FOR ONE YOUNG FRENCH LIEUTENANT, THE SITUATION IN VIETNAM in autumn 1950, following the disaster on the RC4, approached the point of no return. Bernard de Lattre de Tassigny, age twenty-three, an infantry lieutenant in the French Expeditionary Corps, had been in Indochina for a year, commanding a post some twenty miles southeast of Hanoi. He was a remarkable young man. At fifteen, he had helped his father escape from a wartime prison in daring fashion, then had joined the Free French Army and become the youngest soldier to be decorated with the Medaille militaire. Still a teenager in the campaigns of 194445, he was wounded in battle and received commendations for his bravery and dedication. In Indochina, he quickly won praise from his superiors, one of whom wrote, "He is one of the few officers who has really given thought to the problem of our presence here, and he has resolved it in a concrete manner."1

Specifically, de Lattre had determined that the key to success lay in capturing the active support of the rural population; in the phrase of a later era, French soldiers and officers had to win the "hearts and minds" of the peasantry. The war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all, and that meant striving to meet the needs of people where they lived, whether in the form of providing security, or building schoolhouses or athletic fields, or improving sanitation. If killing had to be done-and the young lieutenant didn't doubt it-it should be done as quietly as possible, with a knife or rifle, not with heavy artillery or aerial bombardment.

From the start, de Lattre immersed himself in the often-mundane tasks of pacification. Judging from his letters home and the reports of his superiors, he had success: One report exulted that de Lattre "has captured the hearts of the local population."2 Over time, though, his letters began to take on lugubrious tones, especially as news reached him of the calamity in Cao Bang. He despaired at the "fear psychosis" gripping some fellow officers, and at the louche lifestyle led by others, and he complained of the absence of firm, purposeful command. "Tell Father we need him, without him it will go wrong," he wrote his mother on October 23.3

The son got his wish. In early December, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was appointed commander in chief of the Expeditionary Corps and high commissioner for Indochina, with complete control over the conduct of military operations as well as governmental affairs. Paris authorities, convinced that the conflicts of authority had impeded essential action at critical moments, chose to give both military and civilian powers to one individual. The elder de Lattre's appointment did not come as a surprise, but neither was it entirely expected. Bernard was overjoyed. "What we need," he wrote his father after the appointment was made, "is a leader who leads, fresh blood and new machinery, and no more niggling, no more small-time warfare; and then, with the morale that we still have in spite of it all, we could save everything."4

We could save everything. Those words would resound often in the months ahead. A savior had come, or so for a time it seemed. Jean de Lattre, one of France's great military leaders of the twentieth century, with a string of accomplishments already under his belt, would have perhaps his biggest success in Vietnam. Born in 1889 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, a village in the Vendee whose other famous son was Georges Clemenceau, young Jean went to Saint-Cyr and from there to the trenches of World War I. Five different times he was wounded, swiftly earning a reputation for courage and calmness under fire. Once, during a German cavalry charge, an enemy lance pierced de Lattre's chest; unmounted but undaunted, he killed two of the enemy with his sword, then escaped.

Between the wars de Lattre served under France's famed Marshal Lyautey in Morocco and at the outbreak of the Battle of France led the Fourteenth Infantry Division as it tried valiantly to hold the German Panzers near Rheims. Later jailed by the Vichy regime for defying orders to keep his troops in barracks rather than fight the Germans, he escaped with the help of his wife and the young Bernard, who smuggled into his cell a small saw hidden in a bouquet of flowers and a ten-yard rope stuffed in a bag of laundry. De Lattre joined the Free French and in 194445 led the First French Army (which landed with the Americans in Provence on August 15, 1944) in its glorious march from the southern coast to the Rhine and the Danube. Among his prizes after crossing the Rhine were Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Freudenstadt. At one time, his command included 125,000 American troops.5

Even then, de Lattre's temperament was the stuff of legend. Like Douglas MacArthur, to whom he bore a strong physical resemblance and was often compared, he could be impatient with superiors' instructions; like MacArthur, he was vain and had a flair for the intensely dramatic. "General de Theatre," some called him. A brilliant mimic, he was excellent company, and even detractors acknowledged his extraordinary personal magnetism. More than one observer compared him to Churchill for his singular ability to dominate any room he entered, to attract all attention to himself, and to keep listeners enthralled with his magnetism, his self-deprecating wit, his eloquence.

