‘The spirit was marvellous! We imagined that we were all part of one big family.’ Volunteer canteens were formed, known as ‘soldiers’ mothers’ restaurants’, at which local women provided free food for fighters. Ky and his trio walked hundreds of miles to perform: ‘There was something very interesting and wonderful about this. Even though we were in a war zone where the fighting was very fierce, every night we would organise a show, and draw big crowds. The songs I sang weren’t very good, and we did not harmonise well, but we would tell stories, recite poetry.’ Often the lights around the stage had to be masked, to escape French attention. Ky performed as far south as Hue, where he slept on the bank of the Perfume River, ate food brought out from the city, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and briefly fell in love with a girl in one of his audiences.
Ky persuaded his English-speaking fellow-performer Hai Chau to read aloud to them from the Reader’s Digest, to help him learn English phrases, in preparation for life after the war. Some of these were unexpected, such as ‘I have a surprise for you in my pocket.’ Periodically on their travels they would be abruptly awakened by a voice shouting ‘Tay can!’ – ‘French sweep!’ As the enemy approached, Vietminh fighters would say wearily, ‘The buffalo are out.’ Hai Chau wrote a song with that title, which soldiers loved, satirising the occupiers. Ky was one among many revolutionaries who discovered romance in their shared experience. It offered Vietnamese what the French had for a century denied them: self-respect. Moreover the passage of each month, then of each year, increased the belief of millions of Vietnamese that the best reason to support the communists was that they were destined to win. A little peasant girl sat up far into the night with her mother and sisters in their hut near Hue, making Vietminh flags, ‘red with the yellow star, because we knew that the people would want them to celebrate … victory’.
Yet it seems mistaken uncritically to accept Van Ky’s picture of the war years as a romantic idyll: the privations and sacrifices were terrible. Tensions increased between the revolutionary movement’s peasant supporters and its bourgeois ones. Nguyen Duc Huy, born in 1931 the son of a poor farmer, was sent to study at the new Vietminh military academy in China, where he found the atmosphere poisoned by class struggles and relentless self-criticism sessions. A cadet who had been decorated for bravery in battle killed himself under ideological interrogation. Huy was variously accused of running a French spy network and a nationalist assassination team, then imprisoned for seven months in an underground cell. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘The injustice of it all is impossible to describe.’ What seems extraordinary is that after such experiences he served as a company commander against the French, then led a battalion against the Americans, without losing faith in the Party.
Throughout Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan’s early years with the Vietminh she was harassed about her background in a wealthy dynasty. Her father was a member of the royal family who had served in the emperor’s cabinet. With Giap’s army, at first she was merely described dismissively as ‘bo doi nhoc’ – ‘a kid soldier’. Later, however, despite her passion for the cause, comrades said scornfully, ‘This girl went to a French school – why have they sent her here? How can a mandarin’s daughter live with the Resistance?’ Toan said later: ‘They made things hard for me. I was very unhappy.’ She herself remained nonetheless loyal to the Vietminh, but the enthusiasm for the guerrillas of another bourgeois, sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky, waned: ‘For them the Resistance movement was not merely about expelling foreigners. It was about turning the tables, becoming rulers, revenge.’ Ky eventually took an army commission with the French, becoming a pilot.
Despite heavy losses in clashes around Hanoi, the Vietminh continued to expand their northern ‘liberated zones’. By 1952 they were estimated to control a quarter of the south’s population; three-quarters of the people of central Vietnam; over half in the north. The French wasted immense resources on fortifications. The so-called ‘De Lattre line’, created to protect the Red River delta, poured fifty-one million cubic yards of concrete into 2,200 pillboxes, each one of which was allotted a number prefaced by ‘PK’ – poste kilométrique. This suited the Vietminh strategy of grignotage – gnawing away at French strength: they progressively eliminated such isolated positions, always in darkness. The first that defenders knew of their nemesis was the explosion of a pole charge in the barbed wire, followed by cries of ‘Tien-len!’ – ‘Forward!’ – from attacking communist infantry. By dawn the Vietminh would be gone, leaving only corpses, often mutilated, and blackened patches where mortars or rockets had exploded on earth or concrete. And in Hanoi or Haiphong, one French staff officer would mutter to another, ‘Did you hear what happened to PK141 last night?’
The war threw up many larger-than-life French leaders, such as the huge, red-bearded Col. Paul Vanuxem, a fifty-year-old intellectual warrior, qualified to hold tenure as a professor of philosophy. Maj. Marcel Bigeard had gone into World War II as a sergeant, and parachuted into France in 1944. Col. Christian de Castries was a cavalryman and a dandy, never without his silk scarf, who cherished his reputation as a ladies’ man. There were famous women, too – the likes of Valérie André, a doctor who was also a helicopter pilot, and the highly decorated airborne nurse Paule Dupont d’Isigny.
In the autumn of 1952 Giap concentrated three divisions on the east bank of the Red River, tasked with seizing Nghia Lo, a strategically important ridge. Thanks to night marches and brilliant use of daylight concealment, each man looking to the backpack camouflage of the soldier in front of him, they deployed unnoticed by the French. Then, in a series of assaults that began on 17 October, they overran a chain of posts. Marcel Bigeard’s para battalion covered the retreat of the surviving detachments towards the Black River, in a series of actions that became a nightmare legend. They were obliged to abandon their wounded, and local people later reported finding Bigeard’s trail adorned with the severed heads of those left behind, set on stakes by the Vietminh. The major and those of his men who survived were greeted as heroes when at last they reached the French lines, but the Nghia Lo battles had been a significant disaster.
In April 1953 the communists opened a new front in Laos, to disperse French strength. By June, Chinese deliveries of supplies and munitions had risen from 250 tons in the same period the previous year to two thousand tons a month, together with Molotova trucks and bulldozers. Meanwhile French forces were running short of officers and NCOs, many of the North African troops were scarcely trained, and nobody retained much confidence in the spirit of 110,000 locally recruited soldiers. Gen. ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel, senior US Army officer in the Pacific, visited Saigon in the summer of 1953, soon after Gen. Henri Navarre became commander-in-chief. With characteristic bombast the American urged the French to stir their stumps – adopt a more aggressive military posture. The Korean experience had shown that when lightly-armed Chinese troops caught Americans in the open, they sometimes prevailed. But where circumstances were contrived in which US forces held prepared positions covered by air- and firepower, they became almost invincible. Why could not the French exploit the same realities? Navarre agreed. He cast about for a battlefield on which French strength and Vietminh weakness could be laid bare before the world. He chose Dienbienphu.
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1 WAITING FOR GIAP
So many ‘fatal decisions’ were made in Indochina that it would be invidious to single out any for primacy, but that which was made in November 1953 removed any lingering doubt about who was to become the victor, who the vanquished. Dienbienphu was a relatively small battle, engaging on the colonialist side barely a division. Yet it assumed decisive moral significance, because it was launched as a French initiative, with the explicit purpose of bringing the Vietminh to battle, and was then lost for reasons that reflected epic bungling. Navarre’s bosses in Paris were in those days almost as confused as was the general himself, being unwilling either to give up the struggle or to continue it. France’s Committee of National
