A mere bluff? Possibly, but the Truman team was not willing to call it. In March, Secretary of State Acheson, with customary candor, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "We do not want to get into a position where the French say, 'You take over; we aren't able to go ahead with this.' We want the French to stay there.... The French have got to carry [the burden] in Indochina, and we are willing to help, but not to substitute for them." Acheson cautioned the lawmakers that "the thing we want to be careful about is that we do not press the French to the point where they say, 'All right, take over the damned country. We don't want it,' and put their soldiers on ships and send them back to France."30

Acheson had more on his mind than Indochina in making these remarks. He also sought to avoid destabilizing the Paris government as it was preparing to make concessions to the administration over allied policy toward Germany. It all combined to limit Washington's leverage over France, and it frustrated the secretary. On May 1, President Truman formally approved an aid program of $23.3 million for the Indochinese states. He did so on Acheson's recommendation, yet the secretary was frustrated, telling associates that the French seemed "paralyzed, in a state of moving neither forward nor backward." The only thing to do was to press on, in the hope that Carpentier and his Expeditionary Corps could turn things around and bring Ho Chi Minh to his knees. A few weeks later Dean Rusk, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, summarized the policy in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The United States must support France in Indochina, he said, because without the French presence, the Communists would win. How long would the disorder last? a senator asked. Rusk replied that he did not know but added that he personally was not pessimistic. Asia, he said, was waiting to see who won.31

A TECHNICIAN APPLIES A QUICK PAINT JOB TO A U.S.-SUPPLIED C-119 TRANSPORT PLANE AT HAIPHONG AIR BASE, CHANGING THE WHITE STAR OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE INTO THE FRENCH TRICOLOR. (photo credit 9.1)

Rusk may not have been pessimistic, but others in Washington were. As had been the case ever since Franklin Roosevelt vowed during the Second World War to keep the French from returning to Indochina, there were those who envisioned disaster ahead should America join the war against Ho. Some were in the State Department-for example, Charlton Ogburn, head of the Southeast Asia division, who doubted that the introduction of U.S. military aid would make any real difference to what was a futile colonial effort-and some were outside the executive branch. Some were not in government at all. Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist in the land, had tried some weeks earlier, in early April, to nudge the administration away from doing what in fact it seemed about to do. "We shall not be able to reverse our whole position in Asia and to support a colonial war against national independence," he wrote. "That would shatter our prestige in the rest of Asia. And even if we were willing to do that, there is no way that this Congress would or could promise enough money and enough military aid to enable the French army to plan a campaign of pacification which would last for many years."32

One can imagine Acheson nodding solemnly as he read Lippmann's words; he very likely disagreed with none of them. Yet he gambled that the United States would be able to keep that prestige-by continuing to pressure Paris to grant more rights and freedoms to the Associated States-even as she threw her lot behind France's four-year-old war.

A new day had dawned. At the time Acheson announced the recognition of Bao Dai, there were perhaps a dozen Americans living in Saigon, and not all that many more elsewhere in Vietnam. The French had resisted U.S. business ventures, and the majority of Americans in Indochina were missionaries, numbering perhaps 120, mostly from the Christian and Missionary Alliance along with a small contingent of Seventh-Day Adventists. Now, though, the U.S. presence grew markedly, as the Truman administration began to assemble what journalist Seymour Topping, who arrived in Saigon in February to take up his post as Associated Press bureau chief and thus saw it firsthand, called "the usual panoply of intervention": large diplomatic and information staffs as well as economic and military aid missions. American warships called at the city's port as "a sign of friendship for Vietnam."33

The liberal New Republic summarized the new reality: "Southeast Asia is the center of the cold war. Indo-China is the center of Southeast Asia. America is late with a program to save Indo-China. But we are on our way."34

V

AT VIET MINH HEADQUARTERS, LEADERS UNDERSTOOD THAT THEY now faced the very real prospect of a major increase in U.S. support for the French war effort. The possibility worried them, especially as the balance between the two sides in the war remained so delicate. But most senior officials also felt certain that they had achieved a monumental victory. They had won formal recognition from the world's two leading socialist states and the promise of significant assistance from one of them. Vietnam was back on the map of nations and part of the internationalist Communist world now stretching, in ICP general secretary Truong Chinh's words, from the Elbe to the Mekong. The humiliation of the colonial past seemed as if it could finally be swept away. In early February 1950, while Ho was still away, the party resolved that it would follow Mao Zedong's lead and lean to the Soviet-led Communist side in the Cold War. Fighting a war of national liberation would not be enough, Truong Chinh told his colleagues; Vietnam must do her part in the internationalist struggle against the imperialist bloc led by the United States:

When it comes to the struggle of the democratic camp against the imperialists, Indochina is an outpost, a fortress on the antiimperialist defense perimeter in Southeast Asia.... In Indochina, not only are the interests of our people and the French colonialists in conflict, but in reality the interests of the two camps, the imperialist and democratic ones, are also in conflict at the world level. The Indochina problem has become an entirely international problem.35

The new Sino-Vietnamese arrangement soon had tangible effects. In short order, Beijing created a Chinese Military Advisory Group (CMAG) and sent senior PLA officers south to assist in the training of Viet Minh units and plot strategy. The Fourth Field Army of the PLA set up a military school for the Vietnamese. Sizable amounts of Chinese military and nonmilitary equipment followed, though it paled next to what the Americans were providing the French. The outbreak of the Korean War in late June, and the announcement by the United States that she would intervene militarily on behalf of South Korea, only strengthened these Sino-Vietnamese ties. With the arrival of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits, Beijing leaders felt certain that Washington was embarked on a course of aggression aimed at China, North Korea, and Vietnam. In July, the CMAG, led by General Wei Guoqing, was formally established, its seventy-nine officers instructed that they had a "glorious internationalist duty" to carry out in Vietnam. By August, group members were in place in Vietnam.36

French installations in northern Tonkin were now extremely vulnerable. Long before August 1950, in fact already in early 1949, as PLA units became more active along the border and on a few occasions joined in operations with Viet Minh forces, French commanders fretted about the extension of Mao's power into South China. In May 1949, Paris sent the ominously named General Georges Revers (Revers means "setback" or "reverse" in French), chief of the general staff, to Vietnam to examine the military situation and make his recommendation in the light of the probability of a Communist win in China. The first months of the year had not produced a change in the overall nature of the war; it remained a stalemate, which as before was to the disadvantage of the French. The Viet Minh did not have the capacity to wage major attacks on the deltas, but they continued to infiltrate behind the lines, and to reduce the number of villages under Bao Dai's administration. In Tonkin, the all-important line of communication between Hanoi and Haiphong was still subject to frequent guerrilla attacks, and meanwhile the French had too few troops to consolidate gains made during operations. The same was true in Annam. In Cochin China, the French efforts at pacification achieved some successes, but the Viet Minh remained strongly rooted in the Plain of Reeds and in the Ca Mau peninsula. In a measure of that strength, the Viet Minh under commanding general Nguyen Binh were able to mount numerous large operations, involving hundreds of troops, in and around the Mekong Delta in the latter part of 1949; the French were obliged to send major reinforcements and were able to prevail only at considerable cost.37

A Viet Minh attack could come anywhere. Edmund Gullion of the U.S. embassy recalled witnessing the assassination of the head of the French Surete in late April 1950:

It was in the morning but I hadn't come from my flat, and I just walked by the square and I saw Bazin [the Surete chief] just about to get in his car, and he was carrying this leather folder. And in front of him was another parked car with some Vietnamese in it. As he started to get into it, this other Vietnamese jumped out of the parked car right in front of him, holding an enormous revolver in both hands, the way they do in American movies now, two-handed, and pumped shots into his belly. I was right across the street from him, a narrow street, and I ducked behind a barber's chair [in the open]. The assassin got in the car and drove away. The irony of it was that they were expecting some kind of ceremony and there was a French squad rehearsing for it, and I remember seeing this fellow go right past them-and he was never found.

Just prior to his death, Bazin had told a French reporter: "Every day the Viet Minh radio says, 'Bazin, you are going to die.' " He said he hoped he would get them before they got him.38

More and more, the French High Command found itself committing valuable manpower to the basic task of keeping a minimum number of road and river axes of communications open, if only during daylight hours. It established a chain of military posts along specified routes, whose task was to maintain visual surveillance over key sections and extend security over more distant sections by calling in mortar and artillery fire. Watchtowers began dotting the landscape in Cochin China in 1948 and were extended to central Vietnam the following year; generally, these fieldworks were within sight of one another, at an interval of approximately one kilometer, and were manned by five or six men, usually auxiliaries. The system achieved some success but tied down a lot of troops in static positions, and the posts often proved vulnerable to nighttime Viet Minh attacks.

Revers in his report catalogued many of these problems and drew sobering conclusions. No military solution favoring France was possible, he argued, not in the long run. All actions must proceed from this basis, and ultimately Paris leaders would need to seek a "peace of the brave" with Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Bao Dai was a poor leader whose government had minimal support, and France did not have enough manpower in Indochina to impose her will on the population. Since the Viet Minh were bound, sooner or later, to gain significant assistance from the Chinese Communists, France could not realistically hope to hold the whole of Tonkin (at least not without the introduction of American ground forces); instead, she should withdraw from all of Tonkin except a rough quadrilateral around the Red River Delta anchored on Haiphong, Hoa Binh, Viet Tri, Thai Nguyen, and Mong Cai. The fortresses on the Chinese frontier along Route Coloniale 4, already suffering from the relentless attacks on the convoys, would become indefensible if the PLA reached the border and decided to aid the Viet Minh. They were, moreover, strategically unimportant and were tying down troops badly needed in the Red River Delta.39

The Revers report was top secret and was made for the private information of senior French policy makers. It thus caused an uproar when excerpts from it were broadcast on Viet Minh radio and when, following a fight between a French soldier and a Vietnamese student on a Paris bus, a copy of the report was discovered in the latter's briefcase. The student, Do Dai Phuoc, led French counterespionage agents to another Vietnamese student's apartment, where they found seventy-two additional copies. Subsequent investigation revealed that the document had circulated widely within the French capital's large Vietnamese community. A major political scandal-"The Generals' Affair"-erupted, preoccupying the chattering classes for months and delaying a final decision on Revers's call for an evacuation of the northern forts.40 The months went by. In late 1949, Giap stepped up pressure on the convoys along the RC4, and the consolidation of PLA control in South China increased his determination to subject the French installations to a major assault. He grasped what the new French commander in chief, Marcel Carpentier-a wunderkind who had gone from major in 1940 to lieutenant general in 1946, but who knew little about Indochina-also grasped: that these posts were forlorn islands in a Viet Minh sea.

CHAPTER 10

ATTACK ON THE RC4

AT 6:45 IN THE MORNING OF MAY 25, 1950, A VIOLENT FUSILLADE suddenly rained down on the small French garrison (eight hundred men, mostly Moroccan) at Dong Khe, a post situated between Cao Bang and That Khe along the RC4. The post was a bastion in the French military system where convoys could stop to rest in the shelter of the French flag. Giap's aim: to take and hold Dong Khe, thereby isolating Cao Bang from its links with That Khe. In the days prior, four Viet Minh infantry battalions succeeded in hoisting five 75mm cannons onto the heights surrounding the town without being detected by the garrison, and then proceeded to unleash barrage after barrage on the post. It was a preview of the technique they would use at Dien Bien Phu. For forty-eight hours the shelling continued, whereupon the Viet Minh overran Dong Khe in a human-wave assault.

The French responded quickly, dispatching thirty-four aircraft to drop a battalion of paratroops upon the town. They caught the Viet Minh units completely off guard and after intense fighting forced them to flee for the jungle. Giap had reinforcements he could have called in, but the monsoon was fast approaching, and he chose to call it a day. The French congratulated themselves on their quick deployment of the paratroops rather than face the deeper truth of their extreme vulnerability in the Viet Bac. They chose not to take this last great chance to evacuate the frontier posts while time remained.1

Giap, having seen what his forces could do in a major engagement, believed the time had come to shift to the strategic offensive. With China as a secure rear base, a sanctuary where his troops could be trained, reorganized, and equipped for more conventional operations, he could prepare to strike the first hammer blow against the French Union. By the late spring, the Viet Minh had grown to a force of about a quarter of a million troops, organized into three components: a regular army (chu luc), regional units, and guerrilla-militia forces. The regular forces, with an estimated strength of 120,000, Giap organized into six divisions, on European lines-the 304th, 308th, 312th, 316th, 320th, and 325th; five were rooted in Tonkin, and the sixth (the 325th) was based in central Vietnam. Each had three infantry regiments, an artillery battalion, and an antiaircraft battalion, as well as staff and support elements. The task of these regular forces was to conduct a war of maneuver, aimed at drawing French units into combat in locales and under conditions in which French advantages in firepower and air support would be neutralized. The isolated French garrison in an outlying area was thus always a tempting target, and if the attack could occur during the crachin, or misty season in Tonkin, when the low cloud cover inhibited French aerial bombardment and resupply, so much the better.2

To keep these new formations fighting in the field required complex logistical planning. For example, senior Viet Minh planners determined that maintaining an infantry division in action away from its base required the use of roughly fifty thousand local peasants as porters, each carrying about forty-five pounds in supplies. These numbers could be reduced when bicycles were available-when pushed along roads and tracks by the rider, these specially outfitted vehicles could carry up to two hundred pounds during the dry season-but even then the figure was huge. The porter had to carry his own rations with him, which usually took the form of rice in a cloth bandolier. As a general rule, a porter was not to be away from home for more than two weeks, meaning that he would spend "seven carrying days" with the army unit and then could commence the return journey to his village. Fresh porters would be conscripted as the division continued its journey.3

The regional and guerrilla-militia forces had vital tasks of their own, mostly related to defensive and security matters but also including small-scale guerrilla operations against static enemy positions. Giap's early writings stress the importance of these roles. Each province and district had responsibility for raising and equipping its own units of regional troops, who on occasion served as a general reserve for the regular army. At the province level, battalions sometimes comprised several rifle companies and a support company equipped with light machine guns and mortars. Ammunition was often in short supply, but these battalions could take on French units effectively for brief periods of time. Often they also had the task of training the guerrilla-militia forces, who tended to be unarmed or lightly armed and were usually part-timers. Their chief duties included intelligence gathering, transport, and sabotage. A better-armed element of the guerrilla-militia forces, so-called elite irregulars, was equipped with grenades, rifles, and mines, and sometimes even a few automatic weapons. It frequently joined with the regional forces in local operations.

VIET MINH SOLDIERS CROSS A BAMBOO PONTOON BRIDGE IN BAC KAN PROVINCE IN NORTHERN VIETNAM, IN 1950. THIS CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE WOULD BE USED FREQUENTLY IN THE WAR AND AGAIN LATER IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. (photo credit 10.1)

Women took on key roles in the war effort. Though barred from enlisting in the regular army, they served by the thousands in the DRV bureaucracy-though almost never in senior positions-and as nurses and doctors. Many also carried out dangerous undercover sabotage, espionage, and assassination missions in the urban areas of Vietnam, or signed up for duty in the guerrilla-militia forces. At one point in Hung Yen province, for example, 6,700 women served in these forces, taking part in 680 guerrilla operations. A considerable number of them paid with their lives or were seriously wounded.

Giap spent the rainy season preparing for a large-scale autumn offensive. There was in effect a truce in the fighting from July to September, as the war came to a stop in the wet. The rain fell almost continuously, and the rivers overflowed. The spongy, saturated jungles were virtually impassable by French troops-and, for that matter, by Viet Minh units-and the going was not much easier in the watery surfaces of the deltas. Recalled one French observer: "The soldiers were overwhelmed and blinded by the forces of nature, by the soaking vegetation, the mountains that vanished in the clouds, the rivers swirling with turbid, dangerously rapid water, by the mud, the heat, by everything. It was a formless, green-gray world, devoid of outline, inimical, a world in which every movement, even eating was an effort."4

Resourceful commanders take advantage of such intermissions. Giap and his subordinates engaged in meticulous preparations during the summer months, even going so far as to construct elaborate models of the French posts of That Khe, Dong Khe, and Cao Bang, which their troops then practiced taking, day after day after day. They sabotaged roads and bridges, hoping to slow the advance of French motorized forces. They also used propaganda to wage a war of nerves against the French and the Bao Dai government, playing up the theme of a forthcoming offensive.

Most critical of all, Giap received considerable assistance from the Chinese, as pledged by Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh in Moscow and Beijing earlier in the year. On June 18, Liu Shaoqi, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, instructed Chen Geng, commander of the PLA's Twentieth Army Corps and a longtime acquaintance of Ho Chi Minh, to "work out a generally practical plan based on Vietnam's conditions (including military establishments, politics, economy, topography, and transportation) and on the limits of our assistance (including, in particular, our shipping supplies)." Upon receiving this plan, Beijing could "implement various aid programs, including making a priority list of materials to be shipped, training cadres, and rectifying troops, expanding recruits, organizing logistical work, and conducting battles."5

In short order, Chinese advisers were assigned to numerous Viet Minh units at battalion level and above, and the PRC also provided a large amount of weaponry and other materiel-by one authoritative account more than 14,000 guns, 1,700 machine guns, about 150 pieces of varying kinds of cannons, 2,800 tons of grain, and large amounts of ammunition, uniforms, medicine, and communication equipment. Some 200 heavy Molotova trucks stocked with supplies ran continuously from Canton and across South China, crossing into Vietnam in the gaps in the French defense line northeast of Cao Bang, the western anchor on the RC4. If the amounts in these truck beds still did not come close to matching what Washington gave to the French Union-by early 1951, the French would receive some 7,200 tons of military equipment per month on average-it nevertheless had a highly significant impact. Meanwhile, Viet Minh forces were sent to China's Yunnan province for training by PLA officers, including in the use of explosives. By early September, they were back in Vietnam, gathered on the lines of penetration, using the jungle to keep themselves hidden.6

The result was a Viet Minh main battle force in Tonkin whose firepower was roughly equal to that of the French Expeditionary Corps and in some respects superior. In certain heavy weapons, for example, such as bazookas and mortars, a Viet Minh battalion could now outgun its French counterpart. The French retained total superiority in naval vessels, aircraft, armored vehicles, and-with some exceptions-artillery, but overall Giap, by the early autumn of 1950, possessed a fighting force that could accomplish what it had never been able to do before: Go toe-to-toe with the adversary.7

THE FORBIDDING TERRAIN OF CAO BANG NEAR THE CHINESE BORDER, THROUGH WHICH CHINESE AID TO THE VIET MINH BEGAN TO FLOW IN 1950. (photo credit 10.2)

II

FRENCH INTELLIGENCE CODE BREAKERS PICKED UP SIGNS THAT Giap was preparing a major operation in the north along the frontier ridge. By the end of the first week of September, analysts knew that an attack was imminent, but not where. Some French posts had by then been evacuated-the truly impossible positions beyond Cao Bang, notably Tra Linh and Nguyen Binh (not to be confused with the Viet Minh leader of the same name)-but many were still occupied, for prestige reasons largely, and to guard the cemeteries (for the French could not bear the thought of the Vietnamese taking the burial sites and their white crosses). Both Dong Khe and That Khe were thought to be targets, and Lang Son perhaps as well, but hard evidence was elusive. Moreover, the French grossly underestimated the size of the attacking force: Instead of eighteen to twenty battalions as predicted, Giap was readying thirty to thirty-two battalions, including six heavy battalions and numerous artillery. Meanwhile, the vagaries of French domestic politics hurt Carpentier's planning, as the cabinet in Paris turned down his request for reinforcements and instead in August reduced the number of French soldiers in Indochina by nine thousand, on grounds of cost. The increased American aid had yet to really manifest itself, and the war was a major drain on French resources. Pleas from Hanoi to consider using conscripts in Vietnam also met with deaf ears in Paris; no politician wanted to go anywhere near the notion.8

Overall, the French land forces in Indochina totaled some 250,000. About 40 percent of these were regular French forces (metropolitan, Foreign Legion, colonial); the remainder was about equally divided between Vietnamese army forces (under French command) and irregular suppletifs, plus a few thousand Laotian and Cambodian troops. On the support side, French women were a growing presence, as part of the Personnel feminin de l'armee de terre (PFAT). Many were secretaries, but sizable numbers also served in combat areas as ambulance drivers, nurses, surgeons, and helicopter pilots. Among the latter were several women who flew into high-danger battle situations to evacuate wounded soldiers and provide vital first aid. One pilot, Paule Dupont d'Isigny, by war's end had logged some four thousand hours in Indochina and conducted more than thirty missions to rescue wounded soldiers from combat zones. Still other women worked as parachute riggers for the airborne units. (An experienced crew of two could fold one parachute in seven minutes.) Before the war was over, more than a hundred PFAT members would be killed in action.