war.
A common observation about Hanoi is that it shows so few traces of the American War. Few physical traces at any rate, rather than psychic ones. The cliché is rendered all the truer by a handful of vivid exceptions. The centre section of the city’s magnificent nineteenth-century railway station was destroyed in the infamous Christmas Day Bombing of 1972, a fact made unforgettable even to tourists by the way that the missing part was rebuilt in the Soviet brutalist style. But what’s most remarkable is not the amount of evidence of the American War, but the nearly complete absence of any from the long war against the French. Although northern Vietnam was fed largely by the labour of southern Vietnam, Hanoi was the administrative seat of all French Indochina. It was at the centre of a textbook closed-market system, in which the colonies were obliged to sell the French their crops and minerals cheaply while being forced to pay dearly for the mandatory importation of French manufactured goods. Not coincidentally, Hanoi and the north more generally were also the scene of most of the unrest that often broke out as insurgency.
Throughout the 1930s, young radical intellectuals engaged in subtle acts of sabotage — and other acts not so subtle. The Second World War left the situation confused and even more complicated, but once it was over, the nationalist movement surged. Looking today at the Hanoi Opera House, on whose steps newlyweds are often photographed, one has no sense of the fighting that took place there. At the former governor general’s residence, there are only a few pockmarks in an iron railing to remind people of the pitched battle fought there in August 1945 — the month before Ho stood in Ba Dinh Square (a space long since Sovietized in appearance) and read aloud the new republic’s founding document, which he had drafted in a house at 48 Hang Ngang. He called this instrument the Declaration of Independence, and plagiarized liberally from the American one of the same name.
But Hanoi was still at war, and the French were able to bring it to the threshold of starvation by cutting it off from the south. In 1947, the French recaptured the city, and people’s suffering became deeper and more widespread as the urban warfare grew more intense and deadly. Natives pointed me to traffic-choked intersections, places without commemorative markers, where ambushes and bombings had once taken place. There are said to have been spies and counter-spies in every neighbourhood; in some neighbourhoods, in every street; in some streets, on every block. Citizens who could do so fled to the countryside, which was the Viet Minh’s base of support. Some suggest that by 1948 or 1949 there were only about ten thousand civilians still living in Hanoi. Following Dien Bien Phu, the Viet Minh retook the city — easily, as the French were taking flight — and in a few years the population had climbed to four hundred thousand. But it was a fundamentally different place, not merely bigger. In what seemed to the twentieth-century West a practical way to behave, the United Nations partitioned Vietnam. There would now be two Vietnams just as there were two Germanys and two Koreas: the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, the capitalist Republic of Vietnam in the south. Slowly but steadily, the south, which possessed most of the agriculture and most of the industry, became a client of the United States. For its part, the north became dependent on China and the Soviet Union as models of collectivism. Many in the West saw the coming struggle as one between ideologies. Others saw it as the perfect prelude to a Vietnamese civil war.
— ENDGAME —
Dien Bien Phu is a market town in an almost preposterously remote corner of northwest Vietnam. Common sources give its population as either nine thousand or twenty-two thousand (the former seems more likely to me). In 1953, however, it was so small it wasn’t even considered a community and in fact didn’t have a name. The phrase “Dien Bien Phu” translates roughly as “border-area administrative post.” Few outsiders had ever heard of it. By the spring of 1954, however, it was a place very much in the news internationally.
France’s eagerness to resume its lucrative control of Indochina at the end of the Second Wold War was stymied by the surprising, to French eyes, growth of the Viet Minh. As Ho Chi Minh was the political brain of the liberation movement, so Vo Nguyen Giap was the military one. Ted Morgan has written of Giap as “a man of action with a chess player’s mind.” Morgan, a senior American journalist and biographer, is himself, like Ho, a pseudonymous individual. Until he chose to become an American in the 1970s, he was Sanche de Gramont, a minor member of the lingering French nobility. (He selected “Ted Morgan” because it is an anagram of “de Gramont.”) As a young man he was an intelligence officer in the French army, serving during the war in Algeria, where some of the soldiers he knew had survived the horrible fighting at Dien Bien Phu.
Few battles of the twentieth century were more resoundingly decisive or remain such powerful cautionary tales. What took place at Dien Bien Phu has become the subject of a vast literature in both celebratory Vietnamese and exculpatory French. In English, too, the topic keeps recurring in new books, both scholarly and popular. For years, the foremost work in English was Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. It was published in 1966, the year before its author was killed by a landmine while reporting the American War for the New York Times. More than four decades later came Morgan’s Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War, a work whose subtitle says a great deal. I suppose that Morgan is still so French that his former nation’s defeat seems a tragedy in more than just loss of life. But he may also have become so American that, like many others in the United States, he continues to seek precedents for what happened between 1965 and 1975. In any case, the two books are quite different. Fall loved military jargon and put far more effort into explaining logistics, for example, than ideology. In contrast, Morgan writes excellent journalistic prose and attempts the difficult of task of giving us the serious political context for the battle narrative.
What exactly went so wretchedly wrong for the French? Cultural condescension, certainly, but impatience, as well. The colonies were growing. In 1937, there were twenty thousand French people — the colons — in Vietnam and 19 million Vietnamese. By 1954 there were fifty thousand French and 25 million Vietnamese. The latter had stereotypes of the former: for instance, that of the big-bellied French officials and businessmen, growing rich and cruel on exorbitant taxation, rigidly imperial economics, and military might while living with their Vietnamese mistresses (con gai). For their part, the French saw the local population as backward and ignorant.
For a number of years the Viet Minh had been using standard guerrilla and terrorist tactics in both the cities and the rural areas, following methods learned by observing Mao Zedong. By 1953, however, the former ragtag guerrillas had become a formidable and highly disciplined army. We all know the platitude about the tendency of generals to refight the previous war. In this case, the previous war was the recently concluded one in Korea whose most glaring feature had come right at the beginning, in June 1950, when the North invaded the South by suddenly sending a “human wave” of 213,000 soldiers across the 38th parallel.
In Vietnam, the French, tired of the standard anti-colonial scrapping, and fearful that the Viet Minh would expand the war into neighbouring Laos, came up with a plan. They would fortify a strange misty valley a few miles from the Lao border. It was, and is, an elliptical plain made of red clay and surrounded on all sides by thick jungle and very high mountains. Such a tempting target was supposed to lure the Viet Minh into making a human-wave attack. The French imagined tens of thousands, maybe scores of thousands, of lightly armed bo dois charging over open ground, only to be mowed down by French artillery and air power in a single coup. The French believed they were well prepared for their mission. They had even brought along two field-brothels (bordels militaires de campagne) staffed with Algerian and Vietnamese women. But French G-2 work was very poor at best and almost non-existent at worst. They didn’t know how many Vietnamese they were facing or where exactly these enemies were or even how they were armed. They knew only that the Viet Minh, who admittedly had no air force, likewise had no artillery to speak of, nor the skill to use it effectively if they had. These assumptions were mistaken. It was the French who became the sitting
