Chapter 2

Acheson and the entangling alliance: 1946–1952

THE INCLINATION TO INTERVENE: HOPE OF A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT

As soon as the French war in Vietnam started the US began to think about forms of intervention. At first the ideas appeared as rumours and reports: that, although it had not yet been announced, the US had already taken steps to halt the fighting; that, in Washington, ambassador Bonnet had been called in and told that a settlement was imperative; that if the matter was brought up in the UN the US would not necessarily support France; that the US wished to ensure that no Lend-Lease weapons were being used ‘to suppress Vietnam’ – although it was suspected they were; and that the head of Southeast Asian Affairs at the State Department (Mr A.L. Moffat) was already in the area and would be glad to assist both sides.¹ According to the US consul in Saigon, three and a half of these four statements were completely false but, in fact, not only may Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson have offered the ‘good offices’ of the US² (as they were to be offered in Indonesia) but there was also at the same time in effect a plea from Moffat, then in Singapore, that for various reasons the US should intervene. Third-party action, he said, was essential. There was a deep need for US moral leadership. The Vietminh record was no worse than that of the French. America's ‘hands off policy was based on European rather than on Asian considerations. The USSR was not directly active in Southeast Asia: there was, said Moffat sarcastically, no need because the democracies were performing most effectively on their behalf. And Moffat himself seemed hopeful of a political solution based on an independent Vietnam which was to be associated with or even part of the French Union.³ At about the same time as the State Department was receiving this cable from their most senior man on the spot, Secretary of State Byrnes was cabling the Paris embassy that the French were planning to reconquer Tonkin and might set up a puppet government; while in Hanoi the French commander, General Morlière, was claiming that the US and Chinese consuls had denounced the ‘criminal and bestial folly’ of the Vietminh; although apparently they hadn't said a word one way or the other. Thus, by the very beginning of 1947, and well before ‘containment’, the Marshall plan and the Zhdanov doctrine drew the battle lines between Russia and the US in Europe and in general it may be seen that a framework of impressions, intentions, hopes and misunderstandings was being thrown up which would support US policy towards Vietnam for the next 20 years and under whose weight it would ultimately collapse. Specifically, there was the idea of intervention; historic doubts about and antipathy towards European colonialism; corresponding commitment to self-determination and, above all, an impressive self-confidence founded on US power, a resurgence of Wilsonian ideals, and a belief that the principles of the Atlantic Charter and those of the UN should at least inform if they did not determine the foreign policies of the US. At any rate at the beginning, there was a certain even-handedness towards France and the Vietminh coupled with resistance to France's manifest intention that the US could hardly help being involved, one way or another, even though they professed neutrality. This role may have been rather a disappointment to both sides, as General Gallagher said when he got back from Hanoi,⁴ although by opposing the clearance of wartime US mines that had been laid in Haiphong harbour, thus preventing an early return of French troopships, Gallagher seems to have come down rather heavily on the Vietminh side.⁵

Once the war between France and the Vietminh had begun, the time had obviously passed when American operational decisions such as this would affect the fortunes of either side. For someone like Moffat, one of the professionals who was helping to mould US policy in Southeast Asia, there had been no doubt, at least before the event, that the liberation of Indo-China was going to depend upon the US defeat of Japan. Because the US was sacrificing blood and treasure to assure peace and stability in the Far East, the maintenance of which after the war would be largely a US responsibility, it would not have been unreasonable ‘to insist that the French give adequate assurances as to the implementing of policies in Indo-China which we consider essential to assure peace and stability in the Far East’.⁶

Perhaps, as Moffat said, Americans could see the situation in Southeast Asia more objectively than the British, the French and the Dutch because ‘they could analyse problems without the handicap of self-interest, prejudice, pride or domestic politics’.⁷ When it came to actually making policy, however, and actually using ‘the power we had to try to secure self-government in Indo-China’, not only would the problems of intervention against US allies presumably have been more difficult than against her enemies, but there was always the risk as well that circumstances might prejudice ideal or even optimum solutions. For example, when the State Department's Far Eastern Office was trying, unsuccessfully, to put together a compromise paper that would be agreed with the European Office, one may applaud the objective of an Indo-China that was to be fully self-governed, autonomous, and democratic: but there was a world of difference between a ‘national’ and a ‘federal’ government which would become obvious as events unfolded and the qualification, which Moffat and his colleagues seemed to accept, to full self-government which was explicit in Indo-China's recommended partnership in the French Union, and was, by implication reserved to France as a matter of imperial concern, precisely the point, or at least the formality, which produced the irreparable break between France and Ho's infant Republic.⁸

Moffat's testimony although, obviously, personal would seem to uncover therefore not only the roots of US policy in Vietnam – a belief in trusteeship, and international organization generally, a distrust of France, a traditional antipathy to colonialism – but also an immanent if unconscious belief in US intervention that was necessary for the ordering of a more perfect world. At the same time he reflects the important belief that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist even though in his next sentence Moffat said ‘He was also a communist and believed that communism offered the best hope for the Vietnamese people.’ This may, of course, have been a retrospective opinion that was at least tinged with 25 years' subsequent experience and challenged, both before and after, the worldwide definitions of the late 1940s which seemed to require that the Vietminh should have been put into either one of two boxes, nationalist or communist, but not both. At the time, however, the question of Ho Chi Minh's communism and his connections with Moscow and with ‘international communism’ seemed somewhat academic and certainly no more important to begin with than the mounting suspicions of France's unreconstructed colonialism.⁹

When Secretary of State Marshall was cabling the Embassy in Paris that Ho Chi Minh had direct Communist connections – whether or not this was a fact depends upon what one means by ‘connection’ – he argued that it was also a fact that colonial empires, in the 19th-century sense, were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Although the US, or at least the State Department, ‘frankly [had] no solution of problem to suggest’ it was obvious that the US was at this stage hoping for a negotiated settlement, a settlement in which their further hope was that France would find it possible to be more than generous.¹⁰

By this time it was becoming obvious that in spite of the fact that the French were conveying the impression of a limited operation ‘to restore order’ (which might be at least six months to a year) they were hoping for more moderate Vietnamese leaders to emerge and, in the meantime, they would not after all negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. Thus, although the US had been told by the French not only that there was no question of the ‘reconquest’ of Indo-China but that it was also doubtful that France had the military strength to accomplish it,¹¹ they were also invited to believe, by the French, that Ho was in direct contact with Moscow and was receiving advice and instructions from the Soviets. Acheson, as acting Secretary of State, may not have gone so far; although just before the war began, when it looked as if Moffat was going to meet Ho in Hanoi, Acheson asked him to ‘keep in mind Ho's clear record as agent international communism, absence evidence recantation Moscow affiliations … and support Ho receiving [from] French Communist Party.’¹² (Incidentally, during the Fontainebleau conference Ho had called on the US Ambassador in Paris to assure him that he and his party aspired to independence in the French Union and that he was not a communist.)¹³ Again, neither these comments nor what was described as the least desirable eventuality ‘the establishment of a Communist-dominated, Moscow-oriented state in Indo-China’, seem inaccurate or unreasonable: although it may be argued that the inherent fault was to assume that this represented the limit of Ho's power and appeal. In any case the State Department was uncertain about the nature of the Vietminh's communist connections – ‘possibly in indirect touch with Moscow and direct touch with Yenan’¹⁴ – and French influence was reckoned to be important not only as an antidote to Soviet influence but also to protect Vietnam and Southeast Asia from ‘future Chinese imperialism’.¹⁵

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Such hopes as there may have been – American, French, even Vietminh – of a cease-fire or negotiated settlement lingered on for several months but once the French had begun fighting they presented their case, modestly, that military operations were designed with no thought of reconquest but simply to persuade the Vietminh that they had no hope of victory. After all, of course, negotiations would be possible and already the French claimed that with an estimated eight to ten thousand dead, Vietminh resistance was weakening. In diplomatic exchanges, at least, the French accepted American reservations about unregenerate colonialism in Vietnam although, as the French pointed out, they could not be expected to assist in or condone the establishment of a government of Vietnam which would not follow democratic principles ‘as these are understood in the West’. As they did not regard the existing ‘Democratic Republic’ as representative of the people of Annam and Tonkin (the question of Cochinchina tended not to be raised) this obviously ruled out serious negotation.¹⁶

At least, one may take this assumption from the terms which the French emissary Paul Mus, after an arduous journey, presented to Ho in May 1947 and which required what amounted to a conditional surrender; and in any case now that the Communist Party had been ousted from the French government there was no longer the same effective demand in France for a negotiated settlement. Nevertheless, with repeated French insinuations that they had neither the means nor the intention of reconquering Vietnam, it obviously came as a shock to the US to discover that this was exactly what France seemed to have in mind. As it happened, in spite of General Marshall's fears, France's colonial policy did not become a Congressional issue in 1947 nor did it, contrary to what Marshall feared, have much effect on public opinion in the US. In any event, in so far as Congress was interested in Asia, and had assumed many direct responsibilities, its concern was with military assistance and 99-year leases on bases in the Philippines and the dilemmas of policy that these signalled towards China. Although the US may never have been on the brink of intervention in China she had sent 50,000 marines to Northern China in 1945, followed by General Marshall acting as Truman's personal representative. His mission, in so far as it was to reconcile the Nationalists and Communists, was a failure and indeed could hardly have been expected to be otherwise. Events in Vietnam, in many ways comparable although obviously complicated by the factor of French colonialism, were of infinitely less interest and for the moment seemed to require only a definition of attitudes rather than acts of policy.

Nevertheless, Vietnam, as well as China, represented entanglements for US policy although, in one respect at least, the possibility that the US might be able to influence French policy and be able to exert sufficient influence on France to reach a negotiated settlement made the situation more hopeful. It was, moreover, a hope which the French encouraged from time to time although what was achieved seemed always to be less than what was promised. Perhaps Bidault, on a visit to the US, gave the best idea of French intentions when he said that Marshall Aid would make it possible for France ‘to avoid the abandonment of French positions’¹⁷ and even where there were the generous intentions that the US had hoped for, one way or another they always seemed to be frustrated. Thus, Bollaert, who had replaced d'Argenlieu as High Commissioner, apparently wanted France to take the initiative and to pronounce the word ‘independence’ in a major speech on 15 August 1947, the day on which India was to receive independence.¹⁸ Even though it seems only to have been conditional independence the terms were so alarming to General Valluy that he flew back to Paris to warn the French Government and the outcome was a special cabinet meeting at which hardly anyone supported the Bollaert initiative. The result was that when Bollaert finally made his speech on 10 September it was obvious that, for all the rhetoric and for all the idealization of the French Union, if it was independence that France was offering, it was so heavily circumscribed as to make it obvious that France had, at most, transferred the Jacobin concept of ‘the nation one and indivisible’ to a French Union in which she would still be in a commanding position.¹⁹

Whether or not one regards this as a prime example of the way in which a political settlement was undercut by the optimism of those Frenchmen who believed in a military solution it should also be pointed out, as Irving does, that ‘Any policy which might have been construed as the abandonment of Indo-China would have been rejected by the National Assembly in 1947, if not by an overwhelming majority, then at least by a decisive one’²⁰ but this, in turn, did nothing to resolve the US dilemma. As it was formulated by the US Consul at Saigon:

Morally, end French believed have in view and tactics to achieve such end are to be condemned and US cannot be party to return pre-war status or even give such appearance without risking destroying large amount confidence natives still have in US. Practically, however, it is of paramount importance that Indo-China does not become prey to an imposed totalitarian régime by use recognized weapons of repression, reprisal and terrorism – natives are divided and majority unprepared for democratic freedom and in such division and unpreparedness the single-minded purpose of 80 to 100 real Communists could easily gain upper hand. No brief can be held for any solution that would put France and Western democracy influence out of Indo-China or leave natives believe US indifferent.²¹

Given these premises, then, and Moffat's distaste notwithstanding that it would imply ‘democracies reduced resort monarchy as weapon against Communism’,²² one wonders what else, apart from outright rejection, the US might have done when the French turned towards ex-Emperor Bao Dai: at least as a rallying point for non-communist Vietnamese nationalists and, of course, as someone who might be expected to be more amenable to French influence than Ho Chi Minh.

Nevertheless there was a chance, perhaps, that a French government might have been so far-sighted or faint-hearted that it would have ordered a cease-fire, entered into serious negotiations, abandoned its insistence on membership of the French Union, accepted, at least by instalments, an independent, more or less communist state in a presumably close relationship with either the USSR or the Chinese Communist Party, or both, and been prepared to rely on Vietminh goodwill, such as it might be, for the preservation of whatever position they chose to accord France. It is just conceivable that something like this might have happened had there been a Communist government in France. It is inconceivable that it would have happened under any other party or coalition in the time that remained before the French decided on a military solution. It is also problematic what line the US would have taken if France had decided on such a negotiated settlement. On the one hand an opinion within the Southeast Asian Division of the State Department that ‘the ardent leadership of the small Communist group will become less vital’ and would be followed by the natural development of political parties. On the other the robust scepticism of the Western European Division:

It may not be certain, as Ken Landon says, that Ho and Co will succeed in setting up a Communist State if they get rid of the French, but let me suggest that from the stand-point of the security of the US, it is one hell of a big chance to take.²³

In the event the acceptance of an alternative Vietnamese state under Bao Dai was, from the beginning, recognized as almost as big a risk. Although the US was anxious (or at least willing) to approve the Bay of Along agreement which would have reincorporated Cochinchina with the other two parts of Vietnam and paved the way for the return of Bao Dai as the Emperor of a legally united Vietnam, the French government was hesitating to submit the agreement to the Assembly because Indo-China, as the US Ambassador in France described it, was a stick of dynamite or, to change the metaphor, the French government was like an overloaded ship incapable of accommodating one more passenger without capsizing: ‘Indo-China is that passenger’.²⁴

On 27 September 1948, the State Department's policy statement was in fact a re-statement of the US dilemma. In one sentence it was ‘The objectives of US policy can only be attained by such French action that will satisfy the nationalist aspirations of the peoples of Indo-China’. French sovereignty, it was suggested, had been recognized over Indo-China; but the paper maintained that this did not imply any commitment on the part of the US to assist France to exert its authority over the Indo-Chinese people. ‘Since VJ day, the majority people of the area, the Vietnamese, have stubbornly resisted the re-establishment of French authority, a struggle in which we have tried to maintain so far as possible the position of non-support of either party’. Thus, the US had declined to permit the export to the French in Indo-China of arms and munitions for the prosecution of the war against the Vietnamese. (Although, as the free export of arms to France had been permitted, the restrictions were more nominal than real.)

Since early in 1947 the French have employed about 115,000 troops in Indo-China, with little result, since the countryside except in Laos and Cambodia remains under the firm control of the Ho Chi Minh government. A series of French-established puppet governments has tended to enhance the prestige of Ho's government and to call in to question, on the part of the Vietnamese, the sincerity of French intentions to accord an independent status to Vietnam.

As the statement concluded, the objectives of US policy towards Indo-China had not been realized. Three years after the termination of war in 1945 a friendly nation, France, was fighting a desperate and apparently losing struggle in Indo-China. The solution by French military reconquest of Indo-China was not desirable. Neither, however, was complete withdrawal of the French from Indo-China for, as it was assumed that in all likelihood Indo-China would be taken over by the militant communist group, at best there might follow a transition period marked by chaos and terrorist activities, which would then create a political vacuum into which the Chinese inevitably would be drawn or pushed.²⁵

It is interesting that, apart from generic communism, it was the power of China that was here identified as the principal threat to Indo-China. A couple of weeks later, on October 13 1948, the State Department's secret circular instruction ‘Pattern of Soviet Policy in Far-East and South-East Asia’ afforded a general conspectus which, apart from assuming boundless and malevolent Soviet intentions, also inferred a single goal ‘to ensure Soviet control being as surely installed and predominate as in the satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain’.²⁶ If this was the overall assumption then, given that the communists were reckoned to have captured the nationalist movement in Vietnam, there could, logically, be no other course open to the US-France, naturally, would have her own reasons – than to resist. Later on, and particularly in 1950, one might wonder whether the particulars of US policy towards Vietnam had been swamped in the generalities of across-the-board resistance to communism; but even before some critics have discerned a militarization and globalization of US policy, and before the emotional climate of the US changed, one may see, as a piece of sober analysis, the beginning of a policy based on certain not altogether unfounded assumptions about communism, China, and the objectives of the Soviet Union. Implementation of that policy, in Indo-China however, would depend upon France; and after two years of war and in spite of some growing and ineffable optimism, the French were still looking for a purposeful Vietnam policy and had revealed not so much procrastination and missed opportunities as a sort of political paralysis. Nevertheless, and at least from the time the North Atlantic Pact was signed in April 1949, France had a certain entitlement as an ally. For Acheson, who became Secretary of State in January 1949, as for most of the Administration, Congress and probably most of the American people, and as a straight and simple choice, France was more important than Vietnam or Indo-China and more valuable than a party aspiring to be government which, in spite of impeccable anti-colonial credentials and its ability to present itself as all things to all men, was beginning to look more and more like an affiliated communist state.

Already, then, it might be seen that the French were digging the pit into which the US would eventually fall. Already, too, one may see the start of a symbiotic relationship in which France would increasingly depend upon American resources to achieve purposes which, left to herself, would be beyond her, while American objectives, although they did not entirely coincide with the French and for all the power which they would ultimately deploy, had to include France as a frail but, for the moment, indispensable means by which they might be attained. From time to time however there were vivid flashes of US policy-making which suggested that Indo-China was regarded as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself; and those of a philosophical disposition may see this as the flaw which turned idealism into tragedy.

In his study of Dean Acheson, Professor Gaddis Smith devotes a chapter to ‘The Reversal of Policy toward Indo-China’ a reversal over which he says, Acheson presided, which he encouraged, and in part, initiated. In Gaddis Smith's account this is something which happened in 1950 and there was, as will be seen, a cluster of commitments round about April and May of that year from which it would be difficult to turn back; although another of Acheson's biographers has argued that, contrary to what revisionist historians say, Acheson's Indo-China policy did not make future American military involvement inevitable.²⁷ Acheson's ideas on Indo-China and South-East Asia, says Gaddis Smith, were vague and sometimes shifted depending on the person to whom he was talking. Even as Acheson pondered the problem Smith argues that the US was already moving toward support of the French although it might not have been so much a matter of whose hand was on the tiller as how the compass was being set.²⁸

DIVISION IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT?

Within the State Department it has been argued that two competing strategies – one ‘Asian-oriented’ and the other ‘Europe-oriented’ – had emerged and that the critical question was whether the US should have insisted on French concessions to Vietnamese nationalism as a condition of US support.²⁹ Alternatively, it may be suggested that the question was how much the French should have been asked to concede; and even if the critical time, (according to Edmund Gullion,) was ‘right after the Elysée agreements of March 1949’³⁰ and for all the complaint that ‘South-East Asia's policy has been junked’,³¹ and dismay at Acheson's ‘French captivity’, a closer inspection suggests that there may not in fact have been all that much difference in the assumptions upon which different parts of the State Department were operating. The reference to a French captivity was the occasion when Walton Butterworth, the Department's Director of Far Eastern Affairs, had, in Acheson's absence, attempted something in the nature of a diplomatic coup. Under the imprimatur of the Acting Secretary of State, Butterworth had sent the Embassy in Paris what purported to be the Department's views on the Elysée agreement with the request that the memorandum should be presented to the French government. In brief, it was a recommendation that France should recognize the equality and acknowledge the sovereignty of Vietnam and that Vietnam's participation in the French Union should, at most, be voluntary. As it happened Acheson was in Paris when the cable arrived; the Embassy replied with the unanimous opinion that it would be a serious mistake to deliver the memorandum; and Acheson, having seen the correspondence, agreed that it would be inappropriate at the time.

The ‘Far Eastern’ memorandum was a superb and elegant paper even though, in its abstract idealizations of how colonialism should have come to an end, it sounded rather like a secular Sermon on the Mount. Nevertheless one should ask, even on the basis of this lecture, whether there really was a dichotomy between Western Europe and the Far East divisions in the State Department. Certainly Ambassador Bruce's reporting from Paris appears to have been impartial; while the Far Eastern memorandum took for granted first that those in command of the so-called Vietnamese Democratic Republic were men trained in the methods and doctrines of international communism; secondly, that should they succeed, a pattern of foreign totalitarianism would be clamped upon Vietnam under which all liberties, national and personal, would be lost and thirdly, that the paramount question in Indo-China was whether the country was to be saved from communist control: all other issues were irrelevant. It was, in fact, because of Vietnam's importance that the French should be compelled to concede independence.³² In any event the ‘Far East’ solution depended, with rather specious simplicity, on the ability to separate communist sheep from nationalist goats and even though the distinction was recognized as the sine qua non of a solution, it assumed that those who would not support genuine independence, once it was granted by the French, would identify themselves as communists: and would thereby distinguish themselves from the rest of the ‘nationalist elements’ who comprised the major part of the resistance forces. An even more extraordinary paper originated in the State Department: described as a ‘possible method of solving the Indo-China problem’ which would ‘once and for all smoke out Ho Chi Minh and determine whether he is primarily a nationalist or a communist’. Assuming that a common position could be reached between the US, France, Britain, India and the Philippines, either one of the last two countries would convene a conference; France would be induced to grant Vietnam full independence; and an international commission would be established that was to remain in place for several years. Ho, as well as Bao Dai, was to be consulted and it would be put to him that if he was the real nationalist which he professed to be he would ‘accept loyally the decisions and mandates of the government and the subsequent constituent assembly, etc. and bind himself unequivocally not to … subvert the true nationalism of his people or a government that might emerge from the multilateral effort’. It could even be suggested to him that he leave Vietnam and ‘take up once more the philosophical studies to which he had devoted a great deal of his previous life’, and it might also be suggested that ‘there would be pension adequate to support him in those studies’.³³

Apart from understandable concern with the French side of the triangular relationship with Vietnam, US policy makers were under two further constraints had they wished to take a more free-wheeling course. Both of them were self-imposed. In 1972, when he chaired the Hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which were given the imposing title ‘Causes, Origins, and Lessons of the Vietnam War’, a rather dyspeptic Senator Fulbright sought to put much of the blame for American involvement on Dean Acheson, on his European orientations and on his close war-time connections with the British. As Fulbright presented it, in what amounted to a proclamation of American innocence and British guilt, the US had been ‘had’ by her allies; and while this may not appear to be entirely convincing, Fulbright had picked up the importance of what Acheson had described as the danger of Ho Chi Minh's ‘direct communist connection’ – and might, indeed, have gone further. The issue was not whether Ho was a communist but whether there was, in principle, any possibility of voluntary, autonomous communism. By a sort of transposed assumption based on post-war experience Acheson had told the National War College in December 1947 that for Greeks, Italians and others it had not been a free choice whether they accepted or rejected communism: because they were being coerced either by an internal organization financed by other countries or by external pressure to adopt a system of government which had the inescapable consequence of inclusion in the system of Russian power. And this, in turn, would seem to justify Professor Gaddis's conclusion that the assumption was that such governments, whether in Western Europe or Japan, and whether or not they came to power by legal or illegal means, could only be regarded as instruments of the Kremlin and hence not truly independent.³⁴

A priori then, it would seem that Ho Chi Minh and his government were only to be regarded as an extension of Soviet power; an assumption that was to be reinforced by the second constraint which originated in the Department of State. It was that Southeast Asia was ‘the target of a co-ordinated offensive plainly directed by the Kremlin’. This was the conclusion of the Policy Planning Staff which, when it began work in February 1949, certainly had enough circumstantial evidence to prompt such a conclusion. In March 1948 a communist insurrection had broken out in Burma. In Malaya, the government and the communist party stumbled into action against each other in June. In the Philippines, Taruc resumed his struggle against the government and announced that he was a communist while in Indonesia, whatever triggered it off, communists at Madiun in September 1948 attempted to stage a revolution within the revolution. Added to this there was the alarming, although on closer inspection ambiguous, evidence of concerted communist plans for Asia as a whole that were discussed at the World Federation of Democratic Youth Conference in Calcutta in February 1948.³⁵

In the end, however, and in spite of Acheson's approval the Policy Planning Staff paper (PPS 51) remained, as Robert Blum puts it, a non-policy paper: for information rather than for action. But it was sent to the National Security Council and in the meantime Secretary of Defense Johnson, according to the internal ‘History of the Indo-China Incident’ prepared for and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called upon the NSC to determine exactly how US security was threatened by the current situation in the Far East and to formulate tentative courses of action which were to be co-ordinated for the whole region and were to outline specific objectives to be attained. Thus, the NSC had before it the State Department's political assessment that the area was, to repeat, ‘the target of a co-ordinated offensive plainly directed by the Kremlin’. And the following month, July 1949, Acheson apparently issued instructions that it was a ‘fundamental decision of American policy that the United States does not intend to permit any further communist domination on the continent of Asia or in South-east Asia’.³⁶

A COMMUNIST OFFENSIVE IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA?

One could argue, then, that by July 1949 the battle lines had been drawn in Southeast Asia, and even that they had been drawn unilaterally, by the US. A threat was perceived: a co-ordinated, Kremlin-directed offensive. And the Secretary of State had declared what might otherwise be regarded as a powerful if not irresistible force would be met by the immovable object of US resolution. The Policy Planning Staff opinion on Kremlin-directed strategy went word for word into the NSC report The Position of the United States with respect to Asia (NSC 48/1) whose conclusions were approved by the US President on 30 December 1949 (NSC 48/2), although in the NSC paper it was an expression that was qualified by the proposition that it was the colonial-nationalist conflict which had provided a fertile field for subversive communist activities. By the end of February 1950 the ‘threat of communist aggression against Indo-China’ had become ‘only one phase of anticipated communist plans to seize all of South-East Asia’ and a week later the Department of Defense was told by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Southeast Asia was in grave danger of communist domination: now identified ‘as a consequence of aggression from communist China’ as well as ‘internal subversive activities’.

With Senator McCarthy's campaign against treason in the State Department having just got under way this may hardly have been the best time for dispassionate analysis although, if it is not too academic a point, one cannot help comparing these propositions with an earlier assessment (13 October 1948). This set out a Pattern of Soviet Policy in Far East and South East Asia in terms of a Soviet policy which sought to weaken the ties between the colonies and the colonial powers through the encouragement of nationalism and by capitalizing on the discontent caused by long periods of ‘colonial oppression’ and by disrupting the colonial economies either by armed action or by labour disorders so that the metropolitan powers would be deprived of revenue and resources. Thus the USSR would be able to fish profitably in the troubled waters of economic chaos.³⁷

At the time when this paper on basic factors in Soviet Far Eastern policy was being composed, the late summer of 1948, the major points of difference within the State Department were whether or not the Russians would actively support the Chinese communists in the civil war if there was a danger that they might deviate along the path recently chosen by Yugoslavia and whether, for the same reason, the Soviets might be reluctant to foster the expansion of Chinese communist influence in Southeast Asia. A year later, autumn 1949, the communist victory in the Chinese civil war was no longer in doubt and even though other factors, not least intellectual preconceptions, should be taken into account, one must accept Robert Blum's general proposition that ‘The American containment policy in South-East Asia arose from the ashes of its failed policy in China’.³⁸

THE CHINESE CONNECTION

If it is obvious that US policy towards Indo-China could not be considered in isolation from its policy towards the rest of Asia, it is even more obvious that the integration of US policy for Vietnam came about at the same time as the disintegration of its policy towards China: the most traumatic episode in US power-war policies in Asia, at least until the outbreak of the Korean war. China, or at least the Nationalist government, like a great ship going down, had taken many hopes and illusions with it. One of Acheson's biographers has argued that Americans, having never understood the realities of the Chinese situation, were wholly unprepared for the deluge of hate and vituperation which descended on them from Peking once the Chinese People's Republic had been established.³⁹ As an extension of Acheson's ideas about communism it was likewise impossible for Americans to think of the Chinese embracing communism of their own volition and rejecting the US in such a humiliating fashion.⁴⁰ Some of the last-gasp attempts to save the Nationalist governments that were considered in Washington – with the wilder arpeggios such as encouraging the fragmentation of China or even, apparently, a series of punitive air strikes against the Chinese communists (not to mention the sheer fantasy of creating ten new Chinese armies in six months) – originated in the Far Eastern division of the State Department, and in fact the Administration, says Blum, had come close to re-intervention in the Chinese civil war on the mainland, but backed away at the last minute when it discovered that there was no viable force left to support.⁴¹

It is, therefore, with a sense of mounting horror that one listens to Acheson sounding the knell of US policy in China in the letter which accompanied what is usually known as the China White Paper, oblivious to the possibility that the bell was tolling for the same policy that was being reborn in Vietnam. Not of course that the comparisons seemed in any way apposite at the time. For example, ‘Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and its Government had lost popular support’. And the conclusions: ‘a realistic appraisal of conditions … leads to the conclusion that the only alternative open to the US was full-scale intervention on behalf of a Government which had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people. Intervention of such a scope and magnitude would have been resented by the mass of the … people, would have diametrically reversed our historic policy, and would have been condemned by the American people. The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war … was beyond the control of the Government of the United States.’ In each of these examples Acheson was, of course, referring to China but so much of what he said here (or to which he gave his name) now seems to be an epitaph for the experiences of Vietnam. But at the time, as one American policy was ending and another beginning, Vietnam seemed to be exempt from similar considerations.⁴²

Looking at it a different way, having decided not to attempt to save China by its efforts, there was only a faint hope that the US could save Vietnam by its example – as a successful democracy. It was being drawn in to Vietnam by the necessity of responding to developments there, in France, and in China, as well as on account of its own perceptions and its formulation of a general policy of containment. So, as the internal JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) history suggests, the decision to help France combat the Vietminh may have been the logical outgrowth of a reassessment of US interests in Asia as a whole; and yet the particular origins of the US aid programme suggest something less systematic. Like much policy making, it was rooted in domestic considerations.

President Truman's Democratic Administration existed side by side with a Congress in which there was a Republican majority. A bi-partisan approach to foreign policy could be maintained in the most momentous ever commitment in US foreign policy, the North Atlantic Pact, but it had broken down on the issue of China even if ‘the attack of the primitives’, as Acheson put it, had as much to do with Truman's unexpected victory in the presidential election in 1948 and the consequent fury and frustration of the Republican Party. When, therefore, on 9 December 1949, an amendment to the Military Aid Program bill proposed by the combined Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Armed Services sought to earmark the sum of $75 m. for what was eventually described as the ‘general area of China’, in voting to cut the appropriation for the Military Assistance Program in half the House of Representatives may, as Acheson said, have been in one of its berserk moods; but in order to save the Program, and its underpinning of the fledgling North Atlantic Alliance, Acheson was prepared to accept the amendment and, as he presents it, it seems to have been one of the easiest passages in that summer of difficult decisions. Symbolically, at least, a formal connection had been made in which the success of US policy in strengthening Western Europe had been linked to what was in effect Congressional interest in policies which would ‘contain’ communism in Asia. There was also the effect that the existence of this $75 m. fund, to be spent at the discretion of the President, would have not only on departments of the US administration but on foreign governments as well.

In January 1949 the French had suggested that the US might consider extending Marshall Plan assistance to Vietnam: the rapid economic rehabilitation of Vietnam, they said, could be the key to Bao Dai's success.⁴³ A year later (in his celebrated address to the National Press Club) Acheson raised the question whether American military assistance to Southeast Asia might provide ‘the missing component in a problem which might otherwise be unsolved’.⁴⁴ Now, with the approximate end of the Dutch-Indonesian conflict, the foremost of US political and strategic concerns in Southeast Asia, and given the conceptual underpinnings of US policy and the operational commitment to the success of the Bao Dai experiment, Vietnam was the obvious place to begin.

In its internal history for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, their secretariat give them the credit (or blame) for taking the first step in shifting the battle for Asia from China to Southeast Asia. This, they suggest, was done on 17 December 1949 when the JCS proposed that the $75 m. fund should include French Indo-China, as well as Burma and Thailand, and this provided the means for an early programme of assistance in the French struggle against Ho Chi Minh.⁴⁵ In point of fact the JCS had been pressing for consistent applications of containment ever since 1947, had identified US security interests with Nationalist success in China and had declared that, if the Chinese Nationalists were to fall, the US must be prepared to accept eventual Soviet hegemony over Asia.⁴⁶ In point of time, however, one can find the specific civilian proposition from the US Ambassador in Paris a week earlier, on 11 December, not only to extend aid to Vietnam from the President's special $75 m. fund but also recommending direct ‘Marshall Plan’ financing for Indo-China: which the French had tentatively asked for at the beginning of 1949.

For France, it was a time of economic and even incipient military crisis. To finance the French war effort in 1949 had cost them, in US terms, $500 m. – which was greater than the estimated French budgetary deficit for the year – and had eaten up over two-thirds of the annual total of US aid to France. France was maintaining an army of 150,000 men in Indo-China, of whom, by the end of 1949, 16,000 were killed or missing. They were already in some difficulty in northern Tonkin, where they had abandoned some of their isolated posts, so that, once again, it was the presence of China – shadow, perhaps, rather than substance – which was helping to transform the appreciations and perception of the struggle. Already, in effect, US military commanders – in this case, the commander of US naval forces in the Western Pacific – were testifying to the domino effect: if Chinese communists were not stopped in South China, Indo-China, Burma, and perhaps Malaya, would then fall, either from internal subversion or external attack.⁴⁷ Appearing before a Senate committee that was pondering ‘the general area’ of China and its implications, an official of the State Department said of the fund: ‘It might be used in other areas of the Far East which are affected by the developments in China. That would include such areas as Burma, the northern part of Indo-China, if it became desirable to suppress communism in that country.’⁴⁸ As the same study of the executive and legislative roles in the Vietnam war points out, another of the provisions of the 1949 Mutual Defense Assistance Act – approved with almost no debate – authorized the President to send US armed forces as non-combatant military advisers to any ‘agency or nation’ in the world. For the moment, however, it was not military advisers that the French wanted, but other types of military assistance, some of it symbolic but spectacular. Thus, French High Commissioner Pignon was hoping for American assistance in replacing and repairing military equipment; said he was prepared for US military aid to go direct to the Vietnam government; but also, in order to deter a Chinese invasion of Tonkin, was trying to talk the US into sending warships, particularly aircraft-carriers, into Indo-Chinese waters. Above all, however, the French had two objectives. First, to secure recognition of the Bao Dai ‘government’ by as many countries as possible. Second, to obtain recognition, as French Foreign Minister Schuman put it in tripartite talks with the Americans and the British in September, 1949, that the French were the hard core of resistance to communist attempts to take over, initially, Indo-China and ultimately all of Southeast Asia and that as France was fighting the battle of all the democratic powers she would need help.⁴⁹

NO ALTERNATIVE: THE BAO DAI SOLUTION

The recognition of Bao Dai's government was a problem not only for the French. For the US or Britain to have been the first to recognize Bao Dai would, said Acheson, have been to give him the kiss of death. The British opinion, for what it was worth, was that by no stretch of the imagination was Bao Dai's régime in de facto control (they also warned the Americans that Schuman would claim that the French had gone as far as they could in Vietnam without creating trouble in French North Africa). In spite of these hesitations, with no one anxious to recognize Bao Dai first, not least because the French themselves had not even ratified the Elysée agreement, the US hoped, or wished to persuade itself, that full Vietnamese sovereignty would emerge from the chrysalis of the Bao Dai solution and as Acheson defined the US position on 23 December 1949: ‘There is no apparent alternative to Bao Dai régime other than Commie domination Indo-China’.⁵⁰

The fact that China and the USSR recognized Ho Chi Minh before the US recognized Bao Dai is sometimes taken as cause and effect; but on closer inspection the sequence does not seem to bear that much significance. Acheson, at least, had practically made up his mind as soon as the French had promised to ratify the Elysée agreements; and in setting out the arguments to the US Embassy in Bangkok no alternative to recognition was in fact suggested.⁵¹ The Southeast Asian states themselves were reported as having their doubts about Bao Dai's recognition and, eventually, the Thai Foreign Minister, Pote Sarasin, made it the issue on which he resigned. The fact that the US was canvassing support from other Asian states would very likely have been known to the Russians and Chinese; and it is at least conceivable that this fact influenced their own decision. In the event, one feels, recognition of Ho Chi Minh's alternative government by the communist bloc was an additional argument for the US to recognize Bao Dai; but it hardly seems to have been a sufficient cause.

AID TO INDO-CHINA

A State Department working party had concluded on 1 February 1950 that the US, together with France, was already committed in Indo-China, i.e., failure of the Bao Dai experiment would mean the communisation of Indo-China. Failure to support French policy in Indo-China would have the effect of contributing to the defeat of US aims in Europe and, applying the practical test of probability of success, ‘the US would be backing a determined protagonist in this venture … French military leaders soberly confident’.⁵² To prevent failures of this order, even if success was not absolutely assured, might, other things being equal, have seemed to be within the scope of US policy at the time. Certainly in the matter of military aid, as the working party concluded, the US (without sending troops) was in a position to make a unique contribution: but even more positive results might have been expected from economic assistance. Memories were fresh of what it may be fair to call ‘America's failure in China’. As Charles Wolf⁵³ points out there had been mounting Congressional criticism of the Administration's alleged neglect of Asia and although the strength of Republican feeling had been resisted in the matter of China it was at the cost of a critical concession in Southeast Asia generally – Vietnam in particular – which accorded, nevertheless, with the sentiments and announced global purposes of US policy: to resist communism, to encourage free peoples throughout the world, and to strengthen democratic nations against aggression.⁵⁴ Aid to Indo-China meant accepting French assurances that Vietnam would become a free state but if doubts occurred, in Congress for example, there was the sheet anchor of general resistance to communism and, in the case of China, and as the influential Congressman Walter Judd explained, a belief that China was the original domino and that Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines and even India would not be able to resist communist pressure for long. In any case fear of the spread of communism reinforced the belief that Asia, too, could benefit from the treasure that was being poured into Europe by way of Marshall Aid and, as Wolf concludes: ‘It is fair to say that the desire to avoid “another China” no less than the desire of the Administration to avoid further Congressional attacks on its Asian policy, determined the timing of US aid to Southern Asia.’⁵⁵ There was also a personal connection. When, in March 1950 the State Department, under strong Congressional urging, had sent its aid survey mission to Southeast Asia it was headed by Mr R. Allen Griffin, a Californian newspaper publisher and editor, who had been deputy chief of the US Aid Mission to China. As he told Wolf he saw the mission's task ‘as one of formulating a constructive program of aid to help prevent in Southeast Asia a repetition of the circumstances leading to the fall of China’.⁵⁶ The conclusion of the Griffin mission was, first, that US aid would help France and Vietnam to checkmate Chinese communist invasion, if it came; and second, it was assumed that it would somehow ‘sterilise areas of Vietminh infection’. As subsequently printed, the purpose of aid programmes in Southeast Asia was ‘to demonstrate that the local national governments are able to bring benefits to their own people and thereby build political support, especially among the rural population’,⁵⁷ or in the words of the Country Report prepared for the director of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program: ‘to ensure the existence of governments … which represent the legitimate nationalist aspirations of those Indo-Chinese people who do not desire to see communist-orientated governments in Indo-China’.

Aid, therefore, in a sense, appeared to be a substitute for analysis: certainly for the sort of analysis that might have suggested the hazards attending US policy objectives in Vietnam. Doubts were expressed in Washington⁵⁸; but in spite of Griffin's assertion that the wave of communist risings in Indo-China were not economic, social or ideological, rather they were predominantly nationalistic, he concluded that it was because the Bao Dai government was itself so intensely nationalist that it was worth supporting. On 4 May 1950, three days after Truman had approved programmes of military assistance to Indo-China (and to Indonesia) with $13 m. worth of funds which Acheson himself was to approve, Griffin was raising his sights. It was doubtful, he said, whether the Vietnamese government could succeed without the most generous, if not passionate, French assistance; and yet how France's partners within the French Union could evolve had never been defined: indeed no one knew what the French Union meant. The Bao Dai government's first need was public respect – which Griffin thought could be created – but, in what had undertones of a Humpty Dumpty argument, Griffin said ‘If Bao Dai once starts slipping it will be impossible to restore him.’ It was obviously an extremely fragile position: and this was an extremely fragile argument: but it was also one which would seem to require an unlimited US commitment. In any event, Acheson had realized that the US bargaining position with the French disappeared ‘the moment we agree to give them aid’⁵⁹ and, as if to confirm this predicament, a couple of days after Truman's cabinet had decided unanimously in favour of recognition, the French were letting it be known that, although their intentions were indeed evolutionary, they could not ‘afford to kindle unrealistic national appetites’. So, once again, having committed itself to support the fictional or, at most, ‘evolutionary’ independence of Vietnam, the US was just as dependent as ever on France to make this vision a reality. Of course, if it were true, as the State Department and eventually the National Security Council professed to believe, that the threat of communist aggression against Indo-China was only one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia, then this was an unthinkable alternative. Perhaps by this time the general had submerged the particular. For example, the Vietminh were now identified as ‘forces of communist aggression’ and for Dean Rusk, Deputy Under Secretary of State, the danger of communist domination of Southeast Asia was a consequence of ‘aggression’ (whatever that meant) from communist China. Rusk, who appeared to be setting the pace, had asked the Pentagon to prepare military plans as a matter of the greatest urgency; and when NSC 64 was endorsed by the President on 24 April 1950 the US was committed, by all practical measures, to prevent the expansion of communist aggression in Southeast Asia in spite of the fact that less than a third of Vietnam was reckoned to be controlled by the legal government. So, when on 8 May Acheson announced that the US would send economic and military aid to the French in Indo-China (for Gaddis Smith, the turning point – ‘the scales had swayed for three months and then came down hard on the side of France’)⁶⁰ the French position was at least potentially desperate and one cannot help asking whether there were any countries receiving military aid under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, other than Vietnam, in which there were such powerful revolutionary forces and where a revolutionary war was already in progress. Henceforth, of course, there would be a need to promote Vietnam to the position of an established, legitimate and more or less popular state deserving of US assistance.

Whether or not it was realized, then, how exposed the French position was in Vietnam, the universal scope of US foreign policy had just been restated in its most monumental form. In response to the President's request for a re-examination of US objectives ‘in peace and war’ and their effect on strategic plans, and with the background of the development of thermo-nuclear weapons, the Secretaries of State and Defense had produced a paper which was approved by the National Security Council: NSC 68. In it was set down the ‘The Fundamental Purpose Of The United States’ and ‘The Fundamental Design Of The Kremlin’ together with their ‘Underlying Conflict In The Realm Of Ideas And Values’. Attacked by its critics as a sort of institutional megalomania in which a defeat of free institutions anywhere was a defeat everywhere it was a supercharged containment policy in which, in defence of the perimeter, all points seemed to be of equal importance.⁶¹ As Robert Lovett, former Under Secretary of State, told the drafting committee, there was practically nothing that the US could not do if it wanted to. He also advised that the paper's conclusion should be stated ‘simply, clearly, in Hemingway sentences’⁶² and amongst these conclusions was the contingency that, within the next four or five years, the USSR would be able to deliver a surprise atomic attack against the US. In the midst of a world crisis of such magnitude and given the ‘dangerous potentialities’ of the USSR for weakening the relative world position of the US, ‘sufficient resistance’ that was required from the US and other non-communist countries might be presumed to extend to Indo-China. More particularly, and because Vietnam had already been accorded the key position in Southeast Asia, ‘Soviet domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the US’.⁶³ Indeed, Indo-China had already been identified, together with Korea, Berlin and Austria, as a primary area of Soviet interest.⁶⁴ As a simple response one might expect that the US could try to frustrate this Soviet purpose. In principle, therefore, there was now a global US policy even if, in Vietnam, it depended upon a French surrogate, and when Acheson and Schuman met face to face, after apparently unrecorded or at least so far undisclosed conversation, Acheson wanted to establish a close and immediate connection between the problem of Southeast Asia and the defence of the West.⁶⁵ The most obvious connection was, of course, France itself and on most occasions which presented themselves the French told the Americans of their difficulties and requirements in Indo-China, how many of their troops were there and, usually, how many they had lost. In this instance Schuman described Vietnam in terms of financial and military haemorrhage, a burden that France could not be expected to carry indefinitely and one which threatened her ability to meet European defence commitments. France, as he put it, was not fighting for selfish interests but was defending a vital area against communist infiltration and control and, to underline the point, Schuman emphasized that, since the Second World War, France had definitely abandoned colonialism; although what the new policy of the French Union amounted to remained to be seen – and understood.

If Acheson had any doubts, he kept them to himself. The official line⁶⁶ was that ‘true character of French concessions to Indo-Chinese nationalism and ultimate intentions are clear to Department’ and it was for this reason that no further substantive concessions involving parliamentary action in France were called for at that time. Although the French may have persuaded themselves that they were moving as fast as they could towards the ‘perfection’ of Vietnamese independence, it was perhaps indulgent of Acheson to have allowed himself to be persuaded as well. Even if the US kept up the pressure, would public statements from France about her intentions be enough? Particularly in view of what they had told the US so far? Could the French have moved faster? Did they want to? Were they able to? Perhaps there was a glimmer of hope in 1949 when someone of the stature (rather than the disposition) of de Gaulle might have seized the burning brand; and four years later Mendès France could face the unacceptable although by then there was practically no alternative. Before the Americans were irrevocably committed, however, and before the French positions on the Chinese frontier were overrun, they could conceivably have strengthened non-communist national forces in Vietnam to the point where they had a better chance of competing with the Vietminh or even, biting on the bullet, the French could have tried to negotiate a settlement, no matter what alarm that prospect might have caused their American allies.

Given the importance of the French holding their part of the line in Southeast Asia the threat of a settlement was itself sufficient to elicit renewed US support. If it wasn't exactly political pessimism of the order of ‘mourir pour Danzig’ it must have been alarming for Americans to hear from High Commissioner Pignon's diplomatic adviser of the feeling that French interests were not important enough to die for because the country was being given over to the Vietnamese and when the war was over French influence would have disappeared. According to this argument French troops had to see that they were fighting for something and, moreover, they needed the feeling that their actions were approved.⁶⁷ For the French, who declared that old-style exploitation of colonies was a thing of the past, all that they said was necessary were economic and social programmes to dissipate ‘the racial hatred that was drummed up by immature political leaders’.⁶⁸ It was not an argument that one could apply to Vietnam without swallowing hard. And it was hardly one which appealed to Emperor Bao Dai, no matter what one may have thought of his political maturity. When the American chargé at Saigon (Edmund Gullion) called on him in June he said he had returned to Vietnam because of French assurances that seemed to promise independence. ‘But’, apparently on the verge of tears, he asked, ‘this independence, what is it? Where is it? Do you see it? Is a government independent without a budget? When it has to beg 20 m. piastres a month for its existence?’ He no longer thought the French had any intention of leaving Vietnam.

Years later, Acheson agreed in an interview that the French had blackmailed the US in Vietnam.⁶⁹ It was the expression which Bao Dai had used in June 1950 although, as the Americans reported ‘He understood our delicate position since France was our friend in Europe’. But if the French had threatened to withdraw their troops it was, said Bao Dai, pure blackmail; and the Americans had fallen for it. On the other hand, as Acheson said in his memoirs, there are limits on the extent to which one may successfully coerce an ally.⁷⁰ When US assistance for the French in Vietnam was announced on the same day as the ‘Schuman Plan’ that was to merge coal and steel production in France and Germany ‘and thus make war between the two countries not only unthinkable but materially impossible’, it was the prospect of strengthening France, and Germany, in the defence of Western Europe that filled Acheson's political landscape.

THE MELBY-ERSKINE MISSION

The fact that the US announced its continuing if not open-ended assistance for the French in Vietnam on the same day as the Schuman plan began Germany's rehabilitation in Europe was, obviously, a coincidence in spite of any gratitude which the US might have felt for this imaginative and, at the same time, practical French gesture. Six weeks later when the Korean War erupted the focus of Acheson's attention turned to the other side of the world but the concept of all-round defence meant that, for the US, strengthening France and Germany was now even more important in a Europe which, if strong enough, might deter communist aggression and in Asia where the aggression had already begun. Up to this point the US had been binding itself to Vietnam with conceptual associations, policy objectives, and some material considerations. The purposes were essentially prophylactic, contingent, and, in spite of official exaggeration, somewhat confused by the absence of what could clearly be identified as ‘communist aggression’. All this was removed by the Korean War. There is no real reason to believe that the civil-military mission which the US sent to Vietnam would, in any event, have come to substantially different conclusions but the fact remains that their report was made under the impact of the Korean War and as one of its leaders said of the other his thoughts seemed largely to be with ‘his’ division in Korea. Wherever they were General Erskine's thoughts were certainly not in accord with the French in Vietnam. Why, he asked, listen to a bunch of second-raters who hadn't won a war since Napoleon?

The Melby-Erskine mission had been sent to Vietnam to consider the feasibility of a US economic and military aid programme. The first problem, which obviously reflected the Korean events, was defence of the frontier against external aggression. The second was the problem of internal security. Its agreed conclusions were a curious mixture and although, no doubt, reflecting the position as they found it, hardly provided the foundation for an unequivocal policy. Thus, a military solution was seen as a primary requisite for solving the overall Indo-China problem; but one that in no sense could be decisive without what the report called ‘the application of political and economic techniques’. In general terms, it was nicely balanced. There was a mutual absence of good faith on the part of the French and the Vietnamese; nevertheless, they had to be persuaded to rise above their parochial interests. After the event Melby was far more pessimistic: ‘the sickening feeling that this was China all over again’ and if, as he allowed, that in Indo-China French colonial policy was as intransigent as ever it may well have been reciprocated as High Commissioner Pignon and General Carpentier both admitted to Melby ‘privately and with great reluctance that hatred of the French outweighed all other considerations in the thinking of all Vietnamese, whatever their political persuasions’. If it did, and even allowing for Melby's overwhelming dilemma, it is a little surprising to read his conclusion that, if the French were really serious about decolonization and that if military force was properly applied, they could at least hold the lid on the Indo-Chinese kettle for the predictable if only relatively limited future. Beyond that his proposals were extraordinary even if they were conditional.

I would propose the following: a French undertaking for Vietnamese independence within a specified period of five, ten, twenty, or thirty years … A Vietnam national army would be rapidly created to assume responsibility for the internal situation and as this progressed French forces would withdraw to border areas or where unnecessary depart. Civil administration would be increasingly a Vietnamese responsibility. All such agreements would have a US guarantee and such supervision as necessary. Assumably the US would pay most of the bills …

What is perhaps most surprising about this prescription is the assumed validity of the Bao Dai government. It was matched, operationally, by General Erskine's conviction that the Chinese border could be made impregnable and the coastline sealed off to prevent external aid reaching the Vietminh; although it was admitted this could not be done with existing forces on the border. Erskine therefore forwarded what he described as a local suggestion that Japanese troops ‘experienced in warfare in this kind of terrain’ might be used. Then, ‘once border sealed Vietminh problem would be immeasurably simpler with proper combination of military and political activity.’⁷¹ Commenting on Melby's ‘pessimistic but valuable appraisal’ the US Minister at Saigon (Heath) felt it necessary to balance it with local French military opinion that, barring Chinese intervention or a massive increase in their aid to the Vietminh, guerrilla and terrorist activities could be reduced to a policing problem within two years. This, in the event, was wildly optimistic: but it was, by contrast with Melby's extraordinary projection, what the State Department's Policy Planning Staff considered as the maximum period which France would have to grant independence if it were to satisfy ‘genuine nationalism’ in Indo-China.⁷² Capitalizing on the Melby report they suggested that Paris should pass a large measure of responsibility for the Indo-Chinese problem to the UN: thus enlisting wider support from free Asian countries and perhaps even inhibiting Chinese communist support for Ho Chi Minh. Their memorandum on US policy towards Indo-China recognized the possibility that without what it called ‘a bolder political approach’ the French – and the US – might well be heading into a débâcle which neither could afford; but the drastic political measures which were reckoned to be necessary would have to be a matter for voluntary decision by the French government. Direct Chinese intervention at this time, mid-August 1950, did not loom large and, in any event, there was a cryptic reference (or perhaps unexamined idea) to ‘international surveillance of the border’. When Melby had suggested special compensations for the French in the course of their anticipated decolonization these had, curiously, been linked to their undertaking ‘to guarantee inviolability of Indo-China border’. Such a guarantee, had it even been considered, would almost certainly have been worthless and, as the events which were unfolding were to prove, was totally beyond the abilities of the French command in Indo-China. For whatever reason, the French failed either to withdraw their forces from what were intended as border strongholds or to reinforce them sufficiently to be able to withstand attacks from Vietminh forces which could now be launched at divisional strength trained and commensurately equipped by the Chinese communist armies which had reached the frontier the year before. After disaster at Dongkhe, and the horrors of the Cocxa gorge, the French fortresses at Caobang, Langson and Laokay were abandoned but, in their retreat, the French had lost 6,000 men in what has been called their greatest colonial defeat since Montcalm had died at Quebec.⁷³ They had also lost an estimated 11,000 tons of munitions at Langson; and it was said that almost everything that the Vietminh fired at the French in after years came from that remarkable prize.⁷⁴

THE CHINESE SHADOW

The French had obviously suffered a débâcle but, in itself, the opening up of the frontier with China might only have been a prelude to Chinese invasion and ensuing catastrophe. The shadow of Chinese intervention now darkened French and US assessments, even before Chinese intervention became a reality in Korea. France was in enough trouble already with her Vietminh opponents: to the point where her second most senior General, de Lattre de Tassigny, wartime commander of the French First Army, was detached from his command of French and other allied forces in Europe and arrived in Vietnam in December 1950 to assume the dual function of High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief with the immediate responsibility of saving Hanoi.

The war had been transformed. It would not be long before de Lattre faced the divisions of Giap's new model army in the set-piece battles which the Vietminh were prepared to risk in a premature general offensive; and it was in more conventional war of this kind where US assistance and particularly US munitions would apparently tip the scale. For example, when faced with the large-scale Vietminh attacks of early 1951 the personal intervention of the chief US military adviser on Vietnam with General MacArthur in Japan secured the delivery of American napalm, which in turn allowed de Lattre to claim his victory.⁷⁵ On a less spectacular level French defence minister Moch had admitted, or attempted to persuade his opposite number, General Marshall, and Acheson, that with the bulk of French battalions on garrison duties in the pacified areas in Vietnam, they were left with an effective mobile force of only five or six battalions. And this, as he put it, to face, in addition to guerrillas, 50 fully equipped enemy infantry battalions equipped with liberal amounts of artillery and mortars. Although the French would send out another five battalions plus 1,100 French officers and NCOs as cadres and instructors for new Vietnamese units – almost inevitably Moch emphasized the possible effects on the military programme for metropolitan France – General Marshall pointed out that all the material for Indo-China was in fact coming from what the US was supplying to France itself.

ONE WAR?

There was now therefore a de facto alliance between France and the US in Vietnam. It was becoming obvious that the French by themselves were quite incapable of making the economic and military effort to fight a decisive war even if, at this stage, such a thing had been possible. Politically, too, it is worth remembering that, as the American Embassy in Paris reported, the Pleven cabinet faced a dozen problems, any one of which was capable in normal times of causing the downfall of two or three French governments.⁷⁶ The outbreak of the Korean War and, even more, the intervention of Chinese armies would allow France to persuade the US that Vietnam really was part of one allied operation. Not only must the battle for Southeast Asia be fought in Tonkin, as General Juin told the Americans in Saigon, but as de Lattre was to present his case in Washington, it was not his war but our war.

For the US the problem was more complicated. First of all they were becoming involved, also de facto, in the process of French decolonization which, like any successful retreat, was more difficult than an advance. Limited, de jure, to an aid programme, it was to assist something that was not yet there: an independent Vietnamese nation state. In practice, at least in South-East Asia, it made all the difference whether aid was given before or after independence. The Dutch, for example, had what at least from their own point of view were admirable and generous plans for what might have turned out to be an independent Indonesia; but, like the French, had failed to persuade their Republican adversaries that their ultimate freedom was assured in European hands. They had on two occasions tried to pre-empt the issue and had, in so doing, lost not only the confidence but the indispensable economic assistance of the US. Now, however, the French, no matter what they might have thought of American rhetoric, could at least pretend that they took it seriously and that their actions were being taken in defence of ‘the free world’. Faced, therefore, with the apparent metamorphosis of a colonial war and continuing French sacrifices for what were now declared to be American purposes, the US had succeeded in trapping itself. France was neither oblivious of nor indifferent to the outcome of the war which she was fighting and for which, as the US kept saying, she was primarily responsible; but to have had a chance of winning at that stage it would probably have had to be a French rather than a Vietnamese war. Although, if it was a French war, might it also be assumed that the Vietnamese, whose tendency to sit on the fence was the subject of American as well as French complaint, would want to join in with the same enthusiasm that they would give to a national cause? If not, did the Vietnamese have that much chance of winning as a national army? When would the French be able to hand over to them? Indeed, given the fact that they were in the middle of a war the balance of which they were afraid might tip disastrously against them, would they really have opted out other than by a deliberate political decision which would not be taken until well into the future? This was a decision that would be taken after a climactic battlefield disaster but in the meantime two alternatives were to hand. Either the US could allow themselves to be convinced that they were fighting one war, in Vietnam and Korea; that with practically unlimited US military and economic assistance the French could defeat the main Vietminh forces in Tonkin; and that revolution or insurgency could be contained in the rest of the country. Or, the US could try to overcome the political disability of association with what was at least a latent French colonial enterprise; as midwife help to bring the independent state of Vietnam into existence; and, as godfather, protect and support it in a cruel world.

Either of these looked like a possibility and both were tried: but whichever course was being followed seemed to lead to closer and closer involvement. For example, relations with the Emperor Bao Dai, who was to be told on Acheson's instructions, when he arrived back in Saigon in October 1950, that many people including a great number of Americans, had been unable to understand the reasons for his ‘prolonged holiday’ on the French Riviera and had indeed misinterpreted it as an indication of lack of patriotic attachment to his role of Chief of State.⁷⁷ Specifically, it was to be suggested that he should embark upon an immediate programme of visits to all parts of Vietnam making numerous speeches and public appearances in the process. Or, as it was being discussed in Washington at the time, it was a matter of holding Bao Dai's feet to the fire. It seems to have been assumed, however, that His Majesty would have acquiesced in a suggestion that he should invite the US to train the Vietnamese army and although the suggestion, like Acheson's message, was not carried through because of political sensitivity the US was becoming involved in the war one way and another. In Saigon, for example, the US Minister was urging that his country's influence must be felt ‘not only through the gravitational pull of our aid program but in actual participation in certain controls and in accelerating certain French concessions’. Not only was US advice on war plans to be sought and heeded but ‘we should give our views on organization and training of army and advancement of senior Viet officers’ and there should also be some Franco-American rather than Vietnamese control over the ‘dilatory fiscal collections’ of Vietnam.⁷⁸

An apparent opportunity for, or at least inclination to, US participation in Vietnamese national affairs as suggested in Saigon was soon to become a recognized imperative in Washington: and when the French ministers arrived in October 1950 to ask how much could be expected from the US to avoid financial disaster it was the drain of resources in Vietnam as much as the problems of French rearmament in Europe which prompted a close examination of French budgetary as well as military plans. The French were in fact asking for 270 billion francs and it was hard to see how the distinction could be made between helping to improve the French position in Europe and the position in Vietnam. France was an ally of the US and it was as such that she was to receive the greater part of the half a billion dollars in military assistance for the Far East which had been appropriated by Congress. When it was announced by the State Department on 17 October that military equipment, including light bombers, was being supplied for the armed forces both of France and of the Associated States, it was a distinction without a difference because in practice it was the French who were in control: even if Bao Dai was insistent that the French officers who were to train the soldiers of the Vietnamese national army should be responsible directly to him rather than to the French High Command. The divergence and even the incompatibility of purposes between France and the US had certainly occurred to various officers of the State Department and prompted sarcastic comment. But the dilemma remained and had left the US with the choice of two ghastly courses of action. ‘Either we wash our hands of the country and allow the Communists to overrun it; or to continue to pour treasure (and perhaps eventually lives) into a hopeless cause … at a cost of alienating vital segments of Asian public opinion.’ It was, obviously, a monstrous dilemma and although Ogburn in the State Department was concerned that the Congressional Foreign Relations Committees should not be misled, his suggestion of periodic cocktail parties with non-communist Asians seemed to offer only slight relief.⁷⁹ In any event, at the higher level Rusk announced that the independence of the Associated States of Indo-China within the framework of the French Union was now assured,⁸⁰ even if this did mean squaring the circle or at least begging the question. A similar attempt to draw attention to an approaching commitment that was so deep that it might even lead to direct US intervention was made by the Deputy Director of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, John Ohly, in a long and thoughtful paper which he submitted through Rusk to Acheson. Ohly, without being absolutely sure, thought that US foreign policy was wrong and was at least in need of urgent re-examination. Substantial aid to Indo-China might, without achieving its intended purpose, make impossible the fulfilment of US mutual defence objectives elsewhere in the world. To continue without a far more searching analysis than had so far been made would have been the height of folly. The US, because of limitations in resources, could no longer simultaneously pursue all of its objectives in all parts of the world. Certain objectives might have to be abandoned if others of even greater value and importance were to be attained. As it was, however, the US was slowly, and not too slowly, getting itself into a position where its responsibilities tended to supplant rather than complement those of the French: and this was something which at least had to be offset against all the delays that would ensue in European rearmament.

As with the Ogburn paper it was a matter of incisive and impeccable analysis rather than recommendation. Ohly's proposal was for an assessment by a special task force before any further substantial commitments were made in Indo-China but, coming as it did, a month after the US had made its half-a-billion-dollar commitment, it was probably too late. In any case although Acheson in his memoirs acknowledged the ‘perceptive warning of an able colleague’ and admitted that these fears were eventually borne out by events, at the time he decided nonetheless ‘that having put our hand to the plough we would not look back’ and added his own to what would be hundreds of similarly hopeful assessments. ‘Moreover, the immediate situation appeared to take a turn for the better’.⁸¹ What Acheson had in mind, principally, was the agreement to create a Vietnamese National Army; a hopeful assessment of the agreement that had been reached after the long-drawn-out negotiations at Pau to turn local administration over to the Vietnamese early in 1951 (although, as Acheson notes, the transfer date kept being postponed) and de Lattre's appointment to Indo-China. There were, however, other and less hopeful signs that the French were not in fact going to make any substantial concessions. According to Letourneau, the Vietnamese looked on concessions as weakness and would only ask for more. According to de Lattre, France had spent too much blood and treasure for the Vietnamese to expect the sort of independence that was to be found in the British Commonwealth. And there was still the absurd question of protocol involved in who should occupy the Presidential Palace in Saigon which was turning into a long-running farce and one that was unlikely to be resolved in Bao Dai's favour as long as de Lattre was High Commissioner.

In the meantime, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were giving their professional opinion how the French were to win the war and what the US would and would not do. The JCS were already on record that the US should assume ‘positive and proper leadership’ among the Western powers in Southeast Asia in order, as they put it, with no excessive modesty, ‘to retrieve the losses resulting from previous mistakes on the part of the British and the French, as well as to preclude such mistakes in the future.’⁸² Their recommendations to the Secretary of Defense, General Marshall, in November 1950 were yet more overweening and ingenuous, even if the imperative form was unintentional. Having decided for themselves that the problem lay in the lack of will and determination on the part of the Indo-Chinese to join whole-heartedly with the French in resisting communism, the US had to obtain assurances from the French that a programme of French government will be developed; national armies will be organized; France will despatch sufficient additional armed forces to Indo-China to insure that the restoration of peace and internal security will be accomplished in accordance with the timetable of the overall military plan for Indo-China (which made it sound more like a military parade than a war) and that the French will eliminate their policy of colonialism. The emphasis is added here; but even more emphatic was the JCS opinion that, in the event of an overt attack by organized Chinese communist forces in Indo-China, the US should not permit itself to become engaged in a general war with communist China although assistance short of the actual employment of US military forces should be provided.⁸³ In this event the American military assistance programme was to be expanded appropriately but, presumably in the meantime, neighbouring states were to be induced to commit their armed forces. (Chiang Kai-shek was not specifically mentioned but it is hard to think of other forces that might have been available.) All this, one may presume further, was supposed to supply the missing will and determination of the indigenous people and just in case the French might be feeling a little faint-hearted at the prospect, the US should immediately reconsider its policy at the first sign that the French were planning to give up or even if they planned to take the problem to the UN.

As 1950 ended the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency presented a sombre picture of what it was the US had underwritten in Vietnam. On their own, it was reckoned that the Vietminh in Tonkin, who now outnumbered the French regular forces, could probably drive the French out in six to nine months and there were many indications also of impending Chinese communist intervention.⁸⁴ As 1951 began these indications had become an ‘unavoidable assumption’ on the part of the US minister in Saigon (Heath) who reported that ‘sooner or later and probably soon’ Chinese communists will invade Indo-China with organized units,⁸⁵ and near panic conditions were reported from the North. Whether or not, as Heath reported, the Vietnamese were turning increasingly to the US for advice and assistance in a situation where the Governor of Annam wasn't speaking to the Prime Minister – who was being kept on for fear that he would start a separatist movement in the south – there was some point to his suggestions that Bao Dai should be better advertised; that he should have an American adviser and that American technicians should give the Vietnamese government a ‘new look’.

Six months later, in June 1951, after de Lattre had halted the Vietminh offensive in Tonkin and with the immediate threat removed, Heath reported from Saigon that the current phase in Indo-China was now to be seen as a holding operation.⁸⁶ This opinion was shared by Robert Blum in his capacity as chief of the American economic mission in Saigon (he was apparently also a CIA officer). ‘Perhaps the best we can hope for is to conduct here a kind of uneasy holding operation until something else happens in another place’⁸⁷ – but in most other respects, certainly in conclusions and prescription, they diverged to the point of confrontation. For Heath it was a partnership in Indo-China between France and the US, whose interests required loyal and ungrudging although not uncritical support from the US. It was childish, he said, to think of ousting the French from Indo-China and stemming communism with the means then at hand and, considering the size of the military and economic aid programmes that were available, the pro-American movement could not be built overnight. Blum, on the other hand, was looking to a more distant future when the French might have to withdraw entirely and in order to maintain the position of influence in the future he believed that the only firm foundation was a break with the past. In practice this appeared to mean a break with the French and, like many Americans engaged in day-to-day dealings in Vietnam, Blum's frustration had reached the point where he would recommend withdrawing US assistance altogether rather than endlessly humouring the French. The irritation, if not exasperation, was mutual. Apart from calling Blum ‘the most dangerous man in Indo-China’ de Lattre complained of all the ‘missionary young men’ the US was sending to Vietnam, of the way in which they undermined the idea of the French Union and, as he obviously had time to read the reports as soon as they were sent, he objected strenuously and in person to US correspondents who did not share his more exalted view of France's mission in Indo-China. Presumably acting on de Lattre's orders, and certainly in keeping with his ideas, French censors altered the more exuberant and less sensitive American publicity releases and, in an extraordinary outburst, at the last moment de Lattre refused to allow the government of Vietnam to sign its economic agreement with the US. France, he said, must insist on exact compliance with consultation provisions and ‘if the Vietnamese were to be allowed from the start to negotiate and sign international treaties without full prior consultation and approval the foundation and future of the French Union would be in peril.’⁸⁸ This was the first separate treaty to be negotiated and signed by the government of Vietnam and de Lattre's refusal was described as a slap in the face in the report which had caused de Lattre to explode and to consider expelling the American reporter. Perhaps not surprisingly for some Americans, as Heath reported, it was not the Vietminh who were seen as the enemy but the French.

DE LATTRE'S COMET

At the same time, as de Lattre was to repeat constantly to mostly more important Americans, France was an ally and an ally, moreover, that was not far off the point of victory in Vietnam. In Paris in March, 1951 he assured Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe, that with 12 extra infantry battalions plus the Vietnamese army which he was organizing and training, he would repel the anticipated Vietminh mass attack in September and go on to deal them a decisive blow. That in itself would win the support of a substantial group of Vietnamese fence sitters, and would unite all Vietnamese in solid opposition to Ho Chi Minh; and the Chinese communists, practical people, when they saw their aid resulting in no real accomplishment, would be less ready to see it frittered away.⁸⁹ De Lattre, it seems, had himself in mind as a Supreme Allied Commander for Southeast Asia and his proposals for a joint intelligence operation together with a strategic reserve of six or eight divisions would, if it had come to anything, have meant not only an American but a British commitment to French fortunes in Indo-China. As it was, de Lattre constantly held out the prospect of Chinese intervention, apparently believing it himself and certainly capitalizing on it in the US. There was a widespread feeling in 1951 that at any moment the Chinese, who had already identified themselves in US eyes as aggressors in Korea, might extend their intervention to Vietnam. Thus, a major paper on US military assistance to Southeast Asia to which Rusk gave his name early in 1951 was predicated on ‘the imminence of a communist invasion of that area’. On closer inspection there was quite a muddle between ‘Chinese imperialism’ and ‘Vietminh military operations’, but it seems to have been an elementary mistake to base the assessment entirely on capability rather than intention, which the paper admitted, and was an extraordinary foundation for Rusk's conclusion which was that: ‘Above all, we cannot afford to jeopardise the considerable measure of success our policy has already had in Indo-China by neglecting to provide the proper maintenance for our investment.’⁹⁰

Reports and assumptions such as this continued, off and on, throughout the year and reached a climax in December 1951 in a memorandum from the acting Assistant Secretary of State (Allison) to Acheson which reported that from various sources and for various reasons, not least the fact that some 200,000 Chinese communist troops in Kwangsi Province were prepared to move on Indo-China as ‘volunteers’, a large-scale attack against French Union and Vietnamese forces in Tonkin must be expected on or about 28 December.⁹¹ This was remarkably precise and remarkably misleading and seems once again to have been based essentially on Chinese communist capability.

When de Lattre had visited Washington in September 1951 it was this theme, ‘the ability of communist China to invade Indo-China and South-East Asia’ that the State Department had chosen to stress in their briefing for President Truman and their up-beat assessment of the General who had transformed ‘an army beset with defeatism into a force which has since won every major engagement against the communist forces’. Truman was reminded that it was an agreed military estimate that if Indo-China falls, ‘very likely all of South-East Asia may come under communist domination’ and, although it might not have seemed a very credible danger, it was pointed out that the Philippines were less than 800 miles from Indo-China.⁹² It does not appear in Heath's brief memorandum of de Lattre's meeting with Truman but de Lattre subsequently claimed to have been very reassured by the President's statement: ‘We would not let Indo-China fall into enemy hands.’ What is certainly on record, however, is de Lattre's ineffable assurance to Acheson that ‘If it were made possible to carry out his present military plans and if there were no Chinese military intervention the Vietminh could be eliminated as a fighting force in a period of between one and two years.’ In regard to his relations with the Vietnamese de Lattre claimed that Bao Dai was the ablest statesman in Vietnam; but perhaps rather spoilt things by adding that there had been several recent instances when Bao Dai ‘had showed the proper co-operative spirit and, in some cases, even initiative’.⁹³

The gist of de Lattre's message in Washington was that if the US would give him the tools, he would finish the job. Brushing aside the major political problem of French colonialism, (‘there was no reason to discuss the question further’) the real problem for de Lattre was guaranteeing priorities on the delivery of equipment. Putting the question point blank he said ‘Did the US admit that Indo-China was the key-stone in South-East Asia? If the answer was no, nothing more could be accomplished; if yes, the US must provide the weapons to make continued resistance possible.’ As de Lattre presented his case, his plan to construct 1200 bunkers of the Siegfried Line-type (one wonders why its French counterpart was not mentioned instead) was to provide against future Chinese attacks but, on the assumption that the Chinese might be deterred, French success seemed to be simply a matter of US munitions and confidence and, although it might have been misleading as a performance indicator, at the end of his visit to the Pentagon de Lattre was rewarded with Defense Secretary Lovett's assertipn that General de Lattre was regarded as a comrade in arms and that the US would do everything they could for him that was within their capabilities.⁹⁵

On his return to Vietnam de Lattre was even more euphoric. Morale in the Vietminh forces was dropping, Ho's prestige and popularity were waning. Providing there was no direct Chinese communist intervention he was utterly confident that in one year not only would he have secured the Tonkin Delta but would have completely eradicated the Vietminh from South Vietnam so that, by the spring of 1953, the Vietminh revolt would have been stamped out.⁹⁶ It was, of course, one thing to talk up such confidence, either in Saigon or in Washington, but quite another whether it would be believed. While a few professional eyebrows were raised, nevertheless, when the US Army Chief of Staff, General Collins, visited Vietnam he was not only impressed by de Lattre's ‘Siegfried Line’ but told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that unless the Chinese intervened the French and Vietnamese forces should be able to hold Indo-China indefinitely. In the meantime, he said, the French were making genuine progress in building up native forces although it would be some years before the Vietnamese would be competent to defend themselves. There was, however, a warning. This, said Collins, is largely a General de Lattre show. If anything should happen to him, there could well be a collapse in Indo-China and it was for this reason that Collins recommended that the US should continue to extend military and economic aid ‘in order to check the spread of communism in South-East Asia’ – but only as long as de Lattre was in Indo-China.

Two months later de Lattre was dead. He had blazed like a comet across Vietnam and the light did as much as anything in 1951 to dazzle the US and to persuade them that their assessments were right, that it was the right war and that, on certain conditions, it might also be a winnable war. But 1951 was also the year in which the climax had not happened because the Chinese did not arrive and all the plans for increasing US assistance, in which this was a contingent but major factor, would in the end go to help the French reinforce their position in Indo-China or, at most, help them to decide the time when they might depart. As a policy that might have succeeded it suffered from impossible political equivocation. At the same time as the US sought to stiffen French resolve, at least to continue the war, it had to persuade France in effect to let go because, at the very least, it had recognized that the forces of what was nominally ‘the French Union’ in Indo-China in reality needed men: and these men would have to be found for and fight in the National Army of Vietnam. The costs for the US would be enormous, indeed the requirement of the French was that the US would pay the entire cost, but money and munitions could be regarded as the essential calipers which might allow the rickety infant to walk; and as long as it had an American account it would grow up and would be able to buy everything that was needed for a new nation state.

Apart from this it was probably true to say that the Truman Administration, well before it came to an end, had run out of ideas on Vietnam; and it is probably true also that at the end of 1951 the weight of the French problem was beginning to shift: not so much how the US could get France out but how to keep her in. In the meantime, whether or not Acheson's alleged insensitivity to the nationalism of China's leaders could be reckoned to extend southwards to Vietnam⁹⁷ and whether or not the evidence suggests European rather than Asian priorities, Truman's momentous postwar Democratic Administration, and his partnership with Acheson, had taken the US into the tiger's cage. For the moment, however, it was France who was riding the tiger and it would be her problem how to dismount. Whether the US would help her or would decide to take her place were the questions which the next Administration would have to decide.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Newsweek, 6 January 1947.

2. At least the French professed to believe he had. See FRUS 1947 Vol. VI p. 58; cf. the account cabled to the US Embassy in Paris, on Christmas Eve. FRUS 1946 Vol. VIII. In any case Lacoste, Minister in the French Embassy in Washington, had been horrified when someone in the State Department mentioned ‘good offices’: either a third party or the UN. No French government, he said, would ever consider it. FRUS 1946 Vol. VII p. 71.

3. FRUS 1947 Vol. VI The Far East, pp. 54–5.

4. FRUS 1946 Vol. VIII The Far East, p. 19.

5. R.H. Spector, United States Army in Vietnam. Advice and Support; The Early Years 1941–1960 (Washington 1983) p. 69 says this would possibly have led to war between the French and the Vietnamese: which is why neither General Gallagher nor General Lu Han wanted the harbour cleared.

6. Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations. United States Senate, 9, 10, and 11 May 1972. Washington, 1973 pp. 175–6.

7. Ibid p. 169.

8. Ibid p. 167.

9. Probably the first report on the political complexion of the Vietminh to reach the American Secretary of State came from the Director of the OSS on 22 August 1945 which it described, unambiguously, as ‘A 100% Communist party’. United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, (Washington 1971), Book 8, p. 46.

10. FRUS 1947, Vol. VI, p. 68 (3 February 1947).

11. FRUS 1946, Vol. VIII, p. 65 (3 December 1946). Professor Robert J. O'Neill points out that the French, in their offensive of 1947, with a force of 15,000 men, had to find and defeat an army of 60,000 in an area of 7,500 square miles. A reasonable task, he says, would have been to defeat a force of 3000 guerrillas within an area of 400 square miles. General Giap (Washington 1969).

12. Ibid. p. 67.

13. Ibid. p. 58 (11 September 1946).

14. Ibid. pp. 72–3 (17 December).

15. Ibid.

16. According to the French monitoring service, Radio Vietnam on 26 March broadcast a statement from the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, ‘We accept independence of Vietnam in the framework of the French Union’. And even more remarkable were Ho's remarks on the death of Colonel Dèbes, the bombarder of Haiphong, in an air crash: which were either astonishingly generous, or gross dissimulation. FRUS, 1947 Vol. VI, pp. 83–6.

17. Irving, The First Indochina War (London 1975), p. 49.

18. According to Irving, op. cit. p. 48, who had interviewed Bollaert.

19. An English text of the speech may be found in Allan B. Cole, Conflict in Indo-China and International Repercussions (Cornell 1956), pp. 62–6.

20. Irving, op. cit. p. 49.

21. FRUS 1947 Vol. VI pp. 141–2.

22. A telegram to the US Embassy in Paris which went out above Marshall's name on 13 May 1947 but which was apparently composed by Moffat's South-East Asia Division, FRUS, 1947 Vol. VI p. 97; Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, pp. 170–1.

23. Quoted in Gary R. Hess, ‘The First American Commitment in Indo-China: The Acceptance of the “Bao Dai Solution 1950”. Diplomatic History 1978 Vol. 2 Fall.

24. FRUS 1948, Vol. VI pp. 32–3.

25. Ibid.

26. FRUS 1948 Vol. I part 2 p. 643.

27. David S. McClellan Dean Acheson: the State Department Years (New York 1976), ch. 21.

28. Gaddis Smith, Dean Acheson (New York 1972), ch. 12.

29. Gary R. Hess, op. cit.

30. The Pentagon Papers (Gravel 1971) Vol. I p. 74.

31. Charlton Ogburn's complaint from within that Division, that it was ‘the culmination of three years of consistent effort on the part of Western Europe to set aside all considerations of our position in Asia and to keep a free hand of the French’. Hess, op. cit. p. 342.

32. FRUS 1949 Vol. VII pp. 39–45.

33. The details of this plan, and the even simpler proposal of Harold Isaacs, the foreign correspondent, ‘Contact Ho Chi Minh, find out what he wanted, and then accept his terms’, are given in Robert M. Blum's important account, Drawing the Line (New York 1982), ch. 7.

34. J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York 1982), pp. 63–4.

35. At Calcutta what was virtually the keynote speech was given by a Vietnamese delegate. See Ruth D. McVey, The Calcutta Conference and the South-East Asia Uprisings (Cornell 1958). On Malaya see Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–1960 (London 1975).

36. ‘History of the Indo-China Incident, 1940–1954’ Historical Division Joint Secretariat Joint Chiefs of Staff August 1971. The Acheson memo was dated 18 July 1949. There are references to it in Philip C. Jessup The Birth of Nations (New York 1974), p. 29; and in Hearings, Senate Foreign Relations Committee 81st Congress, 2nd Session ‘Nomination of Jessup’ p. 603.

37. FRUS 1948 Vol. I Part 2, p. 643.

38. Blum, op. cit. p. 214.

39. McClellan, op. cit. p. 193.

40. During the war, the widely respected columnist Walter Lippmann had sought to explain ‘The mystery of our China policy’ to the American people, why and how the US, rather than assent to the conquest of China, chose to accept the Japanese challenge, and he concluded that the US decision to become the champion of China was, second only to Monroe's commitment to defend the Latin-American republics, the most momentous event in America's foreign relations. Americans, said Lippmann, being incapable by the nature of their own society of sustained imperialism, were the opponents of imperialism wherever they encountered it. ‘They have believed profoundly that their own principles of liberty were founded upon the laws of nature and of nature's god, and that at last they would prevail everywhere.’ Lippmann believed that the history of US relations with East Asia had proved that these convictions were the mainspring of the foreign relations of the US. Walter Lippmann, ‘US War Aims’, 1944, reprinted in Robert A. Goldwin, Readings in American Foreign Policy (New York 1971).

41. Blum, op. cit. p. 102.

42. ‘United States Relations with China’ in Goldwin, op. cit. pp. 290–301. Also Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York 1969), Ch. 39.

43. Spector, op. cit. p. 97.

44. Quoted in Spector, op. cit. p. 101.

45. JCS, History p. 149.

46. Ibid. p. 41. The influential Congressman Walter Judd had already identified China as the original Asian domino. Quoted in Charles Wolf Jr, Foreign Aid: Theory and Practice on Southern Asia (Princeton 1960), p. 26.

47. The US Government And The Vietnam War Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships Part 1 1945–1961. Prepared for the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Dr William Conrad Gibbons) (Washington 1984), p. 58. Hereinafter cited as ‘Gibbons’.

48. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 61.

49. FRUS 1949 Vol. VII p. 86.

50. Ibid. p. