVN troops, while sticking to the original plan to attack Lai Châu, launch a separate campaign to surround the French forces at Điện Biên Phủ.³⁶ The VWP Politburo then decided to launch the Điện Biên Phủ Campaign, establishing in early December a frontline headquarters with Giáp as commander-in-chief and Wei as Giáp’s top Chinese advisor. Hồ Chí Minh called on the whole Party, people, and army “to spare no effort to ensure the success of the campaign.”³⁷ Thousands of peasants were mobilized to build roads and carry artillery pieces and ammunition over formidable mountain ranges, and PAVN troops gradually encircled the French forces. In response, Navarre sent more troops there.

Beijing’s leaders observed the ongoing Điện Biên Phủ Campaign with much enthusiasm. In particular, they emphasized that a DRVN victory at Điện Biên Phủ could have enormous impact on the development of the international situation, to say nothing of its military and political importance. This emphasis on Điện Biên Phủ’s international significance should be understood in the context of a new communist general strategy that took shape in late 1953 and early 1954. Following the end of the Korean War in mid-1953, the communist world initiated a “peace offensive.” On September 26, the Soviet Union proposed in a note to the French, British, and US governments that a five-power conference (including China) convene to facilitate the easing of international tensions. On October 8, PRC premier Zhou Enlai issued a statement supporting the Soviet proposal. Finally, the “Big Four” conference in Berlin at the end of January 1954 endorsed the Soviet-led plan to convene an international conference in Geneva to discuss the restoration of peace in Korea and Indochina. Beijing was invited to send a delegation to the conference. A victory at Điện Biên Phủ would greatly bolster the communists’ bargaining power at the forthcoming conference. In early to mid-March 1953, Zhou cabled Chinese advisors and Hồ Chí Minh himself to alert them to the forthcoming “international struggle” at Geneva. “To succeed in the field of diplomacy,” Zhou stressed, “DRVN troops should strive for a glorious victory on the battlefield.”³⁸

To strengthen the PAVN fighting force, the Chinese accelerated the delivery of military supplies. To cut Điện Biên Phủ off from French airborne support, Beijing sent back to Vietnam four Vietnamese anti-aircraft battalions that were then training in China. During the months of the Điện Biên Phủ siege, China rushed to provide Vietnam with more than 200 trucks; more than 10,000 barrels of oil; more than 100 cannons; 3,000 guns of assorted types; around 2,400,000 bullets; over 60,000 artillery shells; and about 1,700 tons of grain.³⁹

The Fall of Điện Biên Phủ

By March 1954, PAVN troops had been gathering at Điện Biên Phủ for three months. The Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina was scheduled to begin in late April. The PAVN High Command, having consulted with their Chinese advisors, decided to launch the attack on Điện Biên Phủ on March 13. After PAVN forces captured two of the most vulnerable French outposts, Navarre ordered reinforcements to parachute into the besieged garrison.

On March 30, PAVN forces attacked the center of Điện Biên Phủ, where the French command headquarters was located. When Chinese advisors reported that sturdy French defenses had halted the PAVN advance, leaders in Beijing summoned engineering experts from the Chinese troops in Korea to advise the Vietnamese about digging trenches and underground tunnels.⁴⁰ On April 9, the CCMC telegraphed Wei, guaranteeing that the PAVN would receive enough artillery ammunition to finish the battle. The CCMC also instructed Wei to propose the following tactics to his PAVN counterparts: to cut off the enemy’s front by attacking the middle; to destroy the enemy’s underground defenses one section at a time with concentrated artillery fire; to immediately consolidate a newly seized position, no matter how small, thus continuously tightening the circle around the enemy; to use snipers widely to restrict the enemy’s activity; and to use political propaganda to undermine the enemy’s morale.⁴¹

By mid-April, French troops in Điện Biên Phủ were confined to a small area of less than eight-tenths of a square mile (2 square kilometers), and the air bridge that they used to resupply the garrison had been severed. At this moment, Washington threatened to intervene. In a speech to the Overseas Press Club of America on March 29, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles issued a powerful warning that the United States would tolerate no communist gain in Indochina and called for “united action” on the part of Western countries. One week later, President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the “falling domino” theory to express the necessity of joint military operations against communist expansion in Indochina.

Despite the threat of US intervention, Chinese advisors in Vietnam insisted on continuing with the campaign. Wei believed the Vietnamese should not squander the superior position on the battlefield that they had fought so hard to attain. On April 19, the VWP Politburo decided to move ahead with the plan to crush the garrison with a new wave of attacks in early May. In preparation, the Chinese transferred large amounts of materiel to the Vietnamese. Two Chinese-trained Vietnamese battalions equipped with 75mm recoilless guns and six-barrel Katyusha rocket launchers arrived at Điện Biên Phủ on the eve of the final assault. Once again Beijing assured the Chinese advisors in Vietnam: “To eliminate the enemy totally and to win the final victory in the campaign, you should use overwhelming artillery fire. Do not save artillery shells. We will supply and deliver sufficient shells to you.”⁴²

The final communist assault on Điện Biên Phủ began on the evening of May 5. The newly delivered rocket launchers played a critical role in smashing the remaining French defenses. By the afternoon of May 7, French troops had neither the ability nor the will to fight, and surrendered. The Điện Biên Phủ Campaign ended in a spectacular victory for the Vietnamese communists.

Conferring in Geneva

As has occurred countless times throughout history, the French Indochina War was fought on the battlefield but its ultimate outcome would be decided at the negotiating table. As soon as Beijing decided to attend the Geneva Conference, Zhou managed to find time in his busy schedule to prepare for it. In late February, Zhou and his associates at the PRC foreign ministry worked out a plan to realize Beijing’s top priority goals for Geneva, which were to dismantle the United States’ “blockade, embargo and rearmament policies” against the PRC, and to highlight “New China’s diplomatic accomplishments in front of the world.” Indeed, Zhou and his associates deemed it essential that China not only “actively participate in the conference” but also “make it a success.” The United States’ negative attitude meant that the conference was not likely to reach a breakthrough on Korea. However, the prospect of reaching an agreement on Indochina looked brighter, especially as there were some areas of disagreement between Paris and Washington. China should thus adopt “a policy of showing the carrot to France while using the stick to deal with the United States” and make sure that the conference “does not end inconclusively.” On March 2, top CCP leaders approved the plan.⁴³

Zhou knew that he needed to coordinate strategies with Beijing’s communist allies for his plans to succeed. When Hồ Chí Minh and Phạm Vӑn Đồng, deputy prime minister and foreign minister of the DRVN, visited Beijing in late March, Zhou emphasized that the Vietnamese communists should “actively participate in” the Geneva Conference and strive for a peaceful settlement. To this end, Zhou suggested, the DRVN might consider accepting “a relatively fixed demarcation line in Vietnam,” as this would allow them to “control an area that is linked together.”⁴⁴

Together with Hồ Chí Minh and Đồng, Zhou flew to Moscow in early April 1954. He found that the post–Stalin Soviet leadership was equally eager to end the conflict in Indochina through negotiation. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, told Zhou that the Geneva Conference could potentially solve one or two problems. Zhou said to Molotov that as this was the first time the PRC would attend an important international conference they would be more than willing to listen to the opinions of their Soviet comrades.⁴⁵ Zhou and the Soviet leaders reached a broad consensus about their respective countries’ strategies at the Geneva Conference.

The Geneva Conference began on April 26. As Zhou had anticipated, negotiations on Korea stalemated almost immediately. On the conference’s third day, Zhou reported to Beijing that while “the discussions on Korea [had] already entered a deadlock,” Indochina still looked hopeful. He noted that Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, was “eager to discuss the Indochina question” and had already “approached Molotov” and expressed “the desire to meet with us.” Zhou predicted that “the discussion on Indochina could begin ahead of schedule.”⁴⁶

Formal discussion on Indochina at Geneva began on May 8, the day after the fall of Điện Biên Phủ. Although in preconference consultations with Beijing and Moscow the Vietnamese communists had agreed to accept a settlement based on temporarily dividing Vietnam into two zones, they now hoped to squeeze more concessions out of their adversaries at Geneva. Đồng announced that in exchange for ending the war in Indochina, the DRVN would ask to establish its virtual control over most of Vietnam. He also pushed for a package settlement that would include all three countries of French Indochina and give “due rights and position” to the “resistance forces” in Laos and Cambodia. Those “resistance forces” included many Vietnamese whom Đồng described as “volunteers,” but who were in fact DRVN-sponsored personnel.⁴⁷

Zhou, as he later acknowledged, had not paid much attention to “the distinctions and differences between the three countries of Indochina” before he arrived in Geneva. So, he and the Soviets initially supported the DRVN’s demand for a package settlement. However, Zhou quickly came to change his mind. His experience at Geneva, especially his talks with representatives from Laos and Cambodia, demonstrated to him that “the national and state boundaries between the three associate countries in Indochina were quite distinctive,” and that “the royal governments in Cambodia and Laos were seen as legitimate by the overwhelming majority of their people.” Therefore, he realized, “we must treat them as three different countries.”⁴⁸

Zhou’s changing attitude was supported by his sense that the DRVN had to be more flexible to reach a ceasefire in Indochina. His meeting with Molotov on June 1 – which the Vietnamese joined – reaffirmed the communists’ commitment to pursue a strategy of partitioning zones of control between the two sides in a ceasefire agreement.⁴⁹ Zhou highlighted the merits of this approach in his communication with Beijing and with Hồ Chí Minh and Giáp, whom he contacted through Beijing. A ceasefire in place “is not favorable to us,” he contended, as this would not allow the DRVN to control the whole northern part of the country. Conversely, dividing Vietnam into northern and southern zones would give the DRVN control of a large contiguous area while making the ceasefire much more manageable.⁵⁰

On June 15, the sessions on Korea ended in Geneva with no result. Zhou was concerned that the conference’s Indochina discussions might also fall apart. At this critical moment, the French parliament ousted Prime Minister Joseph Laniel and replaced him with Pierre Mendès France, a longtime critic of the war in Indochina. Mendès France promised that he would lead the negotiations to a successful conclusion by July 20, or he would resign. Zhou regarded this as a potential opportunity to help push the negotiations on Indochina forward.

On the day of the collapse of the discussions on Korea at Geneva, Zhou, together with Molotov, met with Đồng. Zhou was straightforward: Đồng’s refusal to admit the existence of DRVN forces in Laos and Cambodia would render the negotiations fruitless, and the Vietnamese comrades themselves would also lose a golden opportunity for a peaceful solution. Zhou proposed a new line in favor of the withdrawal of all foreign forces, including the DRVN “volunteers,” from Laos and Cambodia, so that “our concessions on Cambodia and Laos would prompt the other side to concede on dividing Vietnam into two zones.” Molotov firmly supported the proposal. Đồng, under heavy pressure, also gave his consent.⁵¹

Zhou immediately relayed the new communist approach to the British and the French. On June 16, at 12:30 p.m., he met with Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary. If the United States did not maintain military bases in Laos or Cambodia, he told Eden, Beijing was willing to recognize the royal governments of these two countries, and would also persuade the DRVN to recall its “volunteers.”⁵² At 3:30 p.m., Zhou introduced to the Geneva Conference a new proposal for reaching a ceasefire in Indochina, which included the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Laos and Cambodia. The next day, when Mendès France became French prime minister, Zhou met with Bidault. In addition to what he had told Eden, Zhou stressed that China had no objection to Laos and Cambodia remaining in the French Union.⁵³

Zhou’s efforts, coupled with the French and British eagerness not to allow the conference to fail, helped the two contending sides reach an agreement on June 19 in military talks, opening the door to “the cessation of hostilities” in Laos and Cambodia. The Geneva Conference then adjourned for the next three weeks. This break afforded Zhou the opportunity to further coordinate communist strategies for the last and most crucial round of negotiations at Geneva.

Zhou’s priority concern, as he expressed in a lengthy telegram dispatched to Beijing on June 19, remained how to persuade the Vietnamese communists to make the necessary concessions at Geneva. In order to reach the best possible deal at the conference, Zhou contended, the Vietnamese delegation had to give up some of their claims, especially those about Cambodia and Laos. However, Zhou complained, they did not seem to understand this point, and their plans had “failed to match the realities” of the circumstances. If they were to stick to such an approach, “the negotiations cannot go on, and our long-term interests … will not be best served.”⁵⁴ He proposed to capitalize on the conference break by meeting with Hồ Chí Minh and Giáp face-to-face, so that “a consensus [would] be worked out.” Zhou’s comrades in Beijing approved his plans the same day.⁵⁵

The Zhou Enlai–Hồ Chí Minh Meeting at Liuzhou

The meeting that Zhou had proposed was held in Liuzhou, a small city in Guangxi near the Chinese-Vietnamese border, on July 3–5 (Figure 8.1). First, Giáp, per Zhou’s suggestion, gave a detailed report on the military situation in Indochina. The enemy had suffered a huge setback at Điện Biên Phủ, but was far from defeated, said Giáp. New French reinforcements had arrived in Indochina, and the total strength of the enemy troops, at around 470,000, was greater than that of the PAVN, at around 300,000. Additionally, the enemy still controlled such big cities as Hanoi, Saigon, Huế, and Đà Nẵng. Giáp acknowledged that the overall balance of force between the two sides on the battlefield had not changed.⁵⁶

Figure 8.1 Hồ Chí Minh with Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, during a visit by Zhou to Hanoi (1960).

Source: Three Lions / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Zhou began his presentation with a question: “If the United States does not interfere, and France sends in more troops, how long will it take for us to seize the whole of Indochina?” Giáp estimated that this would take another two to three years, or more likely, three to five years. Zhou then spoke at length about the correlative relationship between military operations in Indochina and the negotiations in Geneva. The Indochina War had already been internationalized, and there existed the great danger that the Americans might intervene there. Since the imperialist countries had so viscerally feared the expanding influence of the Chinese revolution, they would not allow the Vietnamese revolutionaries to win a glorious victory. Therefore, Zhou argued, “if we ask too much at Geneva, and if peace is not achieved, the United States will surely intervene,” delaying the Vietnamese communists’ victory. “We must isolate the United States and foil its plans,” emphasized Zhou, “otherwise we will fall into the US imperialists’ trap.”⁵⁷

Later in the meeting, Zhou defined four criteria for a desirable settlement: (1) Effecting a simultaneous ceasefire in all three Indochina countries; (2) Locating the demarcation line at the 16th or 17th parallel; (3) Forbidding the transportation of weapons and ammunition into Indochina after the settlement; and (4) Shutting down all foreign military bases in the three countries. In the meantime, Zhou elaborated, Cambodia and Laos should be allowed to pursue their own path of development independent of any military alliance and absent any foreign forces on their respective soil.⁵⁸

Zhou’s presentation seemed to have resonated with his Vietnamese comrades, especially Hồ Chí Minh. At the end of the meeting, Hồ Chí Minh thanked Zhou for “not only conducting the struggle in Geneva but also coming here to give this important report.” He was in “complete agreement” with Zhou and promised to adjust the DRVN’s aims and strategies in accordance with Zhou’s advice, as “now Vietnam is standing at the crossroads, headed either to peace or to war, and the main direction should be the pursuit of peace.”

The reasons for the change in the Vietnamese negotiating position remain a matter of dispute among historians. Although some credit Zhou with convincing Hồ Chí Minh and his colleagues to make concessions, others argue that the Vietnamese had already concluded that compromise was necessary. DRVN leaders appear to have been particularly worried by the announcement in late June that Ngô Đình Diệm, a staunch anticommunist with close ties to the United States, would be taking over as premier of the Saigon-based State of Vietnam (SVN). According to some scholars, DRVN leaders believed that Diệm’s appointment had heightened the risk of US intervention in the war, if they did not make peace quickly.⁵⁹

Whatever the specific circumstances, the PRC and DRVN were now in broad agreement on how to proceed in the next phase of negotiations: They would give preference to a settlement for Vietnam that provided for the country to be temporarily split at the 16th or 17th parallel, and they would accept a political settlement that might lead to the establishment of noncommunist governments in Laos and Cambodia.⁶⁰

On July 5, the VWP Central Committee issued a directive calling for a ceasefire based on the temporary partition of Vietnam, to be followed by the unification of the country through a national plebiscite.⁶¹ The directive clearly reflected Hồ Chí Minh and Zhou’s agreement in Liuzhou.

On July 7, Zhou, who had returned to Beijing, reported at a meeting of the CCP Politburo that the Chinese delegation at Geneva had adopted “a policy line to pursue cooperation with France, Britain, Southeast Asian countries and the three countries in Indochina – that is, to unite with all the international forces that can be united and to isolate the United States – so that America’s plans for expanding its global hegemony will be hindered and undermined.” Mao and the CCP leadership fully endorsed Zhou’s report.⁶²

Zhou flew from Beijing to Moscow two days later. On June 10, he met for two hours with a group of Soviet leaders, including Georgy M. Malenkov, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kagaonovich, and Anastas Mikoyan. He found that “the analysis and viewpoints of the Soviet Party Central Committee were identical to those that we discussed at Liuzhou and Beijing.” As for such issues as “the division of zones, treatment of Laos and Cambodia, responsibility and power of the committee of neutral countries, and the commitments made by the conference participants” during the next stage of negotiations, “the policy-line that we should follow is to make sure that an agreement can be quickly reached.” Therefore, the communist side should introduce “fair and reasonable conditions that the French government is in a position to accept.” In particular, it was crucial to prevent “the interference and sabotage of the United States.” Zhou also reported that “decisions on all concrete issues will be made after I return to Geneva and meet with Comrades Molotov and Phạm Vӑn Đồng, so that we may quickly reach an agreement.”⁶³

The End of the French Indochina War

Zhou arrived in Geneva on the afternoon of July 12. The next twenty-four hours of his schedule were packed with meetings. At 7:00 that evening, Zhou met with Molotov. He briefed the Soviet foreign minister on his meetings with Hồ Chí Minh in Liuzhou, as well as his discussions with Soviet leaders in Moscow. Molotov asked Zhou if he believed it feasible to set the demarcation line at the 16th parallel. Zhou said that he and Hồ Chí Minh had agreed to aim for a 16th parallel solution but would accept the 17th parallel if absolutely necessary. Zhou and Molotov were now allied in their mission to push the Geneva Conference toward a peaceful settlement in Indochina.⁶⁴

Zhou believed that he had detected Đồng’s reluctance to carry out the VWP’s “July 5th Instruction.” He therefore arranged to meet overnight with Đồng. He told Đồng that the “July 5th Instruction” was based on a consensus between the Chinese, Soviet, and Vietnamese leaders. He also mentioned that the danger of direct US military intervention in Indochina was serious and real. To avoid such a scenario, the communist side “must actively, positively and quickly carry out negotiations to pursue a settlement, and must keep the negotiations simple and avoid complicating them, so that Mendès France will not be forced to resign.” Zhou also promised Đồng that “with the eventual withdrawal of the French, all of Vietnam will be yours.” Đồng finally yielded to Zhou’s logic, if not to his pressure.⁶⁵

Zhou met with Mendès France at 10:30 a.m. on July 13. He found that the French prime minister was now chiefly concerned with the location of the demarcation line. Zhou told Mendès France that while the communists preferred to draw the line along the 16th parallel, they were willing to compromise.⁶⁶ At 11:45 a.m., Zhou conferred with Eden, telling him that the Chinese and Vietnamese had reached an agreement on pursuing peace in Indochina. “If France is willing to make further concessions on the question of dividing zones,” he promised Eden, “the Vietnamese will also make due concessions.”⁶⁷

Zhou meant what he said. When, at the final stage of the conference, Mendès France insisted upon setting the demarcation line at the 17th parallel, expressing that this represented the full extent of his concession, and that he would otherwise have to resign, Zhou, with Molotov’s blessing, decided to change the Communist position to the 17th to meet the French requirement.⁶⁸ Thus, the Geneva Conference reached a settlement on Indochina in the early morning of July 21; officially, Mendès France had not exceeded his deadline.

With the signing of the Geneva Accords, the French Indochina War came to an end. The Chinese delegation left Geneva having achieved nearly all of their goals for the conference: the creation of a communist-ruled North Vietnam would establish a buffer zone between China and the capitalist world in Southeast Asia; the opening of a new dialogue between China and such Western powers as France and Great Britain would help break the PRC’s global isolation; and, much more important, the crucial role played by China at the conference implied that for the first time in modern history China had been accepted by the international community – friends and foes alike – as a real world power. All of this, in turn, provided Mao and the CCP leadership new resources with which to promote broader and deeper domestic mobilizations.

But the confrontation in Indochina was far from over. The compromise peace reached at Geneva did not settle the deep disagreements among Vietnamese over the path that their country should take toward its postcolonial future. Diệm’s Saigon-based State of Vietnam and the US government both declined to endorse the Geneva Accords – moves that presaged their subsequent refusal to support the 1956 reunification elections. The DRVN also abandoned key parts of the agreement, including the provisions guaranteeing the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia. By the end of the 1950s, the uneasy peace between North and South Vietnam had given way to a new Indochina conflict that would turn out to be even longer and bloodier than the first. More surprisingly – and ironically – communist China and a unified communist Vietnam would enter the Third Indochina War in 1979 as adversaries. The origins of their enmity, however, could be traced back to their cooperation during the years of the French Indochina War.

9 The French Indochina War in the Central Highlands

Oscar Salemink†

Introduction

This chapter examines the French Indochina War in the Central Highlands. Instead of focusing exclusively on military strategies and operations between 1945 and 1954, I explore the changing relations and mutual perceptions among the main protagonists in the conflict: indigenous Central Highlanders, the Việt Minh, noncommunist Vietnamese, French, and Americans.¹ During both the war of 1945–54 and in the subsequent “Vietnam War,” the importance of the Central Highlands lay in the region’s strategic position relative to the more populated surrounding areas. As Việt Minh General Võ Nguyên Giáp is alleged to have remarked, “To seize and control the highlands is to solve the problem of South Vietnam.”²

Decades before the war began, French colonial authorities recognized the strategic importance of the Central Highlands. In hopes of strengthening their control over the region, they developed policies to promote a single ethnic identity among Highlanders – one that was putatively incompatible with the culture and political projects of lowland groups, especially ethnic Việt (Kinh). During the French Indochina War, French colonialism, Vietnamese nationalism and communism, and nascent American imperialism nurtured diverging plans for the region, each predicated on different views of sovereign authority. These competing claims to sovereignty over the Central Highlands collided violently in the second half of the 1940s. Highlanders responded to the violence by siding with one or the other party, by shifting sides, or by not taking sides; while some took up arms or engaged in other acts of resistance, others found themselves the target of military operations or coercive policies such as forced resettlement.

The Central Highlands are a mountainous region in what is now south-central Vietnam, bordered by the Annam Cordillera (Trường Sơn) to the north, a narrow coastal strip and the South China Sea to the east, the Mekong Delta to the south, and Laos and Cambodia to the west. In the 1940s the Highlands were thinly populated by a wide array of different ethnolinguistic groups, speaking different languages and dialects and adhering to different customs. They lived scattered in villages, sustaining themselves via shifting agriculture, hunting, gathering, and trade, and rarely developed durable “tribal” organizations beyond the village. Relatively few lowland Việt, Lào, Khmer, and Chӑm lived among the Highlanders or in the Highlands and those who did resided mostly in the towns of Kontum, Dalat, Banméthuot, and Pleiku.

Although the region was deemed strategically important, it was not well known. Ethnonyms and toponyms have changed frequently over the decades and many of the terms and labels used during the war are currently deemed offensive. These include words like mọi (moï/moy), a Vietnamese term denoting “savage,” and having servile connotations related to the slave trade; Montagnard, a French colonial designation for Highlander; Annamite, a French term for ethnic Việt; and coolie, a term referring to laborers and plantation workers.³ In French, the Central Highlands were alternatively known as Pays moï, Hauts plateaux du centre, or Pays montagnard du sud-Indochinois (PMSI). In contemporary Vietnamese the region is designated as Tây Nguyên (literally meaning Western Highlands), while the former Republic of Vietnam (RVN) called it Cao Nguyên (High Plateau) or Trung Nguyên (Central Plateau). In this essay, I will invoke these terms not in the name of verisimilitude, but as a means to unpack the agendas that lay behind them. In the Central Highlands, as in other regions of Indochina, the power to name people, places, and communities was intimately linked to claims about legitimacy and sovereignty (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Bảo Đại, emperor of Annam, and ethnic minority leaders in Indochina (c. 1930s).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

Legacies of Divide-and-Rule

During the first half of the twentieth century, a series of French colonial policies deeply impacted the discursive “ethnoscape”⁴ of the Central Highlands and adjacent areas. These strategies included tribalization (turning loosely interconnected population groups into “tribes”), ethnicization (unifying these distinct “tribes” under a single ethnic label), and territorialization (tying Highlander populations to specific territories through state policies).⁵ The combined results of these processes was an emerging common Highlander identity linked to a carefully demarcated territory.

These intertwined policies can be traced back to Léopold Sabatier (1877–1936), administrator of the highland province of Darlac from 1911 to 1926. Sabatier sought to protect “his” Rhadé tribe against the “double threat” of Việt settlement and French colonization in the form of rubber, coffee, and tea plantations. Although forced to step down in 1926, his measures sparked a debate among French officials and colonists about the desirability of settler colonization in the Highlands. At the height of the debate in the mid-1920s, the military command of French Indochina commissioned Lieutenant-Colonel Ardant du Picq to assess the strategic significance of the Central Highlands in case of a foreign attack or a revolt in the Vietnamese lowlands. The study aimed to examine “the Administration and the indigenous policy which dominate the military question and give it, in the moy country, a particular aspect.”⁶ More than two decades before the outbreak of the Indochina War, Ardant du Picq emphasized the martial qualities of the Highlanders and argued that the colonial administration should seek to gain their confidence – a position that militated against settler colonization. But in the boom years of the 1920s, economic interests prevailed over military concerns, leading to massive land appropriation and forced labor recruitment for plantations.

French colonial rule of the Highlands was predicated on the separation of distinct “tribes,” classified according to language and territory. In this way, “tribal” identities and boundaries were constantly (re)constructed and solidified through the development and teaching of vernacular scripts and governance through customary law, resulting in a process baptized tribalization by Georges Condominas. This process was symbolized by the semiofficial ethnographic map of the Société des études indochinoises of 1937.⁷ “Pacified tribes” such as the Rhadé were subjected to dispossession while the “rebellious tribes” (tribus insoumises) were targeted in “penetration” campaigns. In the 1930s, however, this ongoing colonial encroachment led to revolts under N’Trang Lơng among the Mnong and Kommadam among the Boloven. From 1936–8 a millenarian movement led by Sam Bram swept all the different “tribes” in the Central Highlands, undermining the notion of insurmountable tribal divisions.⁸

These developments triggered two official responses. In 1935, military officers posited the desirability of the “creation of an autonomous Moï territory directly under the Governor-General,” to be administered by military officers. Although this proposal was rejected by the civil authorities, it would gain new momentum during the following decade.⁹ Around the same time, Maurice Graffeuil, résident-supérieur of Annam, decided to reorient indigenous administration toward a “Moï hierarchy” directly under the French resident, without a parallel “Annamese mandarinate” – thus enshrining ethnic separatism into policy.¹⁰ Subsequent measures included codification of Montagnard customary law for reasons of policing and administration, and the transcription of Montagnard languages for educational policies at the expense of teaching Vietnamese.¹¹

The emergence of the leftwing Front Populaire in France (1936–7) instigated additional changes. A “Committee of Investigation on the Overseas Territories” proposed to replace the “old divide-and-rule formula” with a “policy of domestication” (politique d’apprivoisement). This ostensibly more humane approach combined seduction with coercion. The state offered Highlanders medical services such as campaigns to eliminate smallpox and malaria, along with education in vernacular languages; yet it also promulgated its so-called “salt policy” (politique du sel) to control the sale and distribution of this vital commodity. Officials also increased the number of Montagnard recruits for the Bataillon des tirailleurs montagnards du Sud-Annam (BTMSA) from 1938 onward.¹² The pays moï, as the Highlands were now called, became the object of policies to promote “the vigilant protection of the natural qualities of the Moï races” for both humane and strategic reasons. In July 1938, Governor-General Jules Brévié decided that the Moï – despite the many differences among its component communities – constituted one “racial group,” distinct from all other Indochinese “races.” This ethnicization was formalized in October 1939, when senior officials inaugurated the Inspection générale des pays moïs. In this way, colonial governance formally classified Central Highlanders as “tribes” linked to particular locales in a process of territorialization. At the same time, Highlanders were practically removed from the Vietnamese administration that governed the “protectorate” of Annam.

The arrival of Japanese imperial forces in Indochina during 1940–1 directly impacted French designs in the Highlands. Despite leaving the French administrative infrastructure intact, the Japanese military command obstructed the complete territorial detachment of the Pays moï from Annam. Moreover, the Japanese posed as protectors of Vietnamese sovereignty to appease conservative nationalists, who criticized French separatist policies. Meanwhile, in 1941, the Indochinese Communist Party under Hồ Chí Minh established the Việt Minh as a broad anticolonial and antifascist coalition. Operating from bases in northern Vietnam, communist cadres hooked up with “tribal” resistance fighters in the mountain districts of Quảng Ngãi, Quảng Nam, and Quảng Trị provinces in central Vietnam. As early as 1940–1, the French Sûreté reported the activities of communist cadres such as Trần Miên among the “Moï Khaleu” (Bru) in upland Quảng Trị.¹³ Vietnamese communist historians now trace a direct line from this tribal resistance movement to the “revolt of Ba Tơ” in upland Quảng Ngãi (1945), which continued a localized rebel tradition.¹⁴

An interesting footnote in this wartime history is a never-implemented plan of the United States’ Office of Strategic Services to conquer Indochina by dropping commandos in the Central Highlands and inciting revolt against the Franco-Japanese regime.¹⁵ Engineered by Hungarian-born and French-trained anthropologist Georges Devereux (György Dobó, 1908–85) together with Commodore Milton E. Miles, the “Special Military Plan for Indochina” envisaged the utilization of the Montagnards for guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, guided by a group of twenty unconventional warfare experts headed by Devereux. Miles and Devereux proposed to insert the group near Kontum, where Devereux had done fieldwork among the Sedang in the early 1930s. The plan was to hold some 3,800 square miles (10,000 square kilometers) of jungle and recruit a minimum of 20,000 men in the hinterland of Annam. Devereux was confident he could rally the Sedang and other groups because “the natives hate the French as bitterly as they hate the yellow races.”¹⁶ But Devereux did not inspire much confidence among his peers (who viewed him as a “nutter”) and in July 1943 he was relieved of his command. While his plan was never implemented, it anticipated later US efforts to mobilize and recruit Highlanders to fight in anticommunist militias during the 1960s.¹⁷

French wartime policies would become the model for their post–1945 attempts to reconquer and govern the Central Highlands. Colonial officials aimed to woo Highlander populations by playing on the supposedly age-old racial antagonism between Highlanders and lowland Vietnamese. Although the Japanese occupation thwarted French designs, the idea of using Highlanders in guerrilla and counterinsurgency operations aimed at undermining Vietnamese power and sovereignty in the Central Highlands would be a recurring theme in subsequent decades.

Competing Claims to Sovereignty

In 1945, Indochina was transformed by the Japanese coup against the French colonial regime and by the August Revolution, culminating in Hồ Chí Minh’s declaration of independence for Vietnam and the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN). Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh viewed the Central Highlands and the people who lived there as inalienable parts of the Vietnamese nation. In opposition to the DRVN’s policy of interethnic solidarity, French officials advocated a new version of separate sovereignty for the Highlands, leading eventually to the creation of a new “crown domain” known as the Pays Montagnard du Sud Indochinois (PMSI). The August Revolution had the character of a series of localized attempts to fill the power vacuum left by the March 1945 coup against the French government and the subsequent Japanese capitulation.¹⁸ In the Central Highlands, the revolution manifested itself in the Ba Tơ uprising, a revolt fueled by existing “tribal” grievances and led by young Highlander intellectuals. After the Japanese coup in March 1945, the opening of detention centers in Kon Tum, Ban Mê Thuột, and Lao Bảo and the release of communist Vietnamese prisoners in the Central Highlands had facilitated contacts between the Việt Minh cadres and Highlanders living in the towns. Educated Jarai and Rhadé youngsters – schoolteachers and medical workers such as Nay Der, Nay Phin, Ksor Ní, and Y Ngông Nie Kdam – embraced the nationalist fervor that agitated Vietnam, and the Việt Minh’s promise of development policies that respected the “national minorities’” own languages and cultures. The Việt Minh literacy campaigns were especially appealing to these young intellectuals. In April 1946, a Việt Minh Congress of the Southern National Minorities took place in Pleiku to elect representatives to the DRVN National Assembly. In a letter to participants, President Hồ Chí Minh stressed the “multinational” (multiethnic) character of the DRVN state and described Vietnam as the country of the Việt majority and the “national minorities” alike.¹⁹

The French, however, were determined to reassert their authority over Indochina – including the Central Highlands. Already in March 1945, “Free French” leader Charles de Gaulle announced the intent to create a new Fédération Indochinoise, which would offer limited autonomy while preserving French control in economic, political, and military affairs. In the fall of 1945, French forces embarked on a reconquest of southern Indochina, aided by the British occupation force that had arrived to accept the Japanese surrender. In November, a cavalry force under Colonel Jacques Massu (who later became famous for his role in the battle of Algiers) reached Ban Mê Thuột, capital of Đắk Lắk province, and unofficial capital of the Pays moï, where the reconquest was temporarily halted. Over the following year, France and the DRVN engaged in tense negotiations amid intensifying armed clashes.²⁰ In this environment, the Central Highlands emerged as a major point of disagreement. In March 1946, just days after French and DRVN officials signed a modus vivendi agreement, the Minister of Colonies Marius Moutet instructed Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, the new French high commissioner in Indochina, to investigate the feasibility of creating an autonomous moï territory. Such a move, Moutet knew, was sure to offend the Việt Minh. Although the subsequent creation of the PMSI would be attributed to d’Argenlieu, records show the decision was initiated in Paris.²¹

In May 1946, d’Argenlieu presided over a tribal oath swearing ceremony in Ban Mê Thuột – a custom invented by Sabatier that was presented as a popular demand for direct French rule in the Highlands. D’Argenlieu described the ceremony as a prelude to the establishment of the PMSI ten days later. As the name implied, the new administrative unit was Highlander territory directly under the French-controlled Fédération indochinoise. Unlike the earlier Pays moï, the PMSI comprised five upland provinces that previously belonged to the region of Annam. This excluded important Highlander populations in other parts of Indochina, including several that had resisted French rule. Thus, PMSI territory did not follow any “ethnic boundaries” but the borders of the Vietnamese state that the French aimed to dismember. Significantly, Highlander populations within the boundaries of Cochinchina were excluded from the PMSI because d’Argenlieu carried through his plan for a separate “republic of Cochinchina” in early June, further shoring up the French sphere of influence. On June 21, French troops in the Highlands attacked Việt Minh positions in Pleiku and Kon Tum, just before the start of the decisive French-DRVN conference at Fontainebleau. This bid to seize the remaining territory of the PMSI produced mixed battlefield results, as colonial forces were stopped north of Kon Tum and east of An Khê. But as an attempt to undermine the negotiations in Fontainebleau, d’Argenlieu’s moves were stunningly successful.²²

Unsurprisingly, the proposed separation of Cochinchina and the PMSI from the territory claimed by the DRVN incited vehement protests from Hồ Chí Minh’s government. During the preparatory Franco-Vietnamese conference at Dalat in April–May 1946, the Việt Minh argued that “Cochinchina was an integral part of Vietnam, whose ethnic, geographic, historical, cultural and psychological unity was impossible to deny.” At Fontainebleau that summer, Hồ Chí Minh asserted that “ethnically, historically, Cochinchina is a part of Vietnam, just like Bretagne or the Bask country is a part of France.”²³ The Việt Minh claimed to embrace all “nationalities” on Vietnamese territory as part of a “multinational” or multiethnic nation-state. The relations between ethnic groups were likened to family ties, with the Việt or Kinh “elder brother” guiding the younger Highlander siblings into a bright future of maturity and development with Bác Hồ (Uncle Hồ, or Bôk Hô in Bahnar language) depicted as a common ancestor.²⁴ According to Hồ Chí Minh, the Kinh majority and the ethnic minorities were “all blood brothers and sisters.” “Rivers can dry up, mountains can wear away,” Bôk Hô declared, “but our solidarity will never decrease.”²⁵

The French arguments about Cochinchina and the PMSI were in many respects the mirror image of the DRVN claims, though they rested on strikingly different notions of ethnic and national identities. In a response to Hồ Chí Minh’s protests against the French occupation of the Pays moï, the Interministerial Indochina Committee declared that France had a special responsibility for the minorities, and that “neither geographically, historically nor ethnically, the High Plateaux can be considered a part of Vietnam.”²⁶ The French also resorted to kin analogies in order to legitimize their plans to rule an “autonomous” Highlander territory. Like Sabatier, who had once described himself as the Ay Prong (grandfather) with responsibility for “guiding and chiding” (guider et gronder) his Rhadé subjects, French attitudes toward the Highlanders were deeply paternalistic.²⁷ In the historical context of rising nationalism, France’s civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) was recast as the duty to guide all their Indochinese “children” with a just but firm hand. This was clearly expressed in one (of many) propaganda speeches for Highlander audiences, in 1953:

Why does the Resident grumble? It is for the well-being of the Montagnards, not for himself. The Resident, that is France, has come here to bring up the Montagnards like a mother brings up her children. […] you must become equal to the Vietnamese. The Montagnards must be on the same level. It should not be, like before 1945, that the Vietnamese is up there and the Montagnard down below.²⁸

In this view, the “dominant peoples” may have reached the age of adolescence, but France had the special responsibility of protecting the minorities and preserving their traditional cultures.

At the Đà Lạt Conference of August 1946, which d’Argenlieu convened to further the development of the Fédération (and to frustrate the talks in Fontainebleau), the French delegation argued for special treatment for ethnic minorities. For the first time in colonial history, Highlanders were officially designated as “civilizations” worthy of protection within autonomous territories, separate from Vietnam but still within the Fédération Indochinoise. For the French, this process was one of “liberation” for the Highlanders. Such moves affirmed de Gaulle’s efforts to preserve the prewar division of Vietnam into five separate pays and also placed the ethnic minorities on equal footing with the majority populations of Indochina. Moreover, by reserving the right to arbitrate conflicts between minority and majority groups, the French sharpened geographic boundaries and ethnic distinctions at the same time.²⁹

The French claims were supported by a PMSI delegation of Highlanders that the French had assembled for the occasion. Headed by the president of the customary law court of Đắk Lắk province, Ma Krong, this delegation proclaimed that the DRVN delegation at Fontainebleau should not speak for other “member states” of the Fédération – in this case the PMSI. The delegation also declared that “all the individuals wearing loincloths” should be protected directly by France and acquire independence. In a single sentence, the petitioners circumscribed Highlander identity within the boundaries of the PMSI and also denied any affinity for other Indochinese populations. While two additional “motions” entailed the preservation of minority education in French and of Highlander customary law, another concerned the incorporation of Highlander soldiers into the French colonial army. The emphasis was on Highlander loyalty to the French, which might be contrasted with the solidarity propagated by the Việt Minh. For the French and the PMSI delegation, this loyalty was symbolized by the odyssey of a Rhadé battalion that had followed their French officer through Laos to China after the Japanese takeover in March 1945. Loyalty was also the symbolic substance of the oath-swearing ceremonies in the newly “liberated” towns in the presence of High Commissioner d’Argenlieu. The Highlander “chiefs” who spoke out against “Annamese tutelage” were rewarded with medals, guns, and occasionally a légion d’honneur. But the limits of this “loyalty” were also apparent – especially when the Việt Minh staged its own ceremony only a few days later, in the same area and with many of the same people.³⁰

In his study of Việt Minh minorities policy in northern Indochina as a key for understanding the battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ, John McAlister argues that the Việt Minh’s “interests were best served by creating an organization for military participation which gave the minorities opportunities for mobility and status.” McAlister found it “instructive to note the Việt Minh’s effectiveness in using military organization to achieve [political integration]” which in Southeast Asia is thought to depend “on economic or social prerequisites.”³¹ However, the Việt Minh had no monopoly on this practice, since their adversaries attempted the same thing among the southern minorities. Like the Việt Minh, the French saw the Highlanders as prospective soldiers and military allies. But whereas the Việt Minh used the DRVN army as an instrument to tie different groups together, the French needed to create a separate homeland to motivate the Montagnard battalions to fight against Vietnamese nationalism, while also providing avenues for the ambitions of Montagnard warriors.³² The ideas of a separate territory and a separate Montagnard army effectively created a Montagnard military elite harboring separatist aspirations. The political effects of this policy would be long-lasting, enduring well beyond the final French military defeats of 1954.³³

Strategic Developments and Ethnic Tactics in the Central Highlands

After seizing Pleiku, Kon Tum, and An Khê in June 1946, the French expeditionary force encountered heavy PAVN resistance north of the line from Kon Tum to An Khê. Located at the southwestern, inland end of the coastal strip of the provinces of Quảng Trị, Quảng Nam, and Quảng Ngãi, this area was known by the French as the rue sans Joie (street without joy) and it remained firmly in DRVN hands. A military stalemate emerged, with Kon Tum and An Khê as the main French bastions along this front. Later Vietnamese historiographers have glorified the resistance of Hrê, Katu, Kor, and other groups as continuing a tradition of anti-French revolt in alliance with the Việt Minh. In his biography, the Bahnar “hero” Núp is depicted as having led his own village and others against the French, against all odds, deprived of salt, and virtually without support from Việt revolutionaries. In reality, Việt Minh cadres tried to remain in contact with minority groups, and were increasingly successful in organizing anti-French rear-area resistance, resulting in the “rotting away” [pourissement] of French control over population and territory. French actions were increasingly restricted to the major towns and roads. By 1950 the town of Kontum was a French island surrounded by enemy territory.³⁴

The French devised several responses to the PAVN military threat. First, they increased recruitment of Highlander youth into the colonial militia, focusing especially on the Rhadé. In a 1949 assessment, the Rhadé were described as “excellent troops” who served in both the regular French forces (5,000) and the Garde montagnarde (2,500).³⁵ Although some Highlander youngsters found a military career attractive, the French demand for fighters quickly exceeded voluntary supply, and French-appointed village headmen were seduced or coerced to provide the French army with new recruits by whatever means available. From 1948 onward, French officers reported low morale, evasion of recruitment, and growing desertion rates among Montagnard soldiers. The local socialist French leader Louis Caput was not optimistic about Franco-Highlander relations in the PMSI:

The mountain people of these regions […] certainly did not like the more enterprising Vietnamese, but [they] are beginning to detest singularly the French who recruit them as soldiers, subject them to exactions and impose labor upon them. As a result, there has been growing malaise, an abandonment of work and land, a retreat into the forest, and the least one can say is that the situation in the […] PMSI begins to become very disquieting.³⁶

A second response harkened back to the original raison d’être for the French presence: the development of rubber, tea, and coffee plantations. In November 1946 Colonel Massu outlined a plan to enable demobilized French soldiers to establish plantations in Darlac province. The scheme recalled the ancient Roman practice of using legions to colonize conquered territory; it was also reminiscent of Nguyễn Dynasty-era military colonies (đồn điền) established during Vietnam’s “march to the south,” as well as 1930s-era settlement ventures in Laos. Massu felt that a “colonisation à la romaine” was desirable, for it remained “the mission of France in Indochina … to protect the ethnic minorities against the Annamese imperialist tendency.” The plan was welcomed by d’Argenlieu, who stressed the political benefits of the presence of French cadres in the Highlands, as well as the economic advantages of the plantations, which would in theory render the PMSI economically viable. According to one of the settlers, Jacques Boulbet, one of the aims of the colonization was to “secure the bases of a sufficiently viable economy to sustain the thesis of autonomy for the ethnic minorities.”³⁷ Although officials in Paris were skeptical about the large scale of the “plan Massu” and the labor problems that it might create, they allowed the experiment to proceed on a limited basis.³⁸ By 1949, around one hundred French veterans had settled as colonists in three centers (Ban Mê Thuột, Djiring, and Đắk Mil), partly on previously abandoned plantations. While the results of the colonization effort were duly hailed in public, officials privately noted that “the Montagnard workers come with limited enthusiasm and for strictly regulated periods, in order not to spoil the bit of goodwill, which must be strongly encouraged.”³⁹ These concerns were well-founded, because any goodwill was quickly lost due to an increasing resort to forced labor.

The self-defeating nature of the French colonization efforts was evident to officials and other observers, who noted that extractive aspects of the policy nullified any gains from propaganda, medical, or educational programs. The British journalist Norman Lewis documented the cynical defeatism among French plantation owners, who resolved to exploit Highlander labor “for as long as it would last.” He described how owners hired armed gangs to hunt male workers in Highlander villages, and even tried to recruit members of the Garde montagnarde, apparently unconcerned about the resulting discontent. When the abusive behavior of plantation owners was added to the impositions of taxes, corvée labor, and forced recruitment of Montagnard soldiers, the French state’s prospects for winning Highlander loyalty seemed to disappear, just as Louis Caput had feared. Furthermore, the plantations imposed extra burdens on the French military to defend from PAVN attacks. Complaints in the summer of 1950 led to a heated correspondence among senior French leaders about the feasibility of the defense of plantations – but without a clear outcome.⁴⁰

The Military End Game

By the late 1940s, French policy for the Central Highlands had reached a crossroads. The strategy to win Highlander loyalty through separatism and French “protection” of minority rights seemed unsustainable. Meanwhile, geopolitical shifts and the emerging Cold War had forced French officials to reconsider their intransigent stance toward Vietnamese nationalism. By 1949, the looming communist takeover in China had increased the availability of US military aid for the French war effort in Indochina. But US policymakers wanted the French to accommodate noncommunist Vietnamese nationalists so they could be enlisted in the fight against the Việt Minh. These circumstances gave rise to the “Bảo Đại solution,” the scheme under which the former Nguyễn emperor would become head of an ostensibly independent State of Vietnam (SVN) within the framework of de Gaulle’s French Union. But despite his malleability, not even Bảo Đại would endorse a Vietnam that excluded Cochinchina and the PMSI.

In the Élysée Accords of March 1949, Bảo Đại secured a French pledge to respect the territorial unity of Vietnam, as well as promises of SVN diplomatic, financial, and military autonomy. For the time being, however, France continued to wield substantial power throughout Vietnam – especially in the PMSI. Even as France recognized formal Vietnamese sovereignty over the Central Highlands, it demanded a statut particulier (special status) for the Highlands because of “special French obligations” toward the Highlanders. To finesse this apparent contradiction, the French proposed that the five Highland provinces would now be linked to the person of Bảo Ðại as the former emperor’s “crown domain of the PMS.” (Significantly, the ‘I’ that previously designated the Indochinois quality of the PMSI had disappeared when the territory was formally reintegrated into Vietnam.) The relation of the ex-emperor to his crown domain consisted primarily of shares in rubber plantations and hunting lodges, but in June 1949 he presided over the oath-swearing ceremony in Ban Mê Thuột, along with the newly installed French high commissioner, Léon Pignon (Figure 9.2). In a volte-face, the French now acknowledged that “these territories […] indisputably belong to the ancient Empire of Annam.” For the moment, this nominal transfer of sovereignty hardly affected the regime of direct French rule, which was the substance of the “special status.”⁴¹ The only tangible short-term policy change was a further opening of the Highlands for plantations, via credits and tax exemptions. Nevertheless, the political reverberations of the French shift would echo for decades. Montagnard soldiers were shocked and upset to learn that their contracts with the French Army had been dissolved and replaced by contracts with the newly created SVN Army.⁴² A generation later, in 1965, the Rhadé leader Y Bham Enuol bitterly remembered how the French “arbitrarily, without consulting us, had […] reunited the PMS to the domain of the Crown of Emperor Bảo Ðại.”⁴³

Figure 9.2 The former Vietnamese emperor Bảo Đại (standing) reads a speech at an oath-swearing ceremony attended by members of several Highlander minority groups in the city of Ban Mê Thuột in June 1949. Leon Pignon, the High Commissioner of Indochina, is seated in front of Bảo Đại. The ceremony aimed to seal the incorporation of the Central Highlands region into the newly created State of Vietnam, which Bảo Đại led as chief of state.

Source: – / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

After 1950, the practical shortcomings of France’s ethnic policy for the Highlands were exacerbated by apparent rapprochement between Highlanders and the DRVN. The steady military advance of the PAVN forces in the Highlands was partly attributed to their accommodation to Highlander culture. The training of communist cadres was increasingly geared to the exigencies of life among non-Việt peoples in the jungle. The “eight orders” given by Hồ Chí Minh professed respect for local populations and their cultural practices, including those of the Highlanders. DRVN accounts told of cadres who totally immersed in local Highlander societies by learning the language, dressing in loincloth, marrying a local woman, and even filing their teeth. Such stories were undoubtedly exaggerated, but they were also widely believed. As observed by the author of a 1951 intelligence report on Việt Minh gains in Darlac province, “The Viet-Minh has a Moi policy, too.”⁴⁴ This realization prompted French military officials to offer more than merely some sort of abstract autonomy in a fictional homeland. Their most important responses included the Action psychologique and the Maquis, both initiated in 1950.

The Action psychologique was set up by Jean le Pichon, who had been commanding Montagnard militia for twenty years. A variation on what the Americans called “psychological warfare,” the French version consisted of propaganda, social action, and military action. Schools were transformed into “formation centers of Montagnard propagators.” These “propagators” took responsibility for the political training of village chiefs, who were warned about the dubious character of DRVN promises of autonomy, and the unreliable nature of the ethnic Việt in general. From 1953, a propaganda journal, Le Petit Montagnard, was available in four languages (Rhadé/Jarai, Koho, Bahnar, and Sedang) and distributed among Montagnard soldiers and other Highlander “brothers.” The “social action,” coordinated with the Catholic mission, consisted of the distribution of salt and of medical care. In the area of “military action,” the PAVN concept of the “fighting village” was adapted to suit French purposes. Characteristically, the French resettled the population of several scattered hamlets into one big village, which would then be defended by armed youths, trained and led by French soldiers. These small-scale resettlement schemes, aimed at isolating enemy guerrillas from village residents, were a harbinger of later US and RVN attempts to concentrate the rural population in strategic hamlets.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, the maquis were commandos who tried to set up counterguerrilla groups in enemy territory, and thus went much further in adapting to local cultures than the action psychologique. Colonel Roger Trinquier, the mastermind behind the maquis, believed it useless to educate “half savage peoples with a limited horizon” in the complex politics of the French Indochina War. The only way to reach them, he argued, was to play on their immediate interests and ambitions, and to revive old antagonisms, especially toward the ethnic Việt. As with the Devereux plan during World War II, the idea was to parachute one or more French commandos of the Groupes de commandos mixtes aeroportés (GCMA) into local communities to set up a self-defense system and to train recruits. The majority of the ten maquis were in the northern mountains, where the most intense combat of the war took place. In the Central Highlands the French capitalized on a revolt of the Hrê “tribe” in Quảng Ngãi against the DRVN. Among the Hrê, the cadres had felt sufficiently safe to step up their exactions in terms of foodstuff and labor, and to settle thousands of Việt migrants in Hrê territory, thus making the same political mistake as the French with their plantations. When the Hrê revolted against this regime by killing hundreds of ethnic Vietnamese in their midst, the French immediately sent Captain Pierre Hentic to try and turn the Hrê, who feared a PAVN retaliation, into “partisans.” One French agent later recounted his experience among the Hrê in romanticized terms, relating how he learned the language and adopted their lifestyle in order to win their confidence, while also marrying a local girl in order to ally himself to a Hrê leader. He told of how he baptized his partisans the “Hrê independence movement” and claimed they fought only for themselves – albeit against the same enemy as France, as Colonel Trinquier aptly noted.⁴⁶

Although the action Hrê lasted until 1954, the overall French military position in the Highlands deteriorated steadily after 1950. Despite the initial success of the Hrê maquis, Hentic’s eight battalions proved no match for regular PAVN units supported by Highlander guerrillas. Thus, the French were never able to reconquer the “street without joy” and lost their grip on the coastal districts of Quảng Ngãi and Bình Định provinces. As the Việt Minh grew stronger, the pressure on French positions in the Central Highlands mounted, especially around the towns of Kon Tum and An Khê. Located on route colonial 19, one of just three roads connecting the Highlands to the Vietnamese coast, An Khê had been the site of a celebrated French victory in 1946–7 but would soon become the scene of one of France’s bloodiest defeats.

In January 1954 the French commander General Henri Navarre launched Opération Atlante, aimed at conquering the coastal strip of Quảng Ngãi and Bình Định provinces. This required a concentration of military forces at the same time as Điện Biên Phủ was being turned into a massive French fortress. This left the Central Highlands exposed, and General Võ Nguyễn Giáp directed Việt Minh regiments to attack French posts north of Kon Tum.⁴⁷ In response, Navarre ordered the deployment of a battle-hardened group of more than 800 commandos who had fought the Chinese and North Korean armies alongside US forces in Korea. Upon arrival in the Highlands, they merged with local Việt troops and GCMA consisting of Rhadé and Jarai fighters to form the 3,500-strong Groupe Mobile 100 (GM 100). The GM 100 was sent to protect Kontum and Pleiku, and quickly had bruising battles at Đắk Tô, Đắk Đoa, and Plei Rinh with the PAVN’s 803rd Regiment, forcing the French to give up the town of Kontum, site of a French Catholic mission since the 1850s.

One month after the famous Việt Minh victory at Điện Biên Phủ, French commanders realized that their forces at An Khê also faced the prospect of being overrun. The GM 100 was sent to relieve the town and open Route 19, but it was ambushed at the Mang Yang pass on June 24. During four days of combat, the group sustained heavy casualties and the loss of most of its vehicles and artillery, making it the third-worst French defeat after Cao Bằng (1950) and Điện Biên Phủ (1954), both in the north. When the remainder of these forces were sent to defend the road between Ban Mê Thuột and Pleiku, they were almost annihilated at the Chư Dreh pass on July 17. Of the nearly 800 Korean War veterans who joined the GM 100, only 107 survived. By the time of the ceasefire negotiated at Geneva, only Pleiku, Ban Mê Thuột, and Đà Lạt were still in French hands, albeit extremely tenuously. According to Bernard Fall, “whatever tribesmen had remained loyal to the French were now in the posts and camps, and the remainder retreated with the Việt Minh into the inaccessible hills a few miles off the paths and roads.”⁴⁸

The defeat at An Khê was born not only of the shortcoming in French military strategy, but of the deeper problems lurking in France’s ethnic policies for the Central Highlands. Having long fostered ethnic separatism in the name of “protecting” Highlanders from ethnic Vietnamese encroachment, French officials discovered that the action psychologique and other efforts to win Highlander support were no match for the political operations of the DRVN. Although both sides used a combination of persuasion and coercion in their efforts to mobilize local populations, French efforts to secure Highlander “loyalty” were undermined by the attempts to accommodate Vietnamese nationalism. These contradictions, combined with the increasingly onerous French demands for Highlander land and labor, helped to burnish the appeal of the Việt Minh’s call for multiethnic solidarity (Map 9.1).

Map 9.1 The locations of the major ethnic groups in central Vietnam.

Redrawn by David McCutcheon from André Leroi-Gourham and Jean Poirier, Ethnologie de l’Union française, vol. I: Asie, Océanie, Amérique (Paris, 1953).

Conclusion: The Legacy of An Khê

The destruction of the GM 100 at An Khê in 1954 sealed the French defeat in the Central Highlands. At the same time, it also marked the failure of France’s separatist policies for the region. This failure cannot be explained merely as a result of French military missteps (although those are clearly evident in hindsight). Instead, the war in the Central Highlands was the culmination of a long-running contest over different configurations of ethnicity, territory, national sovereignty, and state power. Although by the spring and summer of 1954 the DRVN’s “ethnic policy” for the Highlands prevailed over that of the French, this did not mean that the broader debates over Highlander loyalties and identities had been resolved – only that they were about to move into a new phase.

Following the partition of Vietnam under the international accords negotiated at Geneva in 1954, administrative responsibility for the Central Highlands passed formally to the SVN (soon to be reborn as the Republic of Vietnam, or RVN). Unlike his French predecessors, RVN founder Ngô Đình Diệm was determined to establish Vietnamese sovereignty over the Highlands.⁴⁹ He proposed to do this via cultural assimilation of Highlander communities and settlement programs for ethnic Vietnamese – moves that quickly provoked resistance in the form of the multiethnic Bajaraka Movement (Bahnar, Jarai, Rhadé, and Kơho) formed in 1958 and in the Trà Bông revolt of the Hrê and Cor minorities during 1959–60.⁵⁰ These uprisings attracted the attention of DRVN leaders in Hanoi, who moved quickly to recruit the rebels into the communist-led National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF). They also prompted responses from the US military, who dispatched special forces units to establish Highlander militias reminiscent both of the French-led Battalions Montagnard and Georges Devereux’s never-implemented “special plan” of 1943.⁵¹ By the early 1960s, the Central Highlands had once again become a theater of combat. The stage had thus been set for a new and even more violent multisided conflict over questions of loyalty, autonomy, solidarity, and ethnic identity.

10 The French Indochina War in Northern Vietnam

Christopher Goscha

The complexity of the French Indochina War is mindboggling. It was not one conflagration, but a collection of several – a war of colonial (re)conquest, an armed struggle for national liberation, a civil war among Vietnamese, a conventional showdown between professional armies, an often-vicious contest for administrative control of the countryside known as “pacification,” the scene of intense urban violence at the start and, by the end, the site of class warfare of a communist kind. All of this, in turn, occurred as the Chinese and Americans stepped in to support their respective partners, the Vietnamese communists and the French colonialists, in what was, with Korea, the deadliest battlefield of the Cold War and the single most destructive war of decolonization in the twentieth century.

Nor was Vietnam a unitary state during the conflict. In late September 1945, the French attacked in the South and, in so doing, shattered the briefly unified Vietnam that Hồ Chí Minh had proclaimed earlier that month. Full-scale hostilities engulfed all of the country by late 1946. From this point, Hồ Chí Minh’s state – known officially as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) – was effectively transformed into an archipelago comprised of scattered “islands” of territory. This situation persisted until 1950 when Mao Zedong’s military assistance and advice allowed Hồ Chí Minh to field the modern army he needed to begin connecting these islands into a more cohesive state under communist control. It was only after that date that the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) began expanding the DRVN’s territorial control, first in the Northern Highlands and then via a corridor stretching southward around the French-controlled Red River Delta linking up eventually with DRVN-governed zones in central Vietnam. This gave rise to a sickle-shaped DRVN in the upper half of Vietnam, the subject of this chapter, with its blade wrapped around the Red River plains and its handle incorporating the lowlands of central Vietnam. The creation of this long stretch of connected DRVN territory running from the Chinese border to lower central Vietnam was a highly consequential event that profoundly shaped the course and outcome of the war.¹

A New Kind of War Comes to Upper Vietnam

On December 19, 1946, after more than a year of failed efforts to negotiate a peaceful decolonization, the French colonial state and Hồ Chí Minh’s DRVN went to war in northern Vietnam to solve the question by force. As urban battles raged in Hanoi, Nam Định, and Huế in early 1947, the DRVN president transferred his government to rural areas to continue the struggle for national independence. Hồ Chí Minh and his entourage established their resistance capital in Thái Nguyên province located in the northern hills looking over the Red River Delta. Although the French narrowly missed capturing the DRVN senior leadership in a surprise attack there in late 1947 (Operation Léa), they contented themselves with taking control of the border with China and consolidating their hold on the Red River Delta. This allowed the Vietnamese to build a northern base area, which they referred to as the Việt Bắc zone, even though it did not cover all of the “north” as its Vietnamese name implied. At the same time, by focusing on the control of the northern and southern deltas, the French allowed their adversaries to administer vast territories in central Vietnam largely free of direct colonial interference. This included several rice-rich provinces located south of Hanoi, which the DRVN designated zones III and IV, as well as a long strip of land in lower-central Vietnam known as Zone V. A host of resistance messengers, administrators, and radio operators did their best to keep the DRVN capital at Thái Nguyên informed of what was going on in these outlying areas. While DRVN loyalists also controlled segments of territory in Cochinchina and the Mekong Delta, the lines of communication and territorial control in the South were always more tenuous. Meanwhile, the French reconstructed their colonial state in the form of an Indochinese federation. In 1949, they allowed their Vietnamese partners to establish a second Vietnam known as the Associated State of Vietnam (ASVN). It joined similar states in Laos and Cambodia as part of the Associated States of Indochina, all of which were tucked into the French Union formed in 1946.

To the very end of the French Indochina War, no side was able to impose undisputed authority over people, territory, and resources in the country. The French maintained control of Hanoi, Huế, and Saigon and, though it varied, much of the Mekong and Red River deltas and a handful of provincial towns and roads connecting them. But on the ground, sovereignty was always fragmented and incomplete. The war dragged on in guerrilla form precisely because no one side exercised the military force or possessed the bureaucratic infrastructure needed to control people, territory, and resources completely. Each state had to content itself with what it actually controlled on the ground. And what they controlled looked nothing like “Vietnam.” If Hồ Chí Minh’s DRVN operated as an archipelago state, the same was true of the Associated State of Vietnam. These island clusters, French, ASVN, and DRVN, were in a constant state of competitive flux. Each bumped up against the other, expanding and contracting like sponges being squeezed in and out as their soldiers, security officials, and civil servants moved into an area while their adversaries pulled back – and vice versa. As the head of the Communist Party, Trường Chinh, had described it as early as 1947: “This war has the characteristic of two combs whose teeth are interlocked.”²

The communist victory in China’s civil war in October 1949 and Mao Zedong’s decision to support Hồ Chí Minh changed the nature of the French Indochina War. It also transformed the state the DRVN president led. Starting in early 1950, the Chinese communists, followed by the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist bloc, officially recognized the DRVN. They provided the modern military assistance and training Hồ needed to create the PAVN, a professional army consisting eventually of seven divisions. Like the Chinese, the Vietnamese did not abandon guerrilla warfare, but they now used their divisions and modern weapons to take the battle to the French in the north and eventually the center.

The Vietnamese victory over the French at Cao Bằng in October 1950 started the change in the island-like configuration of the DRVN in its upper two-thirds and began to give new, more consolidated territorial form to the state Hồ Chí Minh was determined to bring forth. Without modern weapons and Chinese help in creating the first PAVN divisions, the commander-in-chief, Võ Nguyên Giáp, would have never been able to force the enemy’s hand at Cao Bằng. The Vietnamese also had the French to thank. Rather than counterattacking to hold the borderlands, Giáp’s opposite, General Marcel Carpentier, lost his nerve in late 1950 and pulled most of his troops back to the delta. He and other French leaders worried that the Chinese might send their own People’s Army into northern Indochina as they were doing in Korea at that very moment. By the end of the year, the French had effectively ceded the strategically important provinces of Lào Cai to the west of Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn to its east, including artillery pieces and huge stocks of ammunition left behind in a chaotic withdrawal. On the far northwestern side, the French maintained a base in Lai Châu province. Supplied by air, it was capable of harassing PAVN units moving through the area, but not much more. Its main goal was to keep as much of the ethnic Tai population living there under colonial rule in the form of a federation. On the far eastern side, the French navy patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin from Hải Phòng Harbor.

The military revolution the Chinese communists had helped their Vietnamese brothers engineer in record time from 1950 was accompanied by a political one. Between 1950 and 1954, Hồ Chí Minh and his entourage borrowed a host of Sino-Soviet methods for crafting a single-party communist state. Assisted by some 200 Chinese advisors, they used these methods to secure party supremacy over the DRVN state and its bureaucracy, the army and its officers, the security service, and the peasant population and its village leaders. Specific measures included the creation of a new and streamlined Communist Party in 1951, the transformation of Hồ Chí Minh into a cult figure, the indoctrination of tens of thousands of civil servants and army officers in the communist faith (rectification), the politicization of the peasant masses through massive propaganda (emulation campaigns), and the creation of a command economy and revamped fiscal system. It did not occur overnight, but it happened progressively in upper Vietnam during the second half of the Indochinese conflict starting in 1950.

Carpentier helped again when he evacuated the hills on the southwestern side of the Red River Delta in the province of Hòa Bình. The Vietnamese immediately moved DRVN soldiers, administrators, and supplies in as resistance committees and Communist Party cells popped up. As this occurred, the shape of Hồ Chí Minh’s archipelagic Vietnam began to change as the PAVN connected islands and a growing body of communist-trained civil servants and cadres took over. Military control of Hòa Bình allowed Hồ Chí Minh and his entourage to connect this expanding northern territory, the Việt Bắc, to upper-central Vietnam’s Zone IV, forming the shape of a half-moon or the head of a sickle. PAVN units were soon moving through this interchange to make their way for the first time to the lowlands south of Hanoi. Chinese-supplied and -trained Vietnamese soldiers began to challenge the French and their ASVN partners for control of rice-rich provinces in Zone III, below Hanoi and Hải Phòng. In short, the DRVN now arced around the perimeter of the entire colonial delta from Lạng Sơn in the east through the capital area of Thái Nguyên before running southward through Hòa Bình to zones III and IV. This territorial crescent was new. From there, there was nothing stopping Hồ Chí Minh from consolidating his links to Zone V below the colonial city of Huế, thus adding a handle to the sickle’s head. Rivers, forest trails, roads, and canals allowed for the circulation of weapons, troops, administrators, and food from the Chinese border to Zone V. As this military expansion occurred, the fragmented political configuration of the DRVN began to disappear in its upper two-thirds. Soldiers, cadres, and administrators worked hand in hand to forge an ever more consolidated regime, with the Communist Party firmly at the helm.

Militarily, the question for the French in early 1951 was whether the PAVN would descend eastward from the Highlands to attack the Red River plains or move west into the Highlands running down Indochina’s spine. The new sickle-shape allowed the PAVN to advance in either direction. The French government realized as Cao Bằng fell in October 1950 that it had to be ready to defend the northern plains if ever Giáp decided to attack in that direction. France’s American allies agreed. Although they were focused on fighting the communists in Korea, they counted on the French to help them hold the line in the Red River Delta – Tonkin as they and the French called it – and accelerated their assistance to the French. Working through their own Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG), created in September 1950, the Americans provided large amounts of modern military assistance to the French and their ASVN partners.

To make sure the French could hold the line in Tonkin, Paris dispatched a new general to Vietnam and made him high commissioner at the same time: Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (Figure 10.1). There was no questioning this man’s mettle. De Lattre had seen combat during World War I, run counterinsurgency operations in North Africa during the interwar period, and led Free French troops during the liberation of southern France in 1944. Having served as the general inspector for the French army in the late 1940s, de Lattre was also aware of the French Expeditionary Corps’ problems in Indochina. Within weeks of his arrival in Hanoi in mid-December 1950, he visited troops in the field, organized parades in the capital, and gave speeches to reverse declining morale. He got rid of defeatist-minded officers in his ranks and recruited a team of officers who shared his ideas. He made Raoul Salan, an officer with extensive experience in northern Indochina, his second-in-command and together they went to work.

Figure 10.1 General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French Commander during the French Indochina War.

Source: ullstein bild Dtl. / ullstein bild / Getty Images.

De Lattre agreed to take over in Indochina on the understanding that there would be no more debacles, no more withdrawals, and no more humiliations. He swatted away suggestions that French forces should withdraw from the north in order to hold the southern pearl of the Indochinese empire – “Cochinchina” or the Mekong Delta. To withdraw from the north would send the wrong message to the Americans and jeopardize the military assistance Washington had agreed to provide as the French went up against an energized Vietnamese army backed by the communist bloc. Second, de Lattre pointed out, if Hồ Chí Minh were to gain full control of the northern plains, he would have the food, manpower, resources, and territorial traction to turn the PAVN into a formidable fighting machine. Lastly, abandoning the north would alienate the Vietnamese who had rallied to the French-backed ASVN. Indeed, de Lattre counted on using his dual authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and high commissioner for Indochina to enlist the Vietnamese in the French war effort like never before. It was no accident that a second Vietnamese army – the Vietnam National Army (VNA), the armed forces of the ASVN – truly came to life in 1951 with the full approval of the Americans.³

Backed by his government, de Lattre lost no time reinforcing his hold over the plains surrounding Hanoi and Hải Phòng. He presided over the creation of a new string of concrete fortifications to protect the capital against any possible attack. The ASVN’s Army helped with pacification in the lowlands. De Lattre transferred regular troops from other parts of Indochina regardless of any grumbling it caused. He stepped up the naval surveillance of the Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam’s long coastline. He improved existing air bases, built a few new ones, and extended runways to receive American fighter-bombers. Barbed wire sprouted up across the northern lowlands. De Lattre welcomed American artillery, shells, napalm, bombers, tanks, trucks, fuel, amphibious landing crafts, radios, and fuel. The Americans also helped the French finance and equip the VNA. Without American aid, de Lattre and his successors in Indochina would have never been able to fight the war they did after 1950.

A parallel transformation was taking place on the DRVN side. Emboldened by their victory at Cao Bằng and flush with Chinese military assistance and advice, the Vietnamese communists set their sights on the Red River Delta. De Lattre’s opposite, General Giáp, was aware of recent Chinese advances in northern Korea. Convinced that he could take the Tonkin lowlands by force in similar fashion, he lost no time in making his move. In early January 1951, he ordered regiments of the PAVN’s 308th and 312th divisions to attack the north side of the colonial delta head-on in the area of Vĩnh Yên. But de Lattre was waiting for his opponent. When PAVN troops charged his positions head-on in mid-January 1951, the French general lit up the sky with artillery blasts and balls of fire in the form of napalm explosions. Vietnamese troops fought ferociously to take enemy positions, but a hail of machine-gun fire met each wave of young men sent over the top. Giáp had few anti-aircraft guns if any at this time, not enough to stop enemy bombers from wreaking mayhem on his troops. De Lattre and his men held their ground.

Vĩnh Yên was the baptism by fire for the PAVN. Wave attacks on entrenched positions left thousands of regulars killed and wounded, hit by the very things the guerrilla soldier had always avoided – artillery shells, direct machine-gun fire, and aerial strafing. As many as six thousand soldiers may have perished during the battle of Vĩnh Yên before Giáp called it off. A PAVN officer, Ngô Vӑn Chiêu, provides us with a horrifying account of what napalm looked like as it fell from the sky on him and his brothers-in-arms in early 1951:

Be careful of the planes. They are going to drop bombs and open fire – hit the ground, hide under the bamboo. The planes dived and all hell broke loose before my eyes. Hell came in the form of a big unwieldy egg falling from the first plane … then a second one dropped on my right near the road where there were two machine gunners. An enormous flame expanding over hundreds of meters, it seemed, spread terror throughout the ranks of the soldiers. Napalm: Fire that falls from the sky. Another plane advanced to spray more of this fire. The bomb dropped behind us and I felt a burning wind hit my entire body. My men ran; I couldn’t stop them. There was no way you could remain under this storm cloud of fire that burned everything in its path. Everywhere the flames were leaping. Then they (the French) let loose their artillery, mortars, and machine guns, creating a tomb of fire from what had been only ten minutes earlier been a small forest.⁴

“What was that,” a stunned soldier emerging from the mayhem asked his commanding officer, “the atom bomb?” “No,” Chiêu told him, “napalm.”

Despite the staggering toll inflicted on DRVN troops, communist leaders were undeterred. Within weeks, Hồ Chí Minh, Giáp, and their Chinese advisors sent Vietnamese boys back into this Franco-American inferno. When the PAVN troops went into battle on the night of March 23–24, 1951, in the areas of Mạo Khê and Đông Triều near Hải Phòng, they were met by a massive barrage delivered by French artillery, American-supplied B-26 aircraft loaded with napalm, and two battleships lying off the coast. Giáp used his artillery as best he could, but he was badly outgunned. Without an air force and an effective anti-air defense system, the PAVN remained woefully vulnerable to superior enemy firepower. Over and again, French artillery and bombers pounded his men as they assailed fortified positions in pitched battle. In mid-1951, Giáp would attempt a third time to seize a piece of the southern Red River Delta in the rice-rich provinces of Ninh Bình and Nam Định, but to no avail. In June 1951, the communists terminated their plans to seize the delta through conventional attacks for the time being. If Giáp continued like this, he would run his newly created army into the ground.⁵

The failure of Giáp’s 1951 offensive did not mean that DRVN strategists turned their attention away from the delta in favor of going westward into the Highlands. Although Giáp and his Chinese advisors would redirect the PAVN’s main force attacks that way from 1952 and eventually toward Điện Biên Phủ, all parties remained focused on the northern delta until the end of the French Indochina War for several reasons. First, clandestine trade with colonial zones allowed DRVN authorities to continue importing essential products they could not get from communist China in sufficient quantities (pharmaceuticals, paper, chemical products, and machine parts). Second, lowland paddy fields produced the rice the Vietnamese communists needed to feed their rapidly expanding regular army, human logistics, and civil service circulating throughout this upland corridor between the Việt Bắc on the one hand and zones III, IV, and V on the other. Third, Giáp needed rice and young people from the heavily populated delta to replenish his badly mauled regiments and to work in his human transport service and work teams. In short, the DRVN “sickle,” though based in the Highlands, needed continued access to enemy zones in the lowlands if it was going to survive and prevail. It needed rice and recruits above all.

Unable to seize the northern delta in one fell swoop, DRVN leaders changed their tactics. They decided to go back in slowly – bit by bit, day by day, village by village. Methodically, they expanded government control into the lowlands by dispatching administrators, security and intelligence officials, and well-armed guerrillas. Pacification was not a colonial monopoly. This second, indirect offensive against the Tonkin Delta worked for another reason. No sooner had Giáp called off his conventional attacks on the delta in June 1951 than he and his party began breaking down their PAVN divisions into smaller, mobile combat teams to conduct guerrilla operations inside French-administered zones. Giáp could recombine these teams into their parent units when needed. From mid-1951, these PAVN teams operated in guerrilla formations and carried out a second, sustained assault on the northern delta. They expanded the DRVN’s territorial hold village by village, collected rice wherever they could, and inducted young men into the army and both sexes into the government’s human-powered transport and work teams. At least half-a-dozen PAVN battalions operated clandestinely in the delta around Hanoi in late 1951, a total of around 4,000 well-armed and trained troops. Thus, communist leaders never abandoned their strategic interest in the Red River Delta.⁶

De Lattre and Salan realized that defensive measures and colonial pacification alone were not going to win the war for the French. Having served in the Highlands in the 1930s, Salan knew how important the enemy’s control of the city of Hòa Bình was for Hồ Chí Minh’s plans to consolidate his control in northern Vietnam. French intelligence officers referred to this enemy interchange in the Black River Valley west of Hanoi as the “Hòa Bình Corridor.” The French concluded that severing this supply line was crucial. If the PAVN dared to counterattack French forces there, so much the better. In mid-November 1951, the French occupied Hòa Bình and secured the route connecting it to the colonial capital. The Vietnamese riposte was immediate. The territorial integrity of Hồ Chí Minh’s communist-driven war state depended on recovering that interchange. Giáp sent his best divisions against the colonial forces hunkered down in Hòa Bình while the 316th and the 320th battalions continued to expand pacification in the delta. In so doing, the Vietnamese aimed to remind the French that what they did up in the Highlands would cost them down below in the war for the delta’s villages. Over a three-month period, Giáp mobilized more than three hundred thousand men and women porters to supply his troops going into Hòa Bình. Most came from the populous lower delta (zones III and IV), as did the food supply. In mid-November, Giáp sent his regulars directly into the line of fire in an attempt to overrun the enemy camp in Hòa Bình. Fighting was ferocious, especially during the wave attacks that came in the dark of night. But each time PAVN regulars rushed enemy positions, they ran into heavy machine-gun fire, artillery, napalm, and aerial bombing.

The DRVN eventually recovered Hòa Bình, but not because they had defeated their adversary on the battlefield. Salan’s men pushed back every PAVN assault. But Salan’s success in the Highlands was coming at the cost of losing ground on the connected front in the Tonkin Delta. After assuming command upon de Lattre’s death in January 1952, Salan realized that if he continued to hold Hòa Bình, it would endanger French control over the plains, a politically unacceptable scenario. In February 1952, Salan withdrew his troops from Hòa Bình to send them after the PAVN-powered mobile units in the delta.⁷

What happened at Hòa Bình had big implications for what French and DRVN leaders would do next. Salan may have held off his attackers in this clash, but he had not destroyed the PAVN. Second, by returning Hòa Bình to the adversary, he allowed his adversaries to re-establish the territorial and military integrity of their sickle-shaped war state running from the Chinese border to Zone V. Lastly, Salan’s decision to withdraw validated Giáp’s calibrated strategy of engaging his PAVN regulars in the Highlands while deploying his mobile task forces in the northern delta. This symbiotic relationship between the Highlands and the plains did not guarantee military victory, but it diluted the French ability to claim it and bogged down Salan’s men. Hòa Bình was a French victory, but it was a pyrrhic one.

But whatever the spin Hồ Chí Minh’s propaganda machine put on it, French commanders had bested Giáp in pitched battle, again. DRVN leaders and their Chinese advisors drew at least four lessons from this: First, they realized that the French would not give up the Red River Delta, the defense of which remained their top political and military priority. Second, the extended duration of the Hòa Bình battle – almost three months – had come dangerously close to depleting the food supplies needed to keep the PAVN soldier in the field. Access to and delivery of rice had emerged as a major concern. Third, the communists realized that winning the war required them to put their party in complete control of the DRVN state, army, logistics, and mass organizations. Finally, Hòa Bình may have offered more favorable terrain for attacking the French than fighting in the open delta, but its proximity to colonial bases in the delta allowed the adversary to supply their men by road and air and to deploy overwhelming air power. Vietnamese communist leaders decided that if they wanted to actually win in pitched battle against the enemy, they had to move their conventional operations into areas more favorable to them. There was only one way for the PAVN to go: westward, deeper into the Indochinese Highlands. But again, the Vietnamese never lost sight of the lowlands. This was the strategic advantage of this sickle-shaped Vietnam running from the Việt Bắc to Zone V. It allowed the Vietnamese to operate in the lowlands at their feet or to go deep into the Highlands – or both. The DRVN had multiple strategic options available, and they were determined to use them (Map 10.1).

Map 10.1 The strategic zones as defined by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Redrawn by Jeff Edwards. Used with permission.

Of Rice and War

Although the French Indochina War in northern Vietnam featured many bloody battlefield clashes, it was also a struggle for food.⁸ This struggle occurred almost everywhere along the edges of the DRVN’s sickle shape. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sustained economic offensive the French operated between 1950 and 1954 to stop their adversaries from procuring the food – above all, the rice – they needed to continue their war effort. In April 1951, as Giáp and de Lattre faced off in the delta, the head of the Communist Party, Trường Chinh, warned his readers that a third general was stalking the land. This officer had no nationality. He needed no army or conscription laws to fight. Trường Chinh referred to him as the “Rice General” (Tướng Gạo). While no one could actually see him, everyone knew he was out there. And all feared the weapon he carried at his side: hunger.⁹

The French saw in this “Rice General” an ally who could help them stop the DRVN from feeding the soldiers and civil servants of its expanding war state. French officers referred to their emerging project interchangeably as the “economic war” or “the rice war” – la bataille du riz. Starting in early 1951, de Lattre and Salan systematized this economic offensive and connected it to their pacification efforts in the Tonkin paddy fields. The goal was no longer simply to build up a loyal local administration. The idea was also to prevent rice from getting through to DRVN zones. As one of the architects of the economic offensive put it: “Both sides are agreed on one thing. The battle for rice is equal in importance to the one between armies. Victory will go to those who know how to control the delta’s rice granaries.”¹⁰ An already brutal conflagration, the French Indochina War was about to get even worse.

Economics had always been part of the struggle between the French and the Vietnamese. No one knew this better than Salan. He had personally accompanied Hồ Chí Minh to France during the summer of 1946 as the Vietnamese president tried desperately to negotiate the prickly questions of trade, finance, and monetary policy. Salan was there, too, in November 1946 when differences over sovereignty led to the violent clash in Hải Phòng Harbor over who had the right to collect customs duties. And he was still there after the outbreak of full-scale war in Hanoi a month later. In 1947, he presided over Operation Léa, the large-scale offensive designed to destroy Hồ Chí Minh’s government and sever its commercial ties to China. As he recognized, he had failed to achieve either objective. The Vietnamese continued to trade clandestinely with the French colonial cities and nearby Asian markets in southern China and Southeast Asia.

Colonial authorities and their Vietnamese partners did their best to stop their enemies from forging economic ties between the DRVN “islands” and Saigon, Hanoi, and other Asian commercial hubs in Guangzhou and Bangkok. From the early years of the war, they attacked the DRVN’s communications, transport, cottage industries, and natural resources. The French went to great lengths to block the DRVN’s trade in medicines, chemicals, and paper. And they attacked Hồ Chí Minh’s food supplies, rice and salt in particular. Success, however, depended on finding officers who could untangle all the moving parts in the enemy’s economic activities. Progress also depended on the cooperation of Vietnamese partners with the intimate knowledge of the land, its languages, and local administration. As a result, colonial operations on the economic front tended to be sporadic and inconsistent. An important exception to this rule occurred in the late 1940s when the French Army effectively blocked the DRVN’s ability to move rice from large stockpiles on the western side of the tip of southern Vietnam to troops fighting in eastern areas in the South.¹¹

The sustained economic assault on the DRVN from Zone V northward only really began in 1950 – in the wake of Mao’s decision to help Hồ Chí Minh field a professional army and build a revolutionary state to run it. Inspired by the success of the southern blockade, French military officers, colonial administrators, and their Vietnamese partners devised an elaborate food denial program for central and northern Vietnam. The pressure for action in this area increased as the communists attacked the delta during the first half of 1951. The French may have defeated Giáp’s offensive, but they realized that the DRVN’s top priority in the delta was not to capture Hanoi, but to secure the nearby rice fields that could feed its hungry divisions.

The French economic offensive evolved in three overlapping phases between 1950 and 1954. The first wave began in early 1950 when military authorities began dividing ASVN territory into three sectors. Zone A referred to spaces located deep within the core territories of French Indochina, where goods and services could circulate freely. Less secure areas were designated Zone B, in which moderate restrictions on activity were enforced. The borderlands adjacent to DRVN territory became Zone C, where all economic activity was strictly controlled, or simply suppressed. These economic measures went hand in hand with new military steps, such as the reinforcement and construction of new posts, watchtowers, and blockhouses. “When it comes to economic warfare,” the French general in charge of central Vietnam’s rice war wrote to his Vietnamese counterpart in 1952, “it is the perfect combination of administrative action and military action that leads to success.”¹² Colonial authorities approved legislation allowing the army to control the circulation of foodstuffs (rice, salt, fish) and industrial inputs that the enemy used for making weapons and explosives (machine parts, gasoline, chemicals). This first wave of controls applied to all of Indochina, including the blockaded areas in the south.

As the center of gravity of the fighting moved northward from late 1950 so, too, did the French economic counteroffensive. And as it did, a second phase emerged in the French military’s plans to cut off the DRVN’s access to the rice stocks of the northern delta. Salan issued more orders to fight a “rice war” in the delta against the enemy using his own methods if necessary. Specific measures included: (1) the rapid deployment of troops and officials into delta villages during harvest times to protect fields from enemy penetration; (2) assisting villagers to get their paddy out of the fields and into carefully guarded silos or nearby blockhouses as rapidly as possible; (3) carefully measuring and inventorying harvest yields for every village to determine how much rice remained for families to meet subsistence needs; (4) guaranteeing that the colonial government would purchase surplus rice at a favorable price in colonial piasters and then store it in safe locations so that none would be left for the enemy; and (5) avoidance of harsh methods that could drive villagers into enemy hands (though this was not always observed by French forces, as Vietnamese testimony demonstrates). Although French troops served in the paddy fields, de Lattre and Salan increasingly relied on the VNA and local authorities to fight the rice war on the ground where it counted most.

Village life during the Indochina War had never been easy in the northern delta or central Vietnam. But now it became much worse. The violence of the conventional battles during the first half of 1951 had spilled over into scores of Red River villages. The escalation of economic warfare meant that the suffering of civilians was now compounded. To stop enemy assaults on rice-rich areas surrounding Hanoi and Hải Phòng, the French unrolled barbed-wire and installed bamboo-piked barricades in and around hundreds of northern villages. Battles over rice occurred mainly during the two harvest seasons (roughly in April–May, the fifth lunar month, and October–November, the tenth). Attacks usually occurred at night when Vietnamese commandos tried to storm barricaded villages and overwhelm the handful of Franco-Vietnamese troops defending them and their food stockpiles. As soon as the peasants had finished the harvest, “the rice war” exploded, French journalist Lucien Bodard recalled, “with Việt Minh and French troops coming out of nowhere to take it from them.”¹³ When the French did not have sufficient defenders in place, they opened up their artillery in order to stop their adversaries from taking the rice in the dark of night. And when one side could not get its rice out, commanders on all sides often burned it rather than leave anything behind. Watching from the sidelines, peasants wondered where they were going to get their next meal. Civilians suffered the most in the rice wars, caught “between the hammer and the anvil” as a French intelligence officer described it.¹⁴

A third and final wave took the economic war to a higher level from mid-1952 as the April–May harvest apparently came in short for the French. Several things distinguish this final phase from the earlier ones. First, Salan’s entourage concluded that the lack of enforcement in the earlier phases had allowed Hồ Chí Minh’s officials to continue importing much of what they needed from the colonial zones, rice above all. This, in turn, had allowed the Vietnamese to feed their PAVN divisions despite the fact that the Chinese communists were not providing food aid. Second, to remedy this problem, Salan’s team concluded that they had to do everything in their power to systematize – the new buzzword – the organization, the administration, and the enforcement of the economic blockade throughout “all of Indochina.” The air force, navy, and special forces would help the army and their Vietnamese allies to do this. Third, having failed to hold Hòa Bình in early 1952, Salan pushed hard to drive a wedge between the rice-rich delta and this enemy corridor hugging its perimeter. Finally, Salan obtained the authorization to attack the DRVN’s economic infrastructure in a stepped-up attempt to bring the enemy to his knees. In June 1952, he declared a systematic economic war on the Vietnamese. What was new in this third phase of the economic offensive was the mobilization of the navy and especially the French Air Force. Salan also received authorization to bomb systematically the DRVN’s agricultural infrastructure.

Reworking the blockade to make it airtight was the first step in this direction. Starting in June, the French Army began reinforcing the protective wrapping around the core areas of the Red River Delta. This meant, in Salan’s words, turning it into a “no man’s land.” Soldiers and administrators poured into the border zones, backed up by the French Navy and Air Force. This buffer zone fanned out from the Franco-Vietnamese border 6 miles (10 kilometers) or so before touching up against DRVN territory. Nothing was permitted to transit this band – no rice, salt, medicines, paper, or chemicals. For Salan, “nothing” also meant no human beings living in this strip. To this end, the commander-in-chief forcibly evacuated twenty thousand Vietnamese from the northern and northwestern sides of the perimeter and eighty-thousand souls from the southwestern side. According to Salan, anyone caught in this no man’s land could be killed as a presumed enemy supporter – a directive that anticipated the “free fire zones” later used by the French in Algeria and the United States and South Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam War. Writing in late 1952, Salan did not mince his words: “The blockade of the delta begun in June of this year has delivered a real blow to the Viet Minh war economy. It has turned out to be an effective weapon in drying up in very important proportions his food supplies in paddy. It is thus necessary to continue this experience and to render it even more vigorous by fixing any minor problems which may have been detected.”¹⁵

Strategic bombing became an essential part of the French economic assault. To choose targets, operational officers sought out detailed information on enemy industries, natural resources, mines, dikes, and irrigation systems. Once the maps had been prepared, the coordinates fixed, and the weather permitting, pilots attacked Hồ Chí Minh’s economic infrastructure from the air while the navy and special forces moved up rivers and canals to strike. The French targeted three main rice producing areas in particular: Thanh Hóa province in Zone IV, Bắc Giang province located southeast of the DRVN capital at Thái Nguyên, and a wide strip of DRVN-controlled rice fields located in the foothills west of Hanoi. From his experience in interwar Indochina, Salan knew that colonial officials had built hydraulic complexes to feed the growing northern population through double cropping. Starting in 1952, the French Air Force began bombing these irrigation targets. Encouraged by the preliminary results, the campaign was expanded to hit canals, dikes, and granaries elsewhere in central and northern Vietnam. As one internal note explained the goal: “to destroy any hope of obtaining a harvest in rebel zones.”¹⁶ Food production throughout the DRVN sickle rapidly plummeted.

The list of targets in this economic war was not limited to irrigation systems. In 1952, the French Air Force received authorization to attack the water buffalo and cattle population in DRVN zones. The goal was to deprive the enemy of another source of food and deny its farmers an important means of tilling their fields. The air force struck deeper into people’s lives by bombing more aggressively the DRVN’s outdoor markets, transport system (roads, bridges, ports, and a tattered railway), industrial capacity (weapons workshops, paper mills, textile factories), and any remaining dams, dikes, and canals not taken out in 1952 or rebuilt thereafter. Sluices and sliding lock-gates used to control the flow of water came under systematic attack. Even stocks of salt could be tainted by petrol dropped from planes.

The French destruction of DRVN infrastructure forced Hồ Chí Minh to further mobilize his population to repair dikes, dams, terraces, and canals; to fix roads and bridges; and to clean the rice and salt that the French had contaminated. Between 1950 and 1954, Vietnamese laborers repaired 2,280 miles (3,670 kilometers) of road and 72,000 feet (22,000 meters) of bridges with little or no mechanical help. To avoid colonial detection and bombers, villagers tended to their fields at night. Peasants turned hiding animals, gardens, and granaries into an art form. Protecting animals from enemy assaults was important as hiding rice. A child of the countryside during the war, Nguyễn Công Luận remembered vividly the strange symbiosis that developed between villagers and animals united in their desire to survive enemy patrols passing through their villages:

Even the animals knew how to get out the way of French-led patrols. Whenever the French [Union] soldiers came, all kinds of sounds subsided. Even domestic animals – beasts of burden, pigs, and dogs – seemed to try to make the least noise. All kept quiet and acted frantically as if they could apprehend [the] fear conveyed by the behavior of panic-stricken villagers. Most dogs ran about to find a nook of safety in dense bamboo groves. Some pigs sneaked into concealed holes when their owners yelled, “French coming!” Two of the dozen buffaloes in my village would act accordingly to the shout “Lie down!” when they were under fire while fleeing the village. When the French soldiers were gone and the villagers returned to their normal activities, all those animals became lively again and made their usual noises and sounds.¹⁷

War demanded as much of women as it did men. Women and girls took over in the fields when their husbands and fathers left to fight. They also served as human porters, road workers, and nurses. Of the estimated 1.7 million people who served as porters during 1950–4, half were women. Children toiled in the fields as never before in their short lives. This increased level of physical activity across all of upper Vietnam meant the burning of unprecedented amounts of calories. Fatigue spread throughout the countryside as undernourished bodies became increasingly susceptible to disease.

By mid-1952, the French economic war was moving into high gear. According to one Vietnamese study, the French Air Force bombed twelve hydraulic systems (dams, dikes, and canals) between June and August 1952. French planes burst the dams of water reservoirs in Zone IV – in the same places the US Air Force would bomb during Operation Rolling Thunder in the mid-1960s. Between 1952 and 1954, the Colonial Air Force killed “tens of thousands” of beasts of burden. In the run-up to the battle of Điện Biên Phủ alone, this included the killing of 3,594 water buffalo. A French after-action report confirms that in a single attack on September 15, 1953, bombers dropped four napalm bombs killing 152 buffaloes. The use of napalm as an economic weapon reveals the importance that the French placed on this aspect of the war. By April 1953, the French army had expanded its economic offensive southward into Zone V, including the rice-rich areas around Huế and Đà Nẵng that had fed the DRVN’s troops clandestinely for years.

By blockading the enemy’s economy and trade, by bombing Hồ Chí Minh’s agricultural infrastructure, and by targeting livestock, the French expanded the war deeper into Vietnamese society, sending pangs of hunger into the bellies of hundreds of thousands of people. In the process, the French eliminated the traditional distinctions between combatants and civilians and between the homefront and the battlefield – erasures that scholars recognize as the defining features of “total war.”¹⁸ In 1956, one of the strongest defenders of “economic warfare,” General Lionel-Max Chassin, commander-in-chief of the air force in Indochina in the early 1950s, provided a bone-chilling assessment of what this form of total war was and should remain, in his view, in a colonial war:

One must starve people to death (Il faut faire crever les gens de faim). I am convinced that had we killed all of the water buffaloes, destroyed all of Indochina’s rice, we would have had the Vietnamese at our mercy whenever we wanted. It took us a long time to understand and to obtain the authorization to destroy the enemy’s dams. We destroyed them in the end and, when we asked the Vietnamese during the first conference meeting on the armistice negotiations (in 1954) what had caused them the most problems, they responded “that what hurt them the most was when you destroyed the dams” … It’s the lesson of economic warfare: you must starve people to death.¹⁹

The Indochina conflict was a brutal war of decolonization. This was particularly true in the upper two-thirds of the DRVN, where hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, including untold numbers of civilians, died in almost a decade of violence, hunger, and fear.

11 The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ

Christopher Goscha

On March 13, 1954, thousands of soldiers descended from the hills above the remote Mường Thanh valley in northwestern Vietnam. These infantrymen of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) were taking part in a massive assault, months in the making, on the heavily fortified French garrison in the town of Điện Biên Phủ, located on the valley floor below them. Thus commenced what would become a bloody 56-day siege, culminating eventually in the surrender of the last French outpost on May 7. The PAVN’s victory would prove to be a momentous event – not only in Indochina, where it led to the swift unraveling of France’s century-old empire, but across the Afro-Asian world, too, serving as a symbol and potential model for anticolonial movements elsewhere in a decolonizing world. As Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais doctor, intellectual, and member of the Algerian nationalist movement, put it in his famous denunciation of colonialism in 1961, The Wretched of the Earth:

The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Điện Biên Phủ is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been: “What must be done to bring about another Điện Biên Phủ? How can we manage it?” Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Điện Biên Phủ. The only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action.¹

Fanon understood that the battle of Điện Biên Phủ had clearly been no guerrilla skirmish. The violence the Vietnamese had succeeded in generating and applying to the battlefield had no equivalent in the Algerian War or any other war of decolonization in the twentieth century for that matter. The PAVN’s commanding general, Võ Nguyên Giáp, had led a modern army consisting of seven divisions, equipped with intelligence, communications, and logistical services. Artillery guns had rained down shells on the French fortress for almost two months, turning the valley floor into a lunar landscape of craters and rubble. As the Algerians struggled against the same French Army in North Africa, Fanon wanted to know how the Vietnamese had fought a set-piece battle in the open against a conventional Western army at Điện Biên Phủ and won. Fanon was not alone in asking this question. Having survived the epic battle himself, French General Marcel Bigeard later marveled at what his adversaries had achieved before he was marched off to a prisoner-of-war camp: “And here I was now a prisoner of these little Vietnamese who in the French army we always considered them to only be good for working as drivers or nurses. Although these men of extraordinary morale had started out with nothing but a hodgepodge of weapons in 1945, they had an ideal, a goal: to drive out the French. In nine years, Giáp had indisputably defeated our Expeditionary Corps … There are lessons to be learned from this.”²

Prelude: Going Deep into the Highlands

No one could have imagined at the start of the Indochina War that its endgame would occur in this remote valley in northwestern Vietnam. When full-scale hostilities had engulfed all of Vietnam in late 1946, Hồ Chí Minh moved the capital of his recently created state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), to the hills of Thái Nguyên province, above the French-controlled Red River Delta. From there, Hồ Chí Minh and his Communist Party administered a fragmented DRVN state that sprawled across noncontiguous “islands” of territory scattered from north to south. But thanks in no small part to the communist bloc’s aid and advice that began pouring into the DRVN in 1950, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Hồ Chí Minh and his followers began to strengthen and consolidate their territorial control and their military power. As described in Chapter 10, the DRVN by 1954 controlled a vast sickle-shaped swath of territory that stretched from the Việt Bắc zone on the border with China, through the Highlands north and west of Hanoi, across the rice-rich provinces lying to the south of the capital, and all the way down into lower-central Vietnam (the regions designated on DRVN maps as zones III, IV, and V). The French continued to hold Hanoi, Haiphong, and most of the heart of the Red River Delta, as well as large areas in southern Vietnam, along with the central Vietnamese port cities of Đồng Hới, Huế, and Đà Nẵng.

A key development leading to the creation of the DRVN “sickle” had occurred in 1950, when the PAVN had used their first divisions and newly received Chinese support to crush French forces in the battle of Cao Bằng, thus securing a direct resupply route to the People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong. Giáp failed, however, to take the northern delta from French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in a series of bloody battles in 1951. Yet PAVN forces hung on to the strategic province of Hòa Bình, thanks less to a resounding battle victory than to the French decision to withdraw from there in order to secure their hold on the Red River Delta.

All of this led DRVN leaders and their Chinese advisors to rethink their military strategy. Starting in 1952, the Vietnamese refocused on seizing as much of the Indochinese Highlands as possible while maintaining guerrilla operations in the northern delta, where they continued to procure rice and recruit soldiers and porters. In October 1952, Võ Nguyên Giáp marched his PAVN troops deep into the northwestern hills for the first time, capturing French forward bases at Tú Lệ, Gia Hội, and Vӑn Yên. The PAVN’s 308th “iron division” overran Nghĩa Lộ in a powerful attack. Marcel Bigeard barely escaped to the west as the Vietnamese seized much of Sơn La province on the border with Laos. The French commander-in-chief, General Raoul Salan, who had succeeded de Lattre after the latter was diagnosed with terminal cancer, fully recognized the strategic import of the PAVN advances. As he informed his men: “We have taken the hit. The loss of the Nghia Lo sector is a painful one. But it is not a decisive one. … The game has only begun.”³

To halt Giáp’s western expansion, Salan decided to transform the highland village of Nà Sản into a heavily fortified camp. He correctly anticipated that his Vietnamese nemesis would attack him there in order to secure his march westward toward Laos. In a flurry of activity in late 1952, Salan transformed this small upland settlement into an entrenched position. Bulldozers cleared the jungle while colonial soldiers and Vietnamese workers dug trenches, laid 5,000 mines, unfurled more than 1,000 tons of barbed wire, and installed heavy artillery. Engineers refurbished and extended the colonial airstrip there. More than six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) long, it could now handle an almost nonstop flow of landings and takeoffs. By November 23, Salan had 12,000 troops protecting the garrison. The French were thus ready when PAVN soldiers began arriving in the area. On November 30, Giáp ordered his men to take the camp. PAVN soldiers duly attacked with their legendary courage, but they immediately ran into barbed wire, mines, and a hail of machine-gun fire. French bombers attacked with impunity. Giáp called off the attack within days.

Salan won at Nà Sản, but it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Giáp simply sent his divisions around the enemy camp and deeper into northern Indochina. In April 1953, in a spectacular move designed to disperse the French Expeditionary Corps even further and expand the PAVN’s hold over Laos, PAVN troops seized Sam Neua and Phong Saly provinces and moved into the hills overlooking the Lao capital of Luang Prabang. In the end, the Vietnamese went no further, content to remain in Sam Neua and install their Laotian allies there, the Pathet Lao. Meanwhile, in central Vietnam, Giáp strengthened the PAVN’s 325th Division and even began dispatching parts of it into the Central Highlands. This Vietnamese “go deep” strategy did not necessarily guarantee victory in pitched battle, but it scattered the adversary’s forces and obligated the French to keep playing defense on an expanding Indochinese battlefield.

The Vietnamese could count on sustained Chinese advice and support for the next round of fighting during 1953–4. Mao Zedong had already rushed a Military and Political Advisory Group to northern Vietnam in 1950 to help train the Vietnamese army and outfit it with modern weapons. With the fighting in Korea over in July 1953, the Chinese began shipping as many trucks, artillery guns, and anti-aircraft systems as they could spare to their Vietnamese counterparts while the Americans did the same for the French. Based on what they had learned from failures to take the well-defended enemy positions at Nà Sản, the Chinese and Vietnamese understood that to overrun any fortified camp of this kind in the future, they would have to do several things: (1) bring unprecedented amounts of carefully calibrated artillery fire to bear on enemy positions; (2) use that artillery to destroy any enemy airstrip, while anti-aircraft guns prevented French planes from parachuting in supplies and reinforcements; (3) organize a fleet of trucks to transport weapons, ammunition, food, and medicines from the Chinese border to PAVN depots as close to the battlefield as possible; (4) conscript tens of thousands of laborers to repair bombed-out bridges and roads and carry weapons and food to the battlefield when the trucks could not; and (5) ensure that enough rice, medicines, and medical personnel were on hand to keep the troops and their people-powered logistics up and running for what would likely be a drawn-out and bloody affair (Map 11.1). This is where things stood on the battlefield in May 1953, when General Henri Navarre took over from Salan in Indochina.

Map 11.1 Vietnamese supply routes through China and Laos.

Redrawn by Jeff Edwards. Reproduced with permission.

The Navarre Plan

Although Navarre did not know Indochina as intimately as Salan did, the new commander-in-chief in Indochina was serious about retaking the initiative from the enemy and helping his government end a war that had entered its eighth year.⁴ Navarre began with a fact-finding mission to Indochina. He consulted officers and officials across the federation. He read Salan’s reports while preparing his own plan for the French governments led by René Mayer and (after June 1953) by Joseph Laniel. Both premiers were ready to pursue a political solution to achieve an “honorable exit” from the Indochina imbroglio. To this end, both expected the army to strengthen the government’s negotiating hand when serious talks commenced. The government left it up to Navarre to devise a strategy they could approve.⁵

Their new general did not disappoint when, in mid-1953, he presented his project. The “Navarre plan” rested on four key assumptions. First, the new commander-in-chief realized that he would get few additional troops from Paris. The government needed them in the metropole as efforts got underway to allocate troops to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a possible European Defence Community, both designed to contain the Soviet threat to Western Europe. To compensate in Indochina, Navarre further expanded the army of the Associated State of Vietnam (known officially as the Vietnam National Army, or VNA) to 200,000 troops by early 1954. Second, with the help of this expanding Vietnamese force, the French aimed to pacify the northern delta once and for all. This would deprive the enemy of his biggest source of rice and recruits and consolidate the Associated State of Vietnam’s territorial control at the same time. Third, the French Expeditionary Corps would avoid major engagements in the Northern Highlands for a year, both to secure the northern delta and to regroup and rebuild. Only during the second year of the plan, starting in the fall of 1954, did Navarre intend to go after the PAVN in the Highlands.

Lastly, Navarre decided that the French Expeditionary Corps, working with the VNA, would launch a major offensive called Operation Atlante against enemy zones in lower-central Vietnam. With French forces and their allies maintaining firm control over most of the Mekong Delta and the rest of Cochinchina, Navarre hoped to seize these DRVN-ruled provinces (known as Zone V) and turn them over to the SVN. This would grow the Associated State’s territory from the Mekong Delta up to about the 16th parallel and assuage their leaders’ demands for an increased say in military and political affairs. By taking the enemy’s zone south of Huế, Navarre also hoped to confine Giáp’s remaining divisions to the north, and then to destroy them there in an offensive during the 1954–5 dry season.

That was the plan, and it had its merits. Strangely absent, however, was any clear explanation as to what Navarre would do if the Vietnamese continued to “go deep” into the Indochinese Highlands, into the French-administered Tai federation in Lai Châu province in the far northwest of Vietnam or even deeper into Laos. There was no reason to suppose that the Vietnamese would not do so, and Navarre knew it. When he asked the French government in late July 1953 if he had to defend Laos in the event of an attack, he did not receive a clear answer until months later. Yet this did not seem to bother Navarre as much at the time as he would later claim. Although the commanding general knew that any enemy attack on Laos or the Tai federation would potentially force him to take a stand in the Highlands, he preferred to wait and see which way his adversary would actually go before committing himself. In the meantime, he would focus on the two linchpins of his plan: pacifying the northern delta and taking Zone V in Operation Atlante.

The Highlands or the Delta?

To make their own military plans for 1953–4, Vietnamese and Chinese strategists naturally wanted to know what Navarre was secretly cooking up. They had learned a few details of his projects on July 30, 1953, when a Parisian newspaper leaked details of the general’s recent meeting with government officials in the French capital. Of particular interest was the revelation that Navarre, when pressed, had stated that he would have a hard time defending Laos in the event of an enemy attack. The Vietnamese were able to piece together more details over the next few weeks, thanks to their espionage services. Sometime in early September, the Chinese provided the Vietnamese with “the entire Navarre plan.” Upon hearing his military intelligence experts sum up Navarre’s strategy, Hồ Chí Minh replied: “The enemy is massing his forces to occupy and hold the Tonkin lowlands, so we will force him to disperse his forces out to other sectors so that we can annihilate them.”⁶

Despite this tough talk, the Vietnamese did not rush into the northwest. Nor did they abandon their interest in the delta. For now, the Vietnamese and their Chinese advisors “kept two irons in the fire,” as one eminent French historian of the French Indochina War put it.⁷ They began preparing to renew their northwest campaign, but they tested the waters in the delta before committing. It is possible that some in the DRVN saw the lowlands as a better alternative to the massive population mobilization that a return to the Highlands would require. Logistics had been a nightmare when the army went deep into the northwest a year earlier, at Nà Sản and in Laos. Whatever the reasons, between late September and early November 1953, Giáp activated his battalions inside the delta and his divisions circulating around it. In late October, he ordered the 320th Division to infiltrate the delta from the southern side. Apprised, Navarre was waiting for him and responded with massive firepower in what he called Opération Mouette. When the fighting ended on November 7, 1953, the 320th had lost more than 1,000 men. Seizing the delta by outright force was now out of the question.

By going deep into the Highlands again, the Vietnamese would do what they did best: disperse enemy forces as thinly as possible across Indochina’s mountainous spine while still harassing them inside the northern lowlands. But this time, when Navarre came out to stop Giáp by throwing up an entrenched camp as Salan had done at Nà Sản, the Vietnamese would be prepared to go the distance. They correctly assumed that the French general would have to take a stand to protect, if not the Tai federation, then Laos for sure. Despite what he would say later, Navarre was confident at the time that he could handle any problem that might come up in the Highlands. If the adversary moved on him in an unacceptable way in the northwest, then he would do as his predecessor had done a year earlier: fly in several thousand crack troops, create a heavily fortified camp, supply it through an air bridge, win, and then evacuate if necessary. The increasing size of the Associated State of Vietnam’s army would allow Navarre to maintain his pacification operations in the Red River Delta and execute Operation Atlante in south-central Vietnam at the same time.

That was the plan. Navarre’s critical error was underestimating his enemy’s ability to learn from prior mistakes. First, the French general did not think the Vietnamese capable of bringing in the heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns needed to destroy an entrenched camp’s artillery and airstrip. Second, Navarre did not believe the PAVN could organize the massive logistical system needed to supply a sustained, pitched battle in the Highlands. Third, he hoped that the Chinese would not increase the quantity and the quality of their military aid to the Vietnamese following the Armistice in Korea in July 1953. Last, the general also failed to consider how rapid diplomatic changes at the international level would require him to adjust on the battlefield.

The Changing International Context

Since Navarre was named commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Indochina in May 1953, several dramatic events had taken place at the international level. Two months earlier, the leader of the communist camp since the 1920s, Joseph Stalin, had died. Although Hồ Chí Minh was said to have shed tears on learning of this, not everyone in the communist bloc did. In fact, Stalin’s death opened the way for a new group of Soviet leaders in the Kremlin to emerge, ones who were increasingly keen on easing Cold War tensions in Europe (with Germany and in Berlin) and Asia (in Korea and Indochina). This would allow them to focus on the domestic economy and a more liberal form of communism to accompany it, a process better known as “de-Stalinization.” The Chinese, led by Mao, were also anxious to focus on domestic issues. Having applied full-scale land reform to all of the country since 1950, they wanted to turn to their new five-year economic plan as they raced down the road to collectivization. They brought their North Korean allies on board and, with Soviet support, signed an Armistice agreement ending the Korean War in July 1953.

The new American president entering the White House in early 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, also wanted to ease international tensions in order to focus on domestic issues. He agreed to the ceasefire in Korea that kept the peninsula separated into two states at the 38th parallel. But Eisenhower was determined to continue support for the French and the State of Vietnam (SVN) in Indochina. While the Chinese built up the PAVN in Vietnam to help protect their southern flank against a hostile American attack, Washington was supplying and arming the French Expeditionary Corps and the VNA in order to stop the communists from moving into Southeast Asia. Eisenhower, like Mao, was paying attention when PAVN troops invaded Laos in early 1953.

In the summer of 1953, the French government’s position on Indochina began to shift. As negotiations accelerated to end the war in Korea, Joseph Laniel announced in late June that, as part of his new government’s mandate, he would actively pursue a negotiated settlement to the Indochina conflict. Pushing him in that direction were the stepped-up efforts by leaders in the “Associated” States of Vietnam and Cambodia to obtain full independence and leave the French Union. In 1953, Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk and Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diệm went on “crusades” in France and North America to make their cases for independence and garner foreign support for it.⁸ Many in the French political class, long supportive of the war and of the Indochinese empire it was designed to preserve, began to wonder if it was really worth the continued effort if their own partners wanted out so badly. Support for the French Indochina War in the National Assembly was declining fast, too, and the French public, never really interested in the conflict anyways, increasingly favored getting out. In response, the French government got serious about negotiations for the first time since the outbreak of general hostilities in 1946.

Following the signing of the Korean Armistice, the various parties began to talk earnestly about finding a similar solution for ending the shooting in Indochina. The Soviets suggested to the French that a negotiated settlement to the Indochina conflict could be found. The French broached the subject with the Americans. The Chinese reacted favorably to a Soviet proposal in September 1953 to convene a meeting of the “Big Powers” (the Unted States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union plus China) to discuss major global disputes, including the Indochina conflict. Communist bloc exchanges with Vietnamese communists also yielded important changes in strategy. In a widely noted interview published in the Swedish paper, the Expressen, on November 26, 1953, Hồ Chí Minh indicated his party’s willingness to discuss a political solution to the war in Indochina.⁹ However, he and his Chinese advisors needed a major victory on the battlefield first to strengthen the DRVN position at the negotiating table. And of course, Navarre needed exactly the same thing for his government.

Looking for a Showdown

With these events as a backdrop, Vietnamese leaders in charge of the PAVN moved first: unable to take the delta, in early November they initiated their Highland Plan by moving on Lai Châu province.¹⁰ (The French had administered this colonial Tai “island” in the middle of DRVN territory since 1945.) Around November 10, the PAVN’s 316th Division left its base west of the Red River Delta to head northwest to rendezvous with the 308th on its way there, too. The French knew that their small contingent of mainly special-forces teams in Lai Châu could not protect the Tai federation against a PAVN attack. Moreover, Lai Châu was too close to China for comfort and too hard to supply by air. This is why Salan had earlier proposed the transfer of the Tai capital to Điện Biên Phủ. Navarre now concurred that Điện Biên Phủ was the best choice for defending Laos. The Mường Thanh valley in which Điện Biên Phủ sat was the largest in the northwest region. It had the required airstrip and would be easier to supply by air than Nà Sản or Lai Châu.

Điện Biên Phủ now acquired enormous importance for both sides. When the first PAVN regiments began moving toward Lai Châu in mid-November, Navarre issued orders to prepare for the airborne seizure of Điện Biên Phủ. Operation Castor was launched on November 20, 1953, with a massive deployment of airborne troops. Within days, they easily dislodged the small PAVN presence in the valley, quickly repaired the airstrip, and began turning Điện Biên Phủ into another entrenched camp, bigger and better than Nà Sản. Planes brought in artillery, machine guns, ammunition, and tanks, while soldiers and laborers felled trees, dug trenches, laid minefields, and unfurled tons of barbed wire. By the end of the year, the valley was home to 12,000 French Union troops and a handful of Tai villages.

When the Vietnamese learned that Navarre was moving on Điện Biên Phủ, Giáp immediately ordered his intelligence service to find out what was going on. Two questions were particularly important: Is the enemy going to withdraw? And how are they deployed? Scouts were dispatched to the valley in search of answers. Signals teams focused on intercepting enemy radio communications to glean details of troop positions and strength. The cartography service scrambled to provide the General Staff with an accurate map of Điện Biên Phủ. Seasoned communist interrogators began interviewing prisoners of war who knew the area. Meanwhile, Giáp ordered the 316th Division to change course and head for the valley. Similar orders went out to the 308th, the 312th, and the 351st. By mid-December, more than half of the PAVN was on its way to Điện Biên Phủ.

DRVN leaders and their Chinese advisors believed that Điện Biên Phủ might be the showdown they were anticipating. But they were not yet sure. Preparations began in earnest despite uncertainty about whether the French would stay put. Giáp hoped they would. Supplying this valley over a sustained period of time would be easier than in Nà Sản or areas further west. The DRVN controlled Hòa Bình, Nghĩa Lộ, and Tuần Giáo (a hub located east of Điện Biên Phủ). If they planned and executed it carefully, the Vietnamese were confident they could supply troops, weapons, and food to Điện Biên Phủ from southern China’s Yunnan province; from the western side of the DRVN’s Việt Bắc zone connected to the Chinese border at Cao Bằng; and from zones III and IV south of Hanoi. Thanks to their first thrust into the northwest in 1952, the Vietnamese were already hard at work building, repairing, and widening roads to move Chinese-supplied trucks to Cò Nòi via Route 13 and on to Tuần Giáo, thanks to Route 41. From there, thousands of porters pushing pack-bikes could transport weapons and food along 50 miles (80 kilometers) of trails leading to Điện Biên Phủ.

Navarre remained supremely confident that he could defeat the Vietnamese in the Highlands without sacrificing his control of the delta or his upcoming Atlante offensive on Zone V. On December 3, he informed the government that he would accept the battle for the northwest at Điện Biên Phủ. The fact that French leaders informed him that he would receive no more troops did nothing to change his mind. On December 6, Navarre gave the order to evacuate Lai Châu in Operation Pollux. If Giáp attacked him at Điện Biên Phủ, he reasoned, his forces would crush the PAVN once and for all. The French slang expression for that action, casser du Viet, could be heard on the lips of officers and soldiers alike as they readied for the clash. René Cogny, second to Navarre and the head of the army in northern Vietnam, dared Giáp to attack: “I want a clash at Điện Biên Phủ. I’ll do everything possible to make him eat dirt and forget about wanting to try his hand at grand strategy.” It is true that Navarre could have evacuated Điện Biên Phủ by air, even in late December; but he did not do so for one very simple reason: he did not want to. He wanted the fight.¹¹

So did the Vietnamese. By the end of December, Giáp’s divisions had surrounded the valley from all sides and had begun installing carefully camouflaged artillery and anti-aircraft guns in the hills. The Vietnamese were confident that if they could line everything up correctly, this was a battle they could win before negotiations began in Europe. “Navarre had spread out his fingers,” the deputy director of military intelligence at the time recalled. The Vietnamese leadership had enough information, he continued, “to make the decision to destroy the Điện Biên Phủ fortified defensive complex, turning this into the key battle of our entire 1953–1954 Winter–Spring plan. Điện Biên Phủ became a battle that neither the enemy nor our side had originally anticipated in our plans … We were concerned that the enemy would retreat and abandon the area, while the enemy was afraid that we would not dare to attack. At this point the battle of wits entered the decisive phase.”¹² It is hard to put it any better.

No one on the Vietnamese side thought this would be an easy victory, though. Indeed, Giáp had to be very careful not to attack prematurely and lose his best divisions in a hail of enemy artillery fire. Giáp’s caution became evident in January 1954, when he called off the first scheduled attack on the enemy camp. Initially, the PAVN and their Chinese advisors had planned to hit the French camp hard and fast (“Attack swiftly to win swiftly” was the slogan). The goal was to improve the government’s negotiating position with a quick victory as diplomats were about to take up the Indochina question for the first time in a Great Powers meeting scheduled for January 25 in Berlin. Although Giáp’s troops were as keen on a fight as Navarre’s were, the Vietnamese general delayed the order when some of his artillery failed to arrive on time and the enemy’s perimeter turned out to be much stronger than initially thought.

The good news for Giáp was that Navarre launched Operation Atlante in lower-central Vietnam at the same time. To disperse Navarre’s forces even further and give his own men time to put more artillery into place around Điện Biên Phủ, Giáp ordered his troops in Zone V to attack into the Central Highlands. He even instructed the 308th Division to briefly leave Điện Biên Phủ and move into northern Laos. Although diversionary, this move served to bring back rice, secure more territories for the Pathet Lao, and make a mockery of the French claim that the engagement at Điện Biên Phủ would stop the PAVN from threatening Laos. In mid-February, the 308th returned to Điện Biên Phủ and joined a total force of 51,000 PAVN regulars now waiting in the hills to attack the 12,000 French Union troops in the garrison. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese infiltrated parts of the 320th Division back into the Tonkin Delta – just as Giáp had done to Salan when the latter had committed to Hòa Bình and Nà Sản during 1951–2. PAVN “pacification” operations in the Red River Delta resumed like clockwork.

This is where Navarre committed the error that would cost him the battle. He knew in early January that the Vietnamese were successfully bringing in artillery. He was sure that Giáp was going to throw everything he had at him at Điện Biên Phủ – not in the delta, not in Laos, and certainly not in Zone V or the nearby Central Highlands. The French general also knew that there was a linkage between negotiations and the battlefield, which could make Điện Biên Phủ the decisive battle of the war. And yet he refused to cancel Operation Atlante to free up additional troops to help defend Điện Biên Phủ. By persisting with his attack on lower-central Vietnam, Navarre missed a chance to provide the reinforcements that might have tipped the coming battle in France’s favor.

The Battle

The battle of Điện Biên Phủ began on March 13, 1954, with a barrage of PAVN artillery fire.¹³ Soon thereafter, thousands of PAVN troops stormed down from the hills to attack the French fortress below. Soldiers rushed the two most vulnerable French positions on the northern side of the camp, Gabrielle and Béatrice, and controlled them within a few days. On the French side, five remaining strong points protected the command center in the heart of the valley. The commanding officer was General Christian de Castries. He relied on the two officers, colonels Pierre Langlais and Marcel Bigeard, to protect the perimeter and to counterattack. They and their men fought with uncommon valor. But they were powerless to prevent Giáp from achieving what he had failed to do at Nà Sản: destroy the runway and weaken the French air bridge.

On the eve of the battle, the Frenchman in charge of the camp’s artillery, Captain Piroth, had bragged to Navarre that “no Viet Minh cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery.” He should have held his tongue because, within a few hours of the start of the battle, it was obvious that the French had badly misjudged the PAVN’s ability to deliver concentrated artillery fire with deadly accuracy. Four days later, the Vietnamese artillery had rendered the airstrip largely unusable. As French bombers scoured the hills in search of the enemy’s guns, Piroth killed himself rather than carry on.

None of this meant that the French were suddenly destined to lose the battle, but it did mean that Điện Biên Phủ would immediately become the site of a siege battle without precedent in any war of decolonization in the twentieth century. For the time being, the troops in the valley could hold on, thanks to the supplies and soldiers that continued to arrive by parachute. However, unlike at Nà Sản, Giáp had anti-aircraft guns hidden in the hills above Điện Biên Phủ. They were soon sending flak into the sky, forcing enemy planes to fly as high above them as 6,500 feet (2,000 meters). This, coupled with increasingly bad weather as the rainy season arrived, made it increasingly difficult for French pilots to resupply the besieged camp by mid-April.

On the ground, the experience of siege warfare was brutal and exhausting for all involved. With both sides in possession of artillery and machine guns, soldiers immediately dug into the ground as exploding shells churned the dirt into piles of rubble and created a crater-like landscape. Having disrupted the French air bridge in the first attack, Võ Nguyên Giáp spent the second half of March spinning a web of trenches around the heavily armed cluster of positions protecting the shrinking enemy fortress. Soldiers and laborers worked day and night with their pickaxes and shovels. With their trenches finally in place, the PAVN launched its second assault on March 30. After making considerable headway over the first two days, a ferocious counterattack led by Langlais and Bigeard pushed the attackers back, with high casualties on both sides. The French fortress held. On April 6, Giáp called off the second attack and requested new recruits. Meanwhile, the French Air Force parachuted in the last troops Navarre could spare. (He still refused to cancel Atlante.) In all, 16,000 French Union troops fought at Điện Biên Phủ.

The start of the third Vietnamese attack on April 26 coincided with the opening of the Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina. Điện Biên Phủ had to fall, and fast, in order to strengthen the communist negotiating position. On May 1, thousands of PAVN troops went over the top again as Giáp unleashed his artillery on the camp. Thanks to the Chinese, the Vietnamese also deployed Soviet Katyusha truck-mounted rocket launchers. They now concentrated these on the enemy positions, with deadly effects. The Katyushas, which the Soviets had first used against the Nazis, were also known as “Stalin’s organs” because of the screeching sound the shells made as they raced through the air. The rockets rained down during the last desperate days of fighting as Giáp’s men fought their way, meter by meter, trench by trench, until the last enemy position surrendered on the afternoon of May 7, 1954. The victorious troops raised the DRVN flag over de Castries’ bunker that day, marking an epic victory of the colonized over the colonizer in set-piece battle. To Fanon’s disappointment, there would be no replication of Điện Biên Phủ in any other war of decolonization in the twentieth century.¹⁴

The valley in the aftermath of the battle was a scene reminiscent of Verdun or battles coming out of World War II. Artillery explosions had obliterated the Tai villages that had stood for generations and turned the surrounding green rice fields into ugly craters and mounds of rubble. Although PAVN troops suffered many casualties storming the heavily defended fortress, the French endured the terror delivered by the enemy’s artillery, machine guns, and rockets. As one of the survivors in the French camp later recalled: “Shells rained down on us without stopping like a hailstorm on a fall evening. Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying under them men and weapons.”¹⁵ On top of it all, heavy and seemingly incessant rain, which had started in April, filled the trenches with knee-deep mud, breeding disease and swarms of yellow flies looking for hosts. They found them among the bodies strewn across this lunar landscape.

Hardest to repair was the violence this type of warfare inflicted on the surviving soldiers. Artillery fire accounted for 86 percent of the wounds inflicted on Vietnamese bodies at Điện Biên Phủ. Of those suffering severe head and back injuries, hundreds of them would never walk again – disabled, paralyzed, or worse. Similarly, 75 percent of all French Union troop losses were the result of artillery fire.¹⁶ This was clearly not “guerrilla warfare.” One veteran recalled the hell he had witnessed at Điện Biên Phủ as a medic:

I was responsible for the transport teams evacuating the dead and wounded for our unit, A1. I was in a shelter some 500 meters from the hill [which was under attack]. I could see the bodies of our dead strung all over the ground, at the mercy of all kinds of enemy projectiles. I couldn’t hold back my tears at the scene of such violence, at the brutality of the battlefield. The evacuation became increasingly difficult because we had a limited number of porters. I had one company of porters. We waited for the rare moments of calm when we could recover our comrades on the hill. I lived among the dead. Many had to wait for days until we could bring them to the lines at the rear; often, their bodies were no longer intact. Many couldn’t be identified, for we hadn’t even had the time to take down the name, age, or origin of these new recruits. There are others who stayed on this hill forever, as we never succeeded in recovering their bodies.¹⁷

Not everyone could take it. Many could not overcome all the physical and psychological trauma they had encountered in a few crowded hours. Others were exhausted from the endless digging to extend the trenches forward. But the General Staff needed the lightly wounded back in action as quickly as possible. Even some of the communist political cadres attached to combat units faltered. Apparently, the French (re)capture of the fortified position they called Eliane on April 11 sapped confidence along the PAVN lines. On April 29, as the third attack got underway, Giáp sent strict orders to his political officers in which he criticized creeping defeatism among the troops, cadres, and officer corps:

All the necessary conditions are there for us to win. However, there is still one great obstacle, one extremely dangerous obstacle blocking our ability to carry out that task. That hindrance is rightist negative thinking that has seriously and insidiously infested the ranks of our cadres and committees within the party. If we do not wipe out this rightist negative thinking, then it will be extremely difficult for us to carry out our glorious victory.¹⁸

“Rightist deviationism” was communist doublespeak for troubling cases of insubordination, cowardice, fear of death and injury, exhaustion, and lack of morale. To fix these problems, the party center organized three days of intensive study sessions, propaganda drives, and rectification campaigns to raise morale, assert party control, and, in so doing, return as many men to their combat positions as possible. The French camp had to fall, period.

Beyond the Valley

There was more to this epic battle than what happened in the valley.¹⁹ For the soldiers, the fighting may have started on March 13, but for hundreds of thousands of peasant conscripts, the hardship and hard work began months earlier. From November 1953 onward, the communists mobilized tens of thousands of people to transport food, salt, medicines, ammunition, and weapons. The Communist Party’s General Supply Office administered human and mechanical logistics under the leadership of Trần Đӑng Ninh. Despite the obstacles, this man of real organizational talents ensured that food, weapons, and medicines got to the front lines. Thanks to the general mobilization law of 1950, Ninh conscripted men and women into massive supply groups, organized them into work teams, and confiscated rice when he had to, as well as boats, bikes, cars, and packhorses. The supply section also had a fleet of Molotova and GMC trucks at its disposal, around six hundred in all. While manpower remained important, mechanized logistics now transported most of the heavy weapons from China to areas near Điện Biên Phủ. A telephone and radio network coordinated this work. Without this mechanization of the rear lines and wiring of the front, there would have been no PAVN victory at Điện Biên Phủ.

However, the labor of the conscripts was equally indispensable. Starting in November 1953, work teams began repairing and widening roads running to Điện Biên Phủ through the Tuần Giáo interchange: from southern China’s Yunnan province via Lai Châu, from zones III and IV south of Hanoi, and from China’s Guangxi province by way of Cao Bằng and Thái Nguyên. Despite French bombing, the Vietnamese relied heavily on roads 13 and 41 to ship supplies to Điện Biên Phủ. Each time the French destroyed a bridge or bombed out the road, thousands of workers arrived on the scene with their shovels, pickaxes, and baskets to repair them or build a new segment to keep the trucks moving and the supplies flowing. Those six hundred transport trucks supplied ammunition and heavy weapons. French bombers destroyed thirty-two of them, while forty-three overturned on dangerous roads. When artillery arrived at the Tuần Giáo hub, technicians there dismantled them into smaller pieces that porters, oxen, and horses lugged into the hills overlooking Điện Biên Phủ. There, another group of specialists in carefully hidden places were tasked with putting the guns back together. French bombers circled constantly above, looking for targets. Human porters and animals also brought in rice, medicines, and supplies from nearby areas and from zones III and IV south of Hanoi. In all, 261,453 people served as human transporters. Of the 21,000 pack-bikes pushed by people carrying rice and medicines, more than half came from Zone IV. Twelve thousand bamboo rafts and five hundred horses also contributed to this logistical victory.

Food was as important as artillery. The communists might have initiated land reform in 1953 to better mobilize the peasantry for war, but they knew that they would not improve agricultural production in time for their operations at Điện Biên Phủ. Trần Đӑng Ninh and his supply team had to provide enough rice, meat, and salt to feed the four divisions setting up camp around Điện Biên Phủ in December 1953. The quarter of a million peasants they had conscripted had to eat, too, as well as the horses and oxen. At the outset, Ninh’s team worked on the assumption that their army would attack the enemy in January 1954 and win quickly. However, the party’s decision not to attack in January and to implement a siege sowed panic as the supply section’s officials scrambled to find the additional rice to feed so many people during what ended up being a military operation of six months (from late November 1953 to early May 1954). Finding the 6,000 tons of rice needed for the January attack had been hard enough; now they would need to double that, if not more. Once again, the communists had no choice but to lean even harder on the peasants, promising them that they would eventually get land, but requisitioning their rice and animals by force if necessary.

It is hard to convey how desperate the situation truly was on the food front. The People’s Army had already depleted rice reserves in the northwest during its operations in the Highlands in 1952–3, triggering famine in large parts of the Tai country where Điện Biên Phủ was nestled. Many areas in the northwest were still experiencing famine. The party ordered each division to plant its own vegetables and raise its own animals. The government provided commanders with money to buy rice and animals whenever they could instead of taking them by force. In the end, the supply section obtained 25,000 tons of rice and almost 2,000 tons of meat through force, persuasion, or purchase. Most of this went to the front lines. The rest fed the supply teams and the civil servants and cadres involved in this massive operation.

The rear lines also extended northward into Laos and China. Even before Giáp had cancelled the January attack, Trần Đӑng Ninh had dispatched his deputy to southern China in search of rice and salt. Between February and April 1954, the Chinese authorities in Yunnan province provided 15 tons of salt and 1,870 tons of rice, as well as several thousand tons of grain for the 500 horses. The Chinese also provided 6,000 rafts that transported rice, salt, and animals down the Jin Shui River to Lai Châu province’s Black River. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese worked with their Laotian allies in the rice-rich areas of Sam Neua and Phong Saly to procure 1,700 tons of rice and other supplies.²⁰

As the fighting unfolded in the valley, French bombers killed an untold number of civilians in work and supply teams in the surrounding hills. Hubs such as Cò Nòi and Tuần Giáo came under intensive bombing. In one French raid at “KM13,” on the road running from Tuần Giáo to the battlefield, ninety porters died in a matter of minutes. Despite attempts to hammer them into line through heavy doses of propaganda, the communists had to accept the desertion of dozens of civilian teams. These people were simply terrified of dying in a hail of fire. At least half the porters and work teams were made up of women. French bombers inflicted death and injury regardless of gender.

Glorious though the victory was, Điện Biên Phủ came at a great cost for the Vietnamese. The official number of Vietnamese military casualties for the battle in the valley is 13,930, with 4,020 of that number listed as killed or missing in action. But French military intelligence estimated that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam lost around 20,000 combatants. The latter number is closer to the truth. None of the statistics, however, count the thousands of porters killed or missing in action. During the Điện Biên Phủ campaign (November 1953–July 1954), one can safely assume that the DRVN lost 25,000 souls in all, men and women, civilians and combatants involved in the endgame of 1953–4.

Conclusion

Although the price of victory was high, the epic nature of the military achievement of the PAVN at Điện Biện Phủ was indisputable. But what, exactly, had the Vietnamese accomplished by winning the battle? Had they in fact secured the decolonization of Vietnam, as Fanon believed? By signing the ceasefire with the French at Geneva on July 21, 1954, Hồ Chí Minh and his party accepted the provisional division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Although the Soviets and Chinese pressured the Vietnamese to accept the compromise terms on offer at Geneva, DRVN leaders had their own reasons to strike a deal. For one, Hồ Chí Minh and his party conceded in internal debates in July that although they might have won an historic battle over the colonizer at Điện Biên Phủ, they had not yet attained the military capabilities needed to defeat the French Army in all of Indochina. Second, the Vietnamese and their communist backers in Beijing and Moscow feared that the Americans would intervene militarily if they did not make peace at Geneva. In addition, Hồ Chí Minh and his entourage recognized that the protracted war they had been fighting since 1945, and especially the conventional one they had added to it in 1950, had taken a terrible toll on their people, with Điện Biên Phủ as the most painful chapter in that story. By going for broke in this Highland showdown, the Vietnamese had pushed their state, its army, and the population to the breaking point. Their backs against the wall, the Vietnamese people could not give any more, as the French colonialists continued to bomb and the communists asked for ever greater amounts of manpower and food. Even the promise of land was not enough. If the war continued, Hồ Chí Minh and the DRVN risked driving their people into the ground and pulling down the communist temple on their heads before it had even been completed.

In the end, Hồ Chí Minh and his party opted to roll the political dice at Geneva. They signed the ceasefire agreement with the French on July 21, 1954, hoping that a separate declaration (duly noted but never signed by the Americans or the leaders of the State of Vietnam) to hold elections two years later would allow them to recover the rest of Vietnam. If, however, a political solution failed, the Vietnamese reserved the right to resume the war where they had left off in July 1954. As it happened, their last engagement had taken place not at Điện Biên Phủ in the north, but in the Central Highlands, where the 325th PAVN division had last struck the French in the battle of Mang Yang pass near Pleiku. This was the same area where the PAVN would engage the US Army’s 1st Calvary division in the battle of Ia Drang of November 1965, the first major battle between American and PAVN regular ground forces. As momentous and consequential as the battle of Điện Biên Phủ had been, it had not settled the unresolved disputes that lay at the heart of the conflict. As a result, the Indochinese Highlands would once again become the scene of massive and bloody clashes between conventional armies wielding the most modern armaments available.