© Darius A. Irani, 2020
Background:
For most of its existence Vietnam has been a poor agrarian society. Its farmers were content to boast of their rice paddies and water buffaloes. Between 111 BCE and 1427 CE Chinese warlords would invade, occupy and then be violently expelled from Vietnam four times. After the last expulsion, the country finally had a measure of peace and independence. Sadly, it was not to be for very long. As a bulwark against British expansion Eastward and to bolster their own colonial ambitions, the French made steady inroads into the region and in 1887 Vietnam and Cambodia were colonized to create French Indochina. Laos would be added in 1893 to complete the trio. The French had one main objective - to enrich themselves at the expense of the Vietnamese. To achieve this they plundered the natural resources of the country. Tin, coal, rice and rubber were exported and sold overseas. The native farmers were robbed of their ancestral lands and forced to work for the benefit of French settlers. Worse still, they treated the Vietnamese with an indifferent brutality. Tens of thousands would die in the so-called cause of civilizing them. Any wonder that an underground resistance existed to expel the French.
During WWI about 100,000 Vietnamese were forced to “volunteer” and were then sent to the French battlefields where they fought and died. On returning to Vietnam the survivors realized that nothing had changed. Their sacrifices had earned them no respect or better treatment, and a nationalist political movement, seeking independence, emerged.
After WWI there were three '“powers” the Vietnamese could turn to for help in evicting the French: the European nations, America and communist Russia. As almost every European country had its own colonial empire, turning to any of them would simply replace one exploitive tyrant with another. America had turned inwards: isolationism was the order of the day. So much so that Congress in 1919 gave Wilson a rude shock when he returned from signing the treaty of Versailles. They wanted to have nothing more to do with Europe’s wars, and refused to let America join his brainchild, the League of Nations. They were certainly not going to get involved in a French squabble half a world away, in a place they hardly knew existed. This left resistance leaders like Ho and Giap with no choice except to start embracing communism if they were ever going to get rid of the French. Thus, it could be argued that communism didn’t have to do too much to expand in Southeast Asia, the greed, arrogance and cruelty of the Western Colonial powers did all the work for them. Between the two world wars, the independence movement did not have much success. There were a few uprisings and a significant mutiny in 1930 all of which the French easily suppressed.
In May 1940 the French capitulated to the Germans, and the French administrative and armed forces in Vietnam allied themselves with the Vichy government. The Japanese sensing an opportunity, invaded Vietnam and in four short days (22 to 26 September 1940) took control. Although in theory the Vichy administration was allied with the Japanese, in practice the Japanese took over the role of exploiter, with the French merely being figure heads. This shaky arrangement lasted till March of 1945 when the Japanese launched a coup and dismantled the entire French administration in Vietnam. Five months later the Japanese would themselves be gone, and the local resistance forces stepped in to fill the vacuum. Later that same year Ho would declare an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the people of Vietnam probably prayed that everybody else would just leave them alone.
The French unfortunately had other ideas. One morning in October 1945 the citizens of Saigon woke up to find a French flotilla in the harbor, and French troops back on their soil (it was barely six months since the end of WWII in Europe, and the idiots were ready to go at it again). Giap, the military leader of the Vietnamese resistance, was barely five feet tall and very slight of build. The 6-foot plus French legionaries and paratroopers towered over him, and his pleas for them to leave his land were treated with derision. The French had already fought in numerous campaigns; their officers were graduates of St. Cyr and other military academies, whereas Giap was just a history teacher with very little military experience. The French had a modern army that had helped to defeat Germany, as opposed to Giap’s ragtag army of a few dozen guerrillas armed with obsolete weapons. No betting man would have given him any odds of prevailing against the French. Ho, for his part, organized a peace conference in Paris. He appealed to the British for help. Britain was desperately clinging to its own disintegrating empire and would offer no help. America was preoccupied with Korea and was more interested in supporting the French than in expelling them(1). Ho and Giap had to accept that the only way they would get rid of the French was by force, and - once again - the only country that would help them was communist Russia.
The die was now cast. Vietnam would accelerate down the slippery slope to communism. For the first few years the struggle would be difficult. Giap did not have the means to launch any significant attacks. The few he tried were failures, and he had to be content with guerrilla attacks against small remote outposts. All this changed in 1949, when the communists took over mainland China. Suddenly, he had an endless supply of modern arms right on his northern border, and he took advantage of them. Inexorably, the tide began to turn. The French would eventually be humiliated. America would forget that it could have achieved a better outcome had it just put pressure on the French to leave(2). Instead, it would be aghast at the apparent spread of communism and start a second war in that poor besieged country.
GIAP:
As the military leader of the Viet Minh, Giap’s family was brutally targeted by the French. As far back as 1919, his father was jailed for subversive activities, and died in prison in just a few weeks. Shortly after this, his sister was arrested and she too died in just a few weeks of French incarceration. Giap was married in 1938 and had one daughter. In 1940, he fled into exile in China. The French then arrested his wife and she was beaten to death by prison guards in Hanoi’s central prison. Her sister was then guillotined. Even his daughter was not spared, also dying in a French prison. If the French had deliberately set out to create a ruthless and implacable foe they could not have done a better job. In the two ensuing wars he would ask for no quarter and would grant none. He would abide by no conventions. He would wage war with a total disregard for any life. “…his soldiers accepted the prospect of death with an enthusiasm which would send shivers down our spines.” By the time the Americans arrived his army was scarred, battle hardened and indifferent to their mortality.
Against such an enemy, American politicians would draft thousands of its reluctant youth, who wanted only to live and enjoy the great American dream that was just waking up. American Generals would give them a few weeks of basic training, arm them with a less than reliable rifle, and send them off to save a corrupt regime, posing as a democracy, in a country they had never heard of. Stupidity, unforgivable stupidity!
What the French would not realize until it was too late, was that Giap would go on to be recognized as one of the great military strategists of the century. This, in a century already teeming with military strategists.
FRANCE:
War in Europe had just ended barely five months earlier. For five long years France had been occupied by a brutal and murderous regime. Thousands of its citizens had been summarily shot by the Germans in reprisals for attacks by the resistance. More than most, they knew what it meant to be at the receiving end of a greedy ruthless occupier. Yet, here they were, ready to do to the Vietnamese what the Germans had just done to them. What made them think that the Vietnamese would be any more welcoming to them than they had been to the Germans.
In reality, France was in no position to fight a war. Its resources had been plundered to support the German war machine. The car in which DeGaulle triumphantly rode into Paris was an American Jeep. The tanks of LeClerc’s armored division, despite their cute French names, were American Shermans. The gas they ran on, the uniforms they wore, the planes flying in their victory parade, their guns and ammo - all American. They were also broke, so America would land up subsidizing about 80% of their war effort in Vietnam. It would appear that America was involved in Vietnam a lot earlier than any of its politicians were willing to admit.
Why go back to Vietnam? The Vietnamese may not have had an Iris Chang to document their suffering, but what the Japanese did to them was probably just as reprehensible as what they had done in Nanking and Shanghai. Vietnam’s natural resources had also been plundered to support the Japanese war machine. So why do it? What did the French think was left to be sucked out of this hurting and denuded country? Maybe it was just a desperate attempt to try and recreate a greatness that five years earlier had been trampled under the treads of German Panzers in six short weeks.
Giap was a quick learner and a masterful tactician. After a few initial defeats, he would not engage the French in a set piece battle. The lush rain forests were the perfect environment to move his men and supplies and set his traps. He would also bury or remove his dead from the battlefield making it difficult to assess his casualties or estimate his remaining manpower. Both tactics that would be equally frustrating to the Americans who would follow. It could be argued that everything America needed to know about what would happen to it in Vietnam was unfolding before its eyes, but its politicians were too stupid and its generals too engrossed in the superiority of their technology to recognize it.
Even when it started, the war-weary French population must have wondered what purpose the return to Vietnam could serve. As it dragged on year after year with no apparent end in sight (casualties and costs rapidly increasing) it became extremely unpopular at home - does all this sound familiar?
The final blow would be delivered in a remote valley called Dien Bien Phu in the North West corner of Vietnam close to the Laotian border. Despite overwhelming air superiority and fire power, the French would be outmaneuvered and outfought to a crushing defeat. Battle hardened paratroopers and foreign legioners would crumble before the onslaught of “a host of little armed men, dressed in coarse green cloth, with sandals cut out of tires on their feet, helmets of inter-laced bamboo decorated with the ruby of a red star on their heads, and gauze masks over their faces, who came running out of their hiding places in the forests and mountains” (3). The French survivors - nearly 10,000 soldiers - would be taken prisoner(4). The French would give up and exit in disgrace and leave the whole mess for the UN to sort out. Sadly, had America’s politicians and generals been paying any attention they would have seen that everything they needed to know..... Or maybe they allowed their egos to delude them into believing they could do better than the French.
AFTERMATH
As a final insult to France’s injured pride, its defeat at Dien Bien Phu would galvanize its African colonies to seek their own independence. Within two years both Morocco and Tunisia would be free. Algeria would engage in a bloody struggle for eight years before gaining its independence. Along the way this struggle would spill over onto mainland France itself. It would be responsible for the fall of the Fourth French Republic and would include many attempts on the life of de Gaulle himself.
France had never intended to leave Indochina, so there was no Plan B for how the colonies would govern themselves after its abrupt departure in 1954. Within a year America would step into this morass and stay there for twenty years. It would squander the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and a Trillion dollars and leave - if not in disgrace at least in abject failure. Both Laos and Cambodia already had nascent communist movements and proxy wars would also be fought in both countries for the next twenty years. When America finally pulled out in 1975, all three puppet governments would collapse, and the three dreaded dominos would all fall to communism. A psychopath called Pol Pot would rise to power in Cambodia and perpetrate one of the worst genocides of the century. Vietnam would fight wars against Cambodia and its old ally China. Vietnamese refugees would create a humanitarian crisis that would persist almost till the end of the century. All for what?
Finally, the disproportionate number of casualties provides a sobering insight. The Vietnamese may have prevailed in both conflicts because they were willing to do what neither the French nor the Americans would ever be able to do - fight and keep on fighting without seeming to ever stop to count their dead and wounded.
Notes:
As early as the Yalta Conference of February 1945, the Americans were suspicious of what Stalin intended to do with the “liberated” nations of Eastern Europe and South East Asia. None the less, Korea was divided in two at the 38th parallel, with control of the Northern half falling into Russia’s hands. As soon as the Japanese left, it was apparent that the country was now in two zones: an isolated, sealed off and heavily armed North and an ill equipped south. Russia would provide the North with tanks, artillery and small arms which they would use to get significant battle experience by fighting alongside Mao in China. All of this made American leadership paranoid about communist expansion in Southern East Asia. So much so, that they could not look at the two situations objectively and realize how different they were. Whereas Korea was a simple opportunistic power play against a weaker and unprepared neighbor, Vietnam was a beleaguered country trying to get independence from an oppressive colonizer. The Vietnamese had to turn to communism because it was the only ideology that would support their struggle.
This is an intriguing question. What if France had granted the three colonies independence in 1946 and left them alone? Although Ho had declared a nominal government in Hanoi, his power base was limited to the northern half of the country and there were many factions competing for power. Even this limited control in the North was immediately quashed by an invasion of 200,000 Chinese troops sent by Chiang Kai-shek to supervise the repatriation of the defeated Japanese who were still there. The Chinese only left as part of a larger deal with the French, who had to renounce all their concessions in China in return. Had the French not been around to negotiate this deal these troops could have easily overwhelmed the communists. Meanwhile, Bao Dai (the last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty) was lurking in the wings with tens of thousands of nationalist troops loosely loyal to him. Could he have turned the tide against the communists? Even in the worst case scenario, in which Ho and Giap are still successful, just avoiding two wars and millions of casualties would still have been a better outcome.
“The Battle of Dienbienphu” by Jules Roy
(page 272)Like all other totalitarian regimes, the Viet Minh’s treatment of dissidents and prisoners was callous and inhumane. Ho and Giap readily disposed of thousands of Vietnamese who might have been a threat to them. After the war ended an exchange of all POWs was part of the cease-fire agreement. Thousands of well fed and well kept members of the “Viet-Nam People’s Army” were returned to the Viet Minh. Sadly, the returning French prisoners “were walking skeletons in no way different from those who survived Dachau and Buchenwald.” For some reason the VPA showed singular cruelty towards the prisoners from Dien Bien Phu. They were made to endure forced marches of 450 and 530 miles to the POW camps. “This was the Death March of the French Union garrison of Dien Bien Phu, lasting from May to July 1954, it caused more losses than any single battle of the whole Indochina war.” [both quotes are from “Street Without Joy” by Bernard Fall]