crooned irresistibly, reminding the world of the glory of the French language: ‘La mer, qu’on voit danser la long des golfes claires’, words rendered banal in English: ‘The sea, that we see dancing the length of the bright bays’. Christian Dior seized the imagination of fashionable womankind with his New Look, unfolding swathes of fabric beneath a tight waist and bodice, putting to flight years of austerity. French culture, style, beauty both natural and man-made, were once more ascendant. From Paris the writer Nancy Mitford tirelessly mocked her English compatriots for their inability to match her hosts’ cuisine, wit, sophistication.
And yet these same clever, conceited, morbidly insecure people chose to immerse themselves in a brutal colonial war eight thousand miles from home, which eventually cost their own side more than ninety thousand dead, and the Vietnamese people far more. Most of the inhabitants of metropolitan France regarded the struggle to preserve their overseas empire – la sale guerre, ‘the dirty war’ – with indifference, if not outright cynicism. De Gaulle, now in political exile, displayed belated doubts, which soon became certainty, that France had no vital interest in Indochina, and could not prevail there. Yet a vocal minority cared passionately, and promoted a fabulously expensive military commitment.
George Orwell observed that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it, whereas it was France’s misfortune to take almost a decade to achieve this. The struggle for Indochina took different forms, according to the regions of the country. In the north, large forces manoeuvred and fought against communist formations that eventually mustered sixty thousand men, supported by a revolving cast of peasant porters. A Vietminh document declared the dry season between October and April ‘most propitious for fighting’, while the rainiest months from May to October, when movement became difficult, were for rest, training, redeployment, planning. Meanwhile in towns and cities, the French strove to combat terror attacks – bombs thrown into crowded cafés, shootings of officials. Such incidents became part of a new normality: at a mayoral reception in Haiphong, guests were momentarily alarmed by a nearby explosion and gunshots, but cocktails and conversation resumed when it was learned that a Vietminh had merely been shot dead after tossing a grenade at a police station. In one unusually successful and cruel attack, guerrillas burst in upon a dinner party held at a French home at Cap St Jacques, near the mouth of the Saigon River. They killed with grenades and old British sten guns eight officers, two women, six children and four Vietnamese servants.
Across the countryside, a network of almost a thousand forts and miradors – watchtowers skirted with mines, concertina wire, logs, sandbags, corrugated iron and trenches prickling with sharpened bamboo stakes – was created to protect villages and roads. These had indifferent success in containing the Vietminh, who lifted the mines for their own use, and could usually overrun a local post if they set their minds to it. French small craft fought fierce battles on the Black River against guerrillas firing from the shore.
Meanwhile, high in the mountains and deep in the jungle, French special forces of the GCMA – Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés – led tribesmen who hated the communists for their own reasons. Since insertion and extraction were dependent upon airstrips, some GCMA men went native because they had no choice; more than a few never returned to civilisation. This became the last conflict in which paratroops made repeated operational jumps, some as often as once a week. For most French units, however, this was a road-dominated war, in which helicopters played only a marginal role: even in the struggle’s last days, the colonial power owned just twenty-three. Infantry conducted an interminable succession of sweeps across the countryside, with such lyrical code names as Citron, Mandarine, Mercure, Artois, Mouette and Nice I & II. These killed some Vietminh, but only in return for a terrific expenditure of effort and intensification of peasant grievances.
Giap had attended no war college, yet read voraciously: he became obsessed with Napoleon, Clausewitz and the guerrilla tactics of Mao. His forces achieved one of their first high-profile successes on 27 January 1947, ambushing a convoy carrying Vietnamese politicians in French service on an inspection tour of the north. Fourteen vehicles were destroyed, the education minister and a French engineer killed. The attack impressed the authorities by its boldness and efficiency, and more of the same followed. Route 5 from Hanoi to Haiphong became known as ‘the road of blood’. A village on the north–south Route 1 was so notorious an ambush site that the French bulldozed it.
The two sides competed in ruthlessness. The Vietminh executed village chiefs who declined to bow to their will, often by live burial before peasant audiences, after subjecting them to tortures of medieval ingenuity. When the Vietminh killed one Vietnamese soldier captured in French service, a guerrilla borrowed a pair of pliers from a nearby house, with which he removed the man’s gold fillings. A child witness wrote: ‘I had seen many corpses beheaded, dismembered, eviscerated, even scalped, yet nothing more disgusting than the sight of that guerrilla holding the two gold teeth, his face beaming.’ Vietnamese adapted readily to conducting covert lives in parallel with their overt ones, because their society had a long tradition of secret associations.
The French employed every extravagance of firepower on the battlefield, and allowed their troops almost absolute licence behind it. The writer Norman Lewis described his first flight to Saigon. His neighbour in the Air France plane was a Foreign Legion colonel, who peered at the Mekong delta below with the jaundiced eye of familiarity. As they passed a cluster of huts at two thousand feet, Lewis’s innocent gaze fixed upon what might have been a wisp of incense curling upwards. Then he grasped that it was, instead, a billowing pall of smoke. When moving specks also became visible, his neighbour the Legionnaire observed sagely, ‘Une opération.’ Lewis wrote: ‘Somehow, as he spoke, he seemed linked psychically to what was going on below. Authority flowed back into the travel-weary figure. With the accession of this priestly essence he dominated the rest of the passengers. Beneath our eyes violence was being done, but we were as detached from it almost as from history … One could understand what an aid to untroubled killing the bombing plane must be.’
French brutality was driven partly by the habit of racial domination, partly by consciousness that even if many peasants were not active foes, they knew where the enemy was, in which culvert or on what path his snares awaited the unwary. The colonialists and their allies of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao – southern religious sects with formidable private armies – are reckoned to have killed five civilians for every one of their own people who perished. The November 1948 massacre of over two hundred Vietnamese women and children at My Trach, in the southernmost province of what would become North Vietnam, is scarcely acknowledged in modern France, yet seems evidentially beyond doubt. Meanwhile, following incidents such as an ambush in which the founders of the Hoa Hao were killed, ‘The Hoa-Hao liked to tie Viet-Minh sympathisers together with rope and throw them into the rivers to drown in bundles,’ in the words of Bernard Fall, ‘floating down the river like so many trains of junks, at the mercy of the currents and tides.’
An American, Bob Miller of United Press, was aboard a French armoured barge patrolling a canal late one night when its searchlight fixed upon three sampans, breaching the curfew. Two that ignored an order to halt were riddled with machine-gun-fire. The third contained two elderly peasants and their son, with a cargo of rice. The sacks were duly tipped overboard, whereupon the boy sought to escape by leaping into the water. A soldier tossed a grenade in his wake, killing him. A courteous young French officer explained to Miller that ‘it was only by making people understand that breaches of the regulations would be punished with extreme severity that [the French] could hope to keep the upper hand’. Upper hand? Even in the relatively quiet years 1947–48, a single Foreign Legion battalion suffered two hundred casualties from mines, skirmishes and ambushes.
The Legion has become part of a heroic legend of Indochina. Yet other French soldiers derided them as genre rouleau compresseur – ‘steamroller types’. Among Vietnamese civilians their units – which included some former members of Hitler’s SS and Wehrmacht – achieved an appalling reputation for rape and pillage. Duong Van Mai, one of a traditional mandarin family, described how Legionnaires entered