But there was also a dark side. Egocentric to the point of megalomania, de Lattre was prone to moodiness and to volcanic expressions of anger toward underlings. Meticulous in his personal appearance-he wore uniforms tailored by Lanvin, the stylish Paris couturier-he demanded that subordinates be likewise, and he bristled when on inspections his hosts failed to welcome him with the ceremonial he considered his due (hence a second nickname: Le Roi Jean, or King Jean). Always he was notoriously touchy about honor-both his own and his country's. On one occasion, during a dinner for Allied commanders, de Lattre refused to touch his food and wine because Marshal Zhukov of the Red Army neglected to mention France in a toast praising Allied armies. Informed of his mistake, Zhukov offered a separate toast to France. A mollified de Lattre began to eat and drink.6

At the conclusion of the war, General de Gaulle sent de Lattre to Berlin to participate in the Armistice ceremony, even though France hadn't been invited. De Lattre signed as a witness and exulted: "Victory has arrived ... radiant victory of springtime, which gives back to our France her youth, her strength and her hope." This was not mere rhetoric. De Lattre believed in his country, believed in the empire, and in the postwar years did everything he could to restore France to what he considered her rightful place among the leading powers. Beginning in late 1945, he served as inspector general and chief of staff of the French Army and then as commander of Western Union (the precursor to NATO) ground forces-in effect, Western Europe's top general.

His acceptance in late 1950 of the Indochina posting surprised some who saw it as a step down in professional terms, but for de Lattre there could be no question of declining. A gambler by nature, he had always trained his troops to embrace the need to take risks; now he had to live up to his teaching. More important, his country was at war, and the war was going badly, with his only son in the heart of the action. An outright defeat seemed all too possible. In this hour of maximum need, he had to answer the call. "I have nothing to gain and doubtless much to lose," de Lattre replied when Prime Minister Rene Pleven asked him to take up the post. "All the more reason for accepting, and, as a good soldier, I shall do so without hesitation."7

De Lattre saw as his foremost aim keeping Indochina firmly within the French Union, but his initial utterances emphasized the menace posed by the forces of international Communism. He told the American journalist Robert Shaplen that France was in Vietnam "to save it from Peking and Moscow." Paris might have acted out of colonialist motives in the past, but no more. "We have abandoned all colonial positions completely," he assured a skeptical Shaplen. "The work we are doing is for the salvation of the Vietnamese people"-and the security of the Western world. The Vietnam struggle, he insisted at every opportunity, was another front in the war that the West was waging in Korea. The stakes were huge: "Tonkin is the keystone of the defense of Southeast Asia. If Tonkin falls, Siam falls with Burma, and Malaya is dangerously compromised. Without Tonkin the rest of Indochina is soon lost."8

Did de Lattre really believe it was so simple? It's hard to be sure. His hatred of Communism knew no bounds, and he was convinced that his actions in Indochina ultimately mattered as much to the West's defense as did MacArthur's in Korea. But he also knew that the imagery of countries falling one by one, like bowling pins-or, as it were, dominoes-resonated in the halls of power in Washington, among both civilians and military men. And on this point de Lattre needed no schooling: The success or failure of the daunting task that confronted him, he knew, depended in large measure on the attitudes and policies of the Truman White House.

II

HE SET OUT FROM ORLY AIRPORT AT MIDNIGHT ON DECEMBER 13. Some two thousand old comrades of the First French Army turned out to see him off, their banners fluttering in the nighttime breeze. It was a moving moment for de Lattre, proof, he said, that les gars (the boys, as he called his men) still trusted him, that the spirit of the First Army still lived. Five days later his plane touched down in Saigon. It was December 19, four years to the day since the outbreak of major war.

"His plane came in and de Lattre stood at the top of a flight of stairs, on the platform, the gangplank, and he turned his profile this way," Edmund Gullion, second in command at the American legation, recalled of the scene. "He had a magnificent profile (something like MacArthur), and watching him arrive, he seemed seven foot tall, stiff and straight and he took white gloves and pulled them carefully on his hands, like that-a very symbolic gesture, symbolizing in the honor of the corps [that] a gentleman aristocrat was in office. But the symbolism of pulling on the gloves was lost on no one.... He was coming down to clean up this mess."9

Immediately he made clear that spit and polish, flourish and ceremony, would be the order of the day. The Guard of Honor presented arms, and the band played "The Marseillaise." To de Lattre, however, the guard appeared slovenly, and in front of bystanders he ripped into the colonel in charge, a terrifying treatment known in French slang as the "shampoo." He then unleashed a torrent of abuse on the bandleader, on the grounds that one instrument was out of tune. To all assembled, there could be no doubt: King Jean had arrived.10

Later that day the general addressed a gathering of French officers, telling them he couldn't guarantee any easy victories or early improvement in the battlefield situation. What he could promise was firm command: "From now on, you will be led." He promptly canceled the order for the evacuation of women and children from Hanoi-"As long as women and children are here, the men won't dare let go"-and announced that his wife would soon join him from Paris. He vowed that Tonkin would be held, rejecting claims by some French officers that a concentration on southern Annam and Cochin China was unavoidable. These statements immediately bolstered morale among civilians and troops, as did his announcement that he would fly immediately to Tonkin. (At this departure too there was a ceremony, and again de Lattre went on a tirade: He ordered twenty-five days' confinement for the pilot of his plane, for failing to put the new commander's insignia on the fuselage. To a bearded copilot, de Lattre snapped: "You've got five minutes to shave yourself clean!")11

In Tonkin, there was no denying the gravity of the situation. French Union garrisons on the northern and northeastern frontiers had been forced, due to the Viet Minh assaults in the Border Campaign, to withdraw to the Red River Delta, the possession of which de Lattre deemed essential to the defense of Indochina as a whole. Upon arriving in Hanoi, he reaffirmed that dependents would stay and again said he would not allow Tonkin to fall.

DE LATTRE AND BAO DAI DURING AN AWARDS CEREMONY IN EARLY 1951. (photo credit 11.1)

In the days thereafter, he shuttled all over the delta in his small Morane spotter plane, showing scant regard for his own physical safety-more than once his entourage came under enemy fire-and a level of energy that left aides utterly exhausted. Everywhere he touched dormant chords of national pride and brought forth cheers from the assembled French troops; everywhere he ruthlessly weeded out the incompetent and the (by his standards) lackadaisical. His mantra at each stop: There will be no quitting Indochina until the Communists have been defeated.

But de Lattre knew that bucking up the fighting spirit of his soldiers, essential though it was, wouldn't be enough. He consequently undertook a regrouping of French forces and reorganized the system of defense in Tonkin. Relying on the Armee d'Afrique tactics he had learned under Marshal Lyautey in Morocco in the 1920s, de Lattre emphasized the need for mobility, even in terrain that limited rapid movement to roads, with the accompanying dangers of ambush. Accordingly, he organized groupes mobiles (striking groups), each consisting essentially of a headquarters with sufficient command and communication facilities, to which could be assigned three or more infantry battalions and supporting troops. These groupes mobiles would move quickly to engage Viet Minh units and relieve besieged posts; when attacked, they would use the Armee d'Afrique tactic of simultaneous assault from at least two, and sometimes three or more, different encircling directions. The artillery, firing from the road deep into the jungle, would be dispersed throughout the length of a column and thus could not all be lost in a single ambush.12

To enhance mobility and protect the delta, de Lattre ordered the construction of a series of self-contained and mutually supporting defense works, or blockhouses, all around the area. This chain of fortified concrete positions-built in groups of five or six, one or two miles apart, and designed to accommodate between three and ten soldiers-which became known as the "De Lattre Line," had been recommended in the Revers Report of May 1949, but nothing had been done. Until now. De Lattre supervised much of the construction personally and drove the crews mercilessly; by the end of 1951, more than a thousand of the posts had been created, on a line that stretched in a rough semicircle from the sea near the Baie d'Along, along the northern edge of the delta to Vinh Yen, and then southeast to the sea again near Phat Diem, enclosing protectively both Hanoi and Haiphong. (See map on this page.) Supported by these positions, the groupes mobiles could set forth in search of enemy units, and also-in theory, at least-protect against rice smuggling as well as major Viet Minh assaults.

Two problems remained, however: finding enough bodies to man these many hundreds of strongpoints, and making sure the troops were adequately supplied. To meet the first objective, de Lattre sought and received reinforcements of North African units and Foreign Legionnaires. He knew, though, that Paris would never authorize sufficient numbers of troops for Indochina to do more than hold the line. The money wasn't there.13 He therefore accelerated what the French were now calling the jaunissement (literally "yellowing"), the building up of the still-embryonic Vietnamese National Army (VNA). At the time of de Lattre's arrival, these comprised eleven battalions and nine gendarmerie units, and he swiftly ordered the creation of an additional twenty-five battalions, four armored squadrons, and eight artillery batteries. This Vietnamese force would perform the task, so the argument went, of pacifying and defending areas not under effective Viet Minh control, thereby freeing the Expeditionary Corps for offensive action. Many of the best officers and NCOs of the French Army, among them Bernard, volunteered to serve as the necessary initial cadres for these Vietnamese units.14

For equipment, de Lattre turned to the United States. He took satisfaction from that fact that Washington's aid had begun flowing more freely, and in particular he welcomed the dispatch of dozens of Bearcat fighters and B-26 bombers, as well as transportation equipment and bulldozers. American artillery shells were also arriving in much larger quantities, as were vital 105mm howitzers. But much more would be needed. From the U.S. liaison office in Indochina, de Lattre requested urgently needed materials. Among the items was an American weapon designed for jungle fighting: napalm. His predecessors had made scant use of this jellied petroleum that ignites on contact, but de Lattre determined at once that it could have enormous utility.15

III

IN HIS JUNGLE HEADQUARTERS NEAR THAI NGUYEN, FIFTY MILES north of Hanoi, General Vo Nguyen Giap greeted the news of de Lattre's appointment with satisfaction, even delight. Always fascinated by military laurels and recognition, Giap viewed the selection of such an illustrious figure as a compliment to himself and to his troops, and he eagerly took up the challenge. "The French are sending against the People's Army a foe worthy of its steel," he declared. "We will defeat him on his own ground."16 Brimming with confidence following his victories in northern Tonkin, Giap now set his sights upon the Red River Delta and Hanoi. His Chinese advisers, flush with excitement about the success of the Border Campaign and of their human-wave attacks against the Americans in Korea, now urged Giap to use the same tactics against the French in Vietnam.

For some months, a debate had been raging in high Viet Minh councils about whether the time had come to shift to the third and final stage of Maoist people's war, the general offensive. Did the success in the autumn offensive suggest that conditions were now ripe? Was a "preponderance of forces" in just one area sufficient, or did one need to have it all over the country? How vulnerable were the French in the delta, and would a Viet Minh victory there presage the crumbling of the entire colonial edifice? Senior officials went around and around on these questions; Giap was among those who argued that his forces could move to the third stage before they held absolute material superiority on the battlefield. Others disagreed, but Giap's advocacy received a boost from the growing rice shortage in Viet Minhheld areas; unless revolutionary forces could expand their presence in the delta, he and others insisted, the food situation would become desperate. (Already the government had ordered people to drastically curtail their consumption of rice so that sufficient amounts would be available to the armed forces.) A fragile consensus emerged to launch the opening stages of what seemed likely to be a protracted and complex offensive. The first stage: a major assault on the delta from the northwest.17

Giap prided himself on his meticulous preparation for battle, but here he miscalculated-his hubris got the better of him. He gave insufficient thought to his great advantage in the Border Campaign: The French were dispersed and had few lines of communication or transport. But that advantage did not apply in the delta: Here the French were much better placed. While Viet Minh forces moved into position north of Hanoi-sixty-five infantry, twelve artillery, and eight engineer battalions, from the 308th and 312th Divisions, together with civilian porters who brought five thousand tons of rice, ammunition, and weapons-Viet Minh propagandists began posting leaflets around the delta bearing the inscription, "Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi for Tet." (Tet is the Chinese lunar new year, falling usually in February.) French commanders girded for battle, and their intelligence analysts (especially those of the Service de documentation exterieure et de contre-espionnage, or SDECE) identified the general whereabouts of the enemy's concentration and the probable attack date.

The first target in what would become known as the Day River Battles was Vinh Yen, some thirty miles northwest of Hanoi on the north side of the Red River, near where it debouched from the highlands. The town was one of Hanoi's protective bastions; if it fell, the road to the capital would be open. Giap planned to use his two divisions to breach Vinh Yen's defenses and force a gap, through which his forces could make a dash for Hanoi. On the evening of January 13, two regiments of the 308th assaulted Bao Chuc, a small post near the town held by about fifty Senegalese and Vietnamese who fought to the last man and succumbed after two bayonet counterattacks. A groupe mobile sent to relieve the post was surrounded and likewise assailed by enemy units that had taken up positions on the surrounding hills. It looked like the leaflet vow would be made good.

De Lattre now took personal charge of the battle. On the fourteenth, he flew right into Vinh Yen in his spotter plane and from there ordered the mobilization of all available reserves and the transfer of troops from Cochin China to the north. On the fifteenth, he sent a groupe mobile of crack North African troops to seize the heights around Vinh Yen. The effort appeared to have succeeded, but suddenly at sundown on the sixteenth, there came wave upon wave of Viet Minh infantry to conquer the hastily dug defenses of the hill line. Merciless hand-to-hand combat ensued, with grenades and tommy guns; casualties were heavy on both sides. De Lattre, returning to Vinh Yen for a second time, realized the gravity of the situation and ordered all available aircraft-both fighter-bombers and transport planes capable of dumping American-made napalm canisters-into what would be the heaviest aerial bombardment of the entire war.18

Relentlessly, the napalm bombs rained down on the Viet Minh troops, literally roasting thousands of them. Early on January 17, the 312th Division tried a final mass attack; it badly mauled a battalion under Colonel Paul Vanuxem but was blocked by a curtain of roaring napalm. After that, the attacks became spasmodic, then died away completely. The air grew silent. The French looked around in stunned disbelief: They had prevailed; they remained lords of the battlefield. Giap had lost 6,000 dead and 8,000 wounded and had been defeated in the open field. French airpower, using a terrifying new weapon, had proved decisive. A Viet Minh officer wrote in his diary:

All of a sudden a sound can be heard in the sky and strange birds appear, getting larger and larger. Airplanes. I order my men to take cover from the bombs and machine-gun bullets. But the planes dive upon us without firing their guns. However, all of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire that falls from the skies.

Another plane swoops down behind us and again drops a napalm bomb. The bomb falls closely behind us and I feel its fiery breath touching my whole body. The men are now fleeing in all directions and I cannot hold them back. There is no way of holding out under this torrent of fire that flows in all directions and burns everything in its passage. On all sides, flames surround us now. In addition, French artillery and mortars now have our range and transform into a fiery tomb what had been, ten minutes ago, a quiet part of the forest.19

As de Lattre well understood, the victory at Vinh Yen would have been impossible without the timely arrival of American airplanes, weapons, and ammunition. The napalm bombs and howitzers were particularly important, but de Lattre also knew that virtually all the aircraft employed were of U.S. origin, as was much of the artillery. At a triumphant press conference in Saigon on January 23, he lauded the United States for her assistance in the battle. Describing the visit U.S. minister Donald R. Heath had made with him to the combat area a few days before, the French commander said that French officers had "eagerly seized the occasion to voice their gratitude for American supplies." To Heath privately, he said that the napalm had been crucial.20

Giap too grasped the importance of the stepped-up American aid to the enemy's cause. But he was unwilling to admit that Vinh Yen represented a serious defeat, or that it showed his forces unready for a major battle of maneuver. The operation was a close-run thing, he reasoned; the result could easily have gone the other way. Twice more that spring Giap tried to break into the delta; both times he failed. In late March, he sent twenty-one battalions against the French garrison around Mao Khe, a coastal village some twenty miles northwest of Haiphong. The French, undermanned by a ratio of three to one, repulsed the attack, thanks again largely to their command of the air and their superior artillery. Napalm was again used to devastating effect. Losses were high on both sides. The French sustained casualties of roughly 25 percent, and the Viet Minh left more than four hundred bodies on the battlefield. A week later the Viet Minh attacked again at nearby Dong Trieu; again they were beaten back.21

The third attempt came in late May. This time Giap moved from the south, in a classical maneuver against the French defenses in the southeast along the Day River. The objective was twofold: to capture the rice crops in the area, then ripe for harvesting, and to take the strongly Catholic area around Ninh Binh and Phat Diem, which to this point had proved stubbornly resistant to Viet Minh infiltration. It took the Viet Minh two months to move-mostly by night, to avoid detection-troops and porters and supplies all the way around the delta, and the monsoon rains started before the operation could begin. But Giap was confident, in part because one regiment of the 320th Division had managed to infiltrate behind enemy lines near Thai Binh, where it joined up with regional units in order to attack the French from the rear.

The assault began on May 29 as Viet Minh units crossed the Day River. They achieved the element of surprise and made initial gains, but de Lattre swiftly organized eight motorized brigades. Heavy fighting ensued, and for days the outcome was in doubt. Some positions around Ninh Binh changed hands several times. But the Catholic militia proved adept at interior defense, and French riverine forces finally cut Giap's supply lines across the river. By June 6, the French had gained the initiative. Four days later Giap ordered a withdrawal. He left some 9,000 dead and 1,000 captured.22

He had been outclassed, had shown his inexperience as a general. Cocksure by nature, he had failed to heed what the Vinh Yen defeat had taught about the difficulty of penetrating the delta. Neither he nor his staff yet understood adequately how to move large units or how to handle them in battle. He had sent them into action in open terrain during daylight, which made them easy targets for superior French firepower. He had failed to leave himself with reserve units and thus had no way to exploit sudden opportunities, and his withdrawals from all three operations had been chaotic and slow, causing further Viet Minh casualties. Only belatedly did he grasp what napalm could do to massed formations. Senior party leaders, notably theoretician Truong Chinh, accused Giap of causing needless massacres and of selecting the wrong commanders; even Ho Chi Minh, whose own leadership was called into question, expressed distress at the heavy battle losses. DRV radio broadcasts obliquely criticized the offensives by praising the guerrilla techniques used early in the war, and there were reports of increased desertions from Viet Minh ranks. Even the Chinese, now facing a prolonged fight against the Americans in Korea, sang a different tune than at the start of the year, emphasizing the need for caution. Giap didn't lose his position, but his authority was undermined. He resolved to steer clear of large set-piece engagements for the foreseeable future and to return to guerrilla warfare.23

A captured order of the day signed by Giap following the defeats put the matter plainly: "Our troops, who have shown their superiority as guerrillas, should, from now on, not seek massive battle. The general counteroffensive is called off. Regional elements will enter by small groups into towns and reinforce the urban networks. The prize of revolutionary warfare remains the population."24

IV