In Tonkin, where the immediate threat loomed, Carpentier had some 53,000 troops at his disposal. Practically all of them, however, were engaged in internal security duties, and although thirteen battalions were earmarked as a mobile reserve, they were not in fact readily available to meet an external threat. The Expeditionary Corps still maintained its superiority in equipment, but much of the equipment was obsolete, and there were deficiencies, particularly in aircraft, so crucial to the French in maintaining their lines of communication. Though the general morale of the individual French officer and soldier was reasonably high, there were unsettling reports flowing to Paris of a slackening will and a "defensive-mindedness" among high officers, some of whom voiced despair at the rising number of French Union casualties-some 100,000 to this point in the war, including 25,000 dead or captured. Some colonial troops, meanwhile, notably the Moroccans, were reportedly beginning to question what they were doing, waging war against a people whose nationalistic effort they admired and themselves sought to emulate.9

The picture was not all bad, to be sure. An intensive pacification effort in the first half of the year, commanded by Major General Marcel Alessandri and designed to clear the Red River Delta and thereby deny the Viet Minh a major source of rice, had achieved considerable success-the flow of rice was cut almost in half. This was a severe problem for the DRV not merely in nutritional terms but also because rice was the medium of exchange of the Viet Minh economy. Troops were paid in rice; services and supplies were purchased with rice. Through the middle months of the year, rice rations for Giap's forces were cut again and again. In addition, pressure on the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor had eased somewhat, to the point that in April the French opened the road to mostly unrestricted traffic by day, whereas before it was restricted to armed convoy travel three days per week. In Cochin China, Viet Minh southern commander Nguyen Binh's attacks on French posts-around Tra Vinh, Vinh Long, Bien Hoa, Thu Dau Mot, Than Son, Can Tho, Soc Trang, and Sa Dec-diminished markedly in both frequency and intensity in the spring, after he suffered crushing losses in the face of French artillery and airpower, and colons in Saigon spoke of a palpable easing of tension in the city. Thenceforth the war would play out mostly in Tonkin and northern Annam.10

Carpentier, recognizing his position of weakness in the far north, in early September ordered that Cao Bang be evacuated and that Thai Nguyen be captured immediately beforehand. Though the two operations were not militarily connected, Carpentier reasoned that the easy capture of Thai Nguyen-and there was no reason to believe Giap would put up a major effort to defend it-would deflect press attention away from the abandonment of Cao Bang. Carpentier ordered that both actions be completed by mid-October, just before the end of the rainy season. He figured Giap's forces would not be in position to attack before then.

He figured wrong. At dawn on September 16, after months of careful preparation, the Viet Minh leader threw five battalions with artillery and mortar support against Dong Khe. Two companies of legionnaires put up furious resistance and initially held their own, even though heavy cloud cover precluded air support. Nervous tension enveloped Giap's command headquarters nearby, particularly after news arrived that a key Viet Minh regiment had lost its way and been unable to join in the attack. There were reports of heavy Viet Minh casualties. Ho Chi Minh, who had arrived at the headquarters the week before, sunburned after a weeklong journey on foot, urged calm. The operation should continue, he said. Giap and Chen Geng agreed. For two days, the fighting raged, until at ten A.M. on September 18, fifty-two hours after the first shots were fired, the Dong Khe post fell. One officer and thirty-one legionnaires managed to get away at the last minute, emerging out of the jungle near That Khe a week later.11

The garrison at Cao Bang, fifteen miles to the north, was now cut off, and the French determined they had no choice but to attempt a fighting retreat southward before the Viet Minh could encircle them. Instead of moving down Route Coloniale 3 toward French units moving northward from Thai Nguyen, however, Carpentier foolishly elected to use the RC4. He reinforced Cao Bang by air with a battalion of North Africans and assembled a force of 3,500 mostly Moroccan troops and a crack paratroop battalion at That Khe, fourteen miles south of Dong Khe. This force, code-named Task Force Bayard, would camouflage the move of the Cao Bang column, meet it halfway, and then escort it back to That Khe. But its commander, Lieutenant General Marcel Le Page, his orders sketchy, vacillated and did not move out of That Khe until September 30. A rumor floated among the soldiers that Le Page's parting words were "We shall never come back."12

In Cao Bang, meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Charton, a squat, no-nonsense commander much loved by his men for his personal courage and his foul mouth, ignored orders to leave his equipment behind and move south on foot. Instead he loaded his personnel into trucks and took with him his artillery pieces as well. On October 3, in this way, 2,600 soldiers-including almost a thousand Moroccans and six hundred legionnaires-and five hundred civilians (including the town's prostitutes) began to move the thirty-three miles to Dong Khe. The column, like a giant caterpillar with metallic bristles, stretched for miles; almost immediately it ran into ambushes and blown-up bridges. By early the next morning, having covered only nine miles, it was blocked. To the south, the Le Page relief force, which had advanced to a few miles from Dong Khe, had also been halted in its tracks. The numerically superior Viet Minh closed in from both sides of the dense forested hills, using roadside bombs, machine guns, and artillery. Bad weather and low-lying mist prevented air support for the French Union troops, who were now completely at the mercy of the attackers. On Carpentier's orders, the French commanders burned their trucks and supplies and (in the case of Charton) abandoned the artillery pieces, then moved off the RC4 in the hope of outflanking the blocking forces. The new plan was to rendezvous at a feature called Hill 477 east of Coc Xa. Progress was excruciatingly slow in the thick brush, as scouts used machetes to hack a path through the dense growth, and many men were simply lost in the forest.13

Alessandri, upon learning of the order, wired Carpentier: "Cancel everything. If you carry it out it will be a crime." But it was too late. The message, at once threatening and insubordinate, went unheeded.14

"We plunged into the mountains, on a 'trail' which was a trail only in name," a Hungarian legionnaire in the Le Page column recalled of the night of October 34. "Several of our wounded died that night. They could not take falling every ten or twenty yards with their porters. We were all beat, for we had practically not slept since we left our base [four days earlier]. Climb, descend several times each day on these abrupt slopes loaded to the maximum with packs and equipment was back-breaking." Always, both columns feared an ambush that could come at any moment and, even worse, felt the incomparable anxiety of not knowing exactly where you were, of being astray in the natural labyrinth of monstrous vegetation, with no guides or detailed maps, with food and water and ammunition running out, and with the enemy all around you.15

Viet Minh troops too were exhausted, having pursued their prey for six days and nights, but there would be no rest on the seventh day. "Why do we need to rest now?" Ho Chi Minh declared. "We are tired but the enemy is ten times more so. A runner on the point of reaching his finishing-line cannot rest." Giap followed with a short message to the troops via telephone on October 6: "I am sure that the enemy is hungrier and colder than you. He has suffered heavier losses and his morale has been undermined as he is a defeated invaders' army. Therefore, you must put more effort into your work in order to annihilate most of the enemy troops. Rainy and foggy weather is all the more favorable to us.... Forward!"16

By the time Charton and Le Page linked up on October 7, both columns had taken huge casualties and were low on water, food, and ammunition. And the worst was yet to come. The two commands had filed into an enormous ambush: Fifteen Viet Minh battalions had closed in. Panic set in among the Moroccans, who had a well-earned reputation for extraordinary courage and resilience; all of a sudden, many of them fled down the cliff faces screaming "Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!" The French force was disintegrating into a mob. Charton and Le Page and the remaining battalion commanders decided to divide the survivors into small parties and flee through the jungle toward That Khe, twenty miles away. Some of the groups made it; many did not. Charton was wounded and taken prisoner by the Viet Minh. The forest was swarming with Viet Minh shouting "Rendez-vous, soldats francais! Rendez-vous, vous etes perdus!" ("Give yourselves up, French soldiers, you are lost!")17

Some French units dropped their rifles and surrendered, too exhausted and hungry to go on. "They all stretched out their hands to ask for food," a Viet Minh officer recalled. "But we were not much better off as far as food was concerned. Our rice rations, which we carried in sausage cloth sacks around our shoulders, had been considerably depleted by many days of fighting.... At first we gave them each a ball of cooked rice. Later we had to halve the ball, then divide again into three parts. They gobbled it in the twinkling of an eye, then obediently followed our orders to move toward the POW camp along the forest tracks."18

Ultimately, only some 600 men from the two columns made it back to French lines. The Expeditionary Corps had suffered 6,000 casualties, of whom no fewer than 4,800 were listed as dead or missing. Charton's column alone lost 75 officers, 295 NCOs, and 2,939 from other ranks. Other combined losses included more than 100 mortars and some 950 machine guns, 8,000 rifles, and 450 trucks. "The disaster of RC4" was by far the most devastating defeat of the war to this point. General Carpentier, stunned and shattered, facing the prospect of informing Paris that the Charton and Le Page columns had been wiped out, flew over the scene and could only say mysteriously, "Everything that could happen has happened."19

In author Bernard Fall's later estimation, it was the greatest French colonial defeat since the loss of Montcalm at Quebec in 1759. General Giap wouldn't have put it in those words, but he found his own way to register the magnitude of his achievement: He joined his Chinese advisers in a celebratory feast and got drunk for the first time in his life.20

The engagement also showed something else: that the war had entered a new, intensive, deadly phase, as the Cold War not only internationalized the diplomatic nature of the conflict but militarized it in unprecedented ways.

To compound the calamity, French posts far from the fighting were simply abandoned. Most important among these was Lang Son, a pleasant town of ten thousand constructed in the French provincial style with wide streets and low yellow-brown houses, and the main post at the eastern edge of the ridge. It was evacuated on Carpentier's orders on October 1718. Large stocks of arms, ammunitions, stores, and vehicles were left behind for the Viet Minh to claim-enough to supply Giap's army for many months.

By the nineteenth, the French had been driven out of northern Tonkin, from the sea to the Red River. The border to China was completely open, from Lao Cai to coastal Mong Cai. The French fell back on a 375-mile northern perimeter, with Hanoi at its core. Panic swept the French communities in Hanoi and elsewhere in the delta, and there was open talk of abandoning Tonkin entirely. Officials scoffed at the notion, but they quietly made preparations to evacuate all women and children from Hanoi, until ordered to stop by High Commissioner Leon Pignon, who vowed the city would be defended house by house. Some firms nevertheless moved their surplus stocks and archives to Haiphong or Saigon.21 For Carpentier and his underlings in Saigon, most distressing for the future was that the Viet Minh had shown themselves to be so much more than the ragtag, primitive bandit gang of French imagination (or at least rhetoric); they were a serious fighting force, disciplined and courageous, able to move rapidly and maneuver, and willing to take major battlefield losses.

And indeed, Viet Minh casualties in the Border Campaign (as it came to be called, or bien gioi to the Vietnamese) were extremely heavy-much heavier than was known at the time. Of the 30,000 troops Giap threw into the fight, as many as 9,000, or 30 percent, may have been killed. Not all died on the battlefield. Because of the rough terrain and distances, porters could evacuate only about 6 percent of the wounded to hospitals within six hours; the rest arrived only later, some of them as late as twelve or eighteen hours after going down. Even then, their ordeal was far from over, as they typically had to endure excruciating waits to go into surgery. Many never made it to the operating table. Nor had the DRV's medical services factored in that they would need also to take care of hundreds of wounded European, African, and North African troops captured in the battle. Many of these soldiers also succumbed, whether from inadequate treatment of their injuries or from illness contracted in the malaria-infested jungles of Cao Bang.22

Giap's success was due in large measure to his preponderance of manpower and to atmospheric conditions. At all times he had at least a 3 to 1 superiority in numbers, and at Dong Khe it was more like 8 to 1. Communication between Viet Minh units was excellent throughout, and Giap could move units precisely where they were needed within the battle zone. After some early mistakes, his officers used coordinated artillery fire effectively, and their staff work was efficient. Intelligence agents in the villages used transmitting sets to give precise information on French movements, which allowed Giap to attack at times and places of his choosing. The ground mist so common at that time of year, as the rains were ending, helped as well: It prevented the French from using airpower to assist the two columns. The French Union command arrangements, meanwhile, were vague, and it was never clear who commanded whom. Marcel Le Page, who commanded the Lang Son column, was the wrong man for the job, an artilleryman with little experience in jungle warfare and a tendency toward indecision and self-doubt (qualities duly noted by his men).23

And, of course, the human and material aid provided by the Chinese, both before and during the campaign, mattered enormously. Measuring exactly how this assistance influenced the course of events remains to this day difficult, however, and care should be taken to avoid exaggeration-it's worth recalling that the French garrisons along the RC4 were isolated and highly vulnerable even before the PLA's arrival, with each convoy completely at the mercy of guerrillas lurking in the hills and gorges along the road. Giap in later years would acknowledge the important material and training assistance provided by the Chinese in 1950, while insisting that he and Ho Chi Minh were the chief decision makers. They and they alone chose where and when to attack, and they hung tough when Chen Geng urged caution or delay.24 Maybe, but Giap would not have been able to strike remotely as hard, or leave the French nearly as bloodied, without the support provided by his northern neighbor.

In late November, Carpentier ordered several operations to try to regain the initiative. Little was accomplished. In one action, commanded by Charton and designed to encircle and destroy several Viet Minh battalions thought to be operating around two villages in Thai Binh province southeast of Hanoi, bad weather delayed the drop of paratroopers by two hours, which meant the planned encirclement of the villages was not completed. When Charton's men arrived, the villages were deserted. The next day the French searched seven or eight other villages in the same area; these too were more or less empty, as residents could be seen running away at the approach of troops. Even people working in the fields disappeared without a trace. No enemy soldiers were ever spotted, and no weapons uncovered. French troops did note, though, that most of the villages had proViet Minh posters and pictures of Ho Chi Minh.25

III

THE FRENCH FACED A STARK NEW REALITY. THE CAO BANG DISASTER, beyond the enormous loss of blood and treasure, beyond the immediate humiliation of having been out-generaled and out-fought by a supposedly inferior enemy, showed that in this war, time was not on France's side. The strategy of isolating the Viet Bac and of reducing the areas under Viet Minh control had not succeeded; to the contrary, Ho Chi Minh's government now had firm control over a huge swath of Tonkin and threatened the rest; it also remained a formidable presence in many parts of Annam and Cochin China. French commanders might not wish to admit it, at least not without a few drinks in them, but an outright defeat of the enemy was now almost impossible to imagine. He had solidified his hold on the Viet Bac and had at least tacit support of the mass of the population there, and he had a powerful neighbor to the north, ready and willing to help his cause.

Which is not to say Ho was invincible. The Viet Minh had scored a stunning victory, but their strength in late 1950 should not be overestimated. Giap's army, now formally named the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), had long and difficult supply lines, and it still lacked much of the equipment, including airplanes, of a modern army. Its food supplies were, as almost always, a source of concern. Nor were the Viet Minh yet in a position to make a serious play for the big prize, the Red River Delta, and it's doubtful that Giap at this stage would have been able to rapidly and immediately dispatch from one place to another the troops required to reinforce a success or avert a disaster. French Union forces, meanwhile, were about to be bolstered by an infusion of aircraft and other materials from the United States.26

French officials were quick to remind themselves and one another of these points. Maybe too quick. Certainly, there could be no talk of quitting, of seeking a fig-leaf diplomatic settlement with Ho that would allow an exit from the morass. France's credibility was on the line, as was the personal credibility of her leaders. And one could speak as well of partisan credibility being at stake. France from 1947 to 1951 had a string of coalition governments, each one standing to the ideological right of its predecessor. Indochina was one reason for this rightward drift. Unbending resolve to tackle the Viet Minh became pivotal to the MRP, the dominant party in these coalitions, which feared a disastrous hemorrhage of support to the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple francais (RPF) if it bowed to Socialist and Communist demands for negotiation with Ho Chi Minh. The declining influence of the French left in colonial and defense policy was critical to the French choices in Indochina that resulted in adherence to the Bao Dai solution, refusal to pursue direct negotiation with the Viet Minh leadership, and greater attachment to U.S. Cold War imperatives, as American military aid became fundamental to the continuation of the French war effort from this point on.27

Broader public opinion in France played little part in determining this firm posture. The country paid attention to Indochina because of the French troops engaged there, and there was despair at the immense loss of life in the October defeats, but one could still speak in late 1950 of a general indifference to questions affecting Southeast Asia and the Far East. On foreign affairs, most voters were far more concerned about Germany, about France's eastern frontiers, and about building up the armed forces to resist yet another invasion across the Rhine. Many expressed opposition to the Indochina War on the narrow grounds that the expenditures of manpower and money there took away from this preparation at home. But the unpopularity of the war did not yet translate into mass active opposition, and thus politicians could act with a considerable degree of impunity.

And so, in the fall of 1950, with one notable exception, no new voices were raised in French governmental circles in favor of immediate negotiations leading to withdrawal. The exception was Pierre Mendes France, an articulate leader of the Radical Party (which, despite the name, was a party of the center-left). Decrying the government's inertia, Mendes France called the war an exercise in futility, one that moreover was exacting a huge cost in blood and treasure. "It is the entire conception of our action in Indochina that is false," he declared from the rostrum in the Assembly, "for it is based on a military effort that is insufficient ... to bring about a solution by force and on a policy that is incapable of assuring us the support of the people."

Things cannot continue like this.... There are only two solutions. The first consists in realizing our objectives in Indochina by means of military force. If we choose that, let us at least avoid illusions and pious lies. To achieve decisive military successes rapidly we need three times as many troops in the field and a tripling of appropriations, and we need them very quickly.... The military solution is a massive new effort, sufficiently massive and sufficiently rapid to anticipate the already considerable development of the forces opposed to us.

Mendes France went on to enumerate the sacrifices that would be required in order to give this option a realistic chance: new taxes, conscription, a reduction of defenses in Europe, a slowdown in productive investment, and the impossibility ultimately of opposing the German rearmament sought by the United States. Would it not be better, he asked, to choose the second option, involving a negotiated settlement with Ho Chi Minh? "An agreement involves concessions, broad concessions, without doubt more significant than those that would have been sufficient in the past. One may reject this solution. It is difficult to apply. But then we must speak the truth to the country. We must inform it of the price that will have to be paid to bring the other solution about."28

The plea fell on deaf ears in the corridors of power. Disengagement short of victory would insult the memory of the Frenchmen who had died defending the cause, top civilian and military leaders insisted, a stock argument they would use time and time again in the months to come (as would, beginning in the mid-1960s, their American successors). It would simply be necessary to try harder, to perform better-and to do so under new French leadership in Hanoi. Carpentier, commander in chief of the French Expeditionary Corps and thus ultimately responsible for the Cao Bang disaster, was recalled, as was High Commissioner Pignon, who had vacillated before endorsing the decision to withdraw completely from the border region. In their place, Paris sent General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a World War II hero who was given both titles: commander in chief and high commissioner. He would turn out to be an inspired choice, as we shall see, at least with respect to the former title.

French leaders also now committed themselves to something they had hitherto resisted: the formation of a Vietnamese national army. They had made a few halfhearted moves in this direction in 1948 and 1949, but the French High Command held sole responsibility for the conduct of operations and for Vietnam's internal security. In November 1950, the existing Vietnamese forces, all of which served under French officers, totaled only eight battalions. None was at full strength, and all were underequipped. But the autumn calamity called into question all previous assumptions; for many French officials, it became glaringly obvious that an increase in trained Indochinese manpower would be essential to turn the tide against the Viet Minh-for political and economic no less than military reasons. More manpower was essential, yet it could not come from France or elsewhere in the empire. Accordingly, in November 1950, a Vietnamese Military Academy was opened, its mission to train one hundred and fifty Vietnamese officers per year. Its leaders announced plans to form four Vietnamese divisions during 1951, partly from newly enlisted recruits and partly from existing French-officered units.29

The announcement was of course an admission of weakness, tacit acknowledgment that the Expeditionary Corps as presently constituted was not up to the job. But the move gave desperate war planners in Paris a reason to hope both that their great and growing military manpower needs could be met and that Bao Dai's anemic government could, by fielding its own army, enhance its popular support. The ordinary villager was weary of the war, French analysts believed, and wished for nothing more than peace and security. If Bao Dai could exploit this desire, if he could convince the peasantry that he would provide that security, he might be able to swing public opinion in his favor. But for that argument to have any chance of working, he needed to be his own man. And to be his own man, he needed Vietnamese troops. Far too many villagers were reluctant to enter areas held by the Expeditionary Corps. Many of them chose instead to back the Viet Minh, not out of ideological conviction but because they were Vietnamese.

It was a disingenuous argument, of course, inasmuch as France was still unwilling to let Bao Dai be his own man, still unwilling to grant his government real independence. But certainly Paris officials were right to see a Vietnamese national army as essential; without it, there could be no hope of weaning significant non-Communist Vietnamese support away from Ho Chi Minh's cause. And if the creation of such a force could cause the Americans, who had long favored the proposition, to boost their military and other assistance to the war effort, so much the better.

On that score too, many French officials saw some reasons for hope in the midst of their late-autumn gloom.30 The pivotal U.S. decision to provide aid to the French military effort had preceded the outbreak of fighting in Korea, but the war there shaped the nature of the U.S. aid program in key ways. On the first day of the North Korean attack, June 25, 1950, President Truman ordered that assistance to Indochina be increased and accelerated; on the thirtieth, the day U.S. troops were committed to combat in Korea (as part of a UN force), eight C-47 transport planes arrived in Saigon with the first shipments of American materiel for the French.

The Korean fighting also formed the backdrop for a July mission to Indochina headed by John Melby of the State Department and Major General Graves B. Erskine of the Marine Corps. Their report, though critical of what Erskine in particular saw as the defensive posture and mind-set of the French, concluded that the war could be won with an infusion of American material assistance. (It was a standard feature of such U.S. "survey missions" during the war: They almost always returned with a "can-do" recommendation for positive action, no matter how intractable the problem might seem to outside observers.) By early August, military supplies sufficient to equip twelve infantry battalions were en route by ship to Vietnam. To oversee the delivery of this expanded American assistance, and to "evaluate French tactical efficiency in the use of U.S. equipment," the administration created the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), whose first contingent of officers and enlisted men arrived in Saigon in September, and the Special Mission for Technical and Economic Assistance (STEM), which began its work the same month. Significantly, the French ruled out any kind of training role for MAAG and made clear they would allow no American interference in the conduct of the war.31

UN forces in Korea reeled under the onslaught in those early weeks. But General Douglas MacArthur's bold landing at Inchon in mid-September stopped the North Korean advance, and his counterattack in the following weeks drove them back almost to the Chinese frontier. In mid-October, however, the first Chinese units crossed into Korea, and on November 25 they began a vigorous offensive, driving U.S. troops before them. For Truman and his advisers, Chinese entry was a body blow. It raised the stakes in all of Asia. Mao's China had to be contained, not merely on the Korean peninsula but anywhere it seemed to threaten. Sniping at the French for their colonial policy in Indochina, though it did not cease entirely, suddenly seemed to many in Washington a self-indulgent luxury. As one high-level internal document put it, the military situation in Vietnam "is so grave as to require the very highest priority of the United States." In October, a shipment of forty Hellcat fighter aircraft arrived in Vietnam, and in November, the administration accelerated deliveries to Indochina of ninety Bearcat fighters and forty-one B-26 bombers, as well as transportation equipment and bulldozers. These commitments made the size of the military assistance program for Indochina second only to the support for U.S. combat forces in Korea.32

A subtle but crucial shift in American thinking had occurred. Washington strategists still emphasized the need for a successful political response to blunt Ho Chi Minh's nationalist appeal, but they now connected this ambition more closely to the military struggle. Hence their vociferous support for the French plans for a new Vietnamese national army; it would, after all, serve both ends. Was there a risk that this new army could be "turned against us"? Yes, a joint State-Defense report acknowledged in early December. But that possibility had to be considered alongside the prospect of ultimate defeat if things continued on their present course. "The former is a risk, the latter well-nigh a certainty.... Much of the stigma of colonialism can be removed if, where necessary, yellow men will be killed by yellow men rather than by white men alone." The inclusion of the word alone was telling, for the report's conclusion left no doubt that a French presence was vital for the foreseeable future and that the Paris government should get the military assistance it needed. For France's cause in Indochina was also America's. "America without Asia will have been reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precarious foothold on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent," the authors concluded, but "success will vindicate and give added meaning to America and the American way of life."33

In time, as we shall see, French leaders would have second thoughts about this internationalization of the war effort. Inevitably, the growth in U.S. involvement gave Washington officials increased leverage in the decision making and lessened France's freedom of maneuver. For now, though, only one thing mattered: The struggle demanded an infusion of resources, which only the Americans could provide.

Vietnamese non-Communists likewise saw their leverage reduced with the Americans' arrival. Whereas in Indonesia non-Communist nationalists under Sukarno won U.S. backing in their struggle against the Netherlands and secured independence via an international negotiated settlement in 1949, in Vietnam a different dynamic prevailed. Here the non-Communists were allied with the French against the Viet Minh and thus had far less chance to play the Americans-who saw this as a Cold War struggle first and foremost-against the colonial overlord. With each passing month, it seemed, non-Communist nationalist groups such as the Dai Viet and VNQDD saw their influence recede.

At Ho Chi Minh's headquarters in the Viet Bac, the hope as 1950 drew to a close was that the hour had passed for the new measures to affect the course of events. It was too late now for the enemy to raise a legitimate Vietnamese fighting force, too late for the mighty Americans to make a meaningful difference on the ground. Following the glorious victory in the Border Campaign, red bunting appeared in villages all over Tonkin to welcome the victorious soldiers. Resistance committees proliferated throughout the north. By midautumn, recalled one Viet Minh soldier who took part in the Cao Bang fighting, army political officers were assuring troops that they would be "in Hanoi for Tet," and there was a pervasive sense that "the general counteroffensive had begun." The soldier described a typical mass rally that he and his unit came across as they marched from the frontier ridge to the delta: "The propaganda sections were already in place and had installed an information room where a phonograph played military tunes. A propagandist on a box decorated by the red flag with the yellow star harangued the crowd and the young people. 'The People's Army will be in Hanoi for Tet. This is the present that the army will give President Ho for the new year.' "34

Ho Chi Minh would get no such gift for the Tet holiday. Unbeknownst to the party propagandists who made their pitch, and to the cheering crowds who heard them, change was coming to Vietnam, in the form of a new French commander with a different conception of how to wage the struggle and the strength to realize that vision. And unbeknownst to them, Vo Nguyen Giap was about to make his biggest blunder of the war.

CHAPTER 11

KING JEAN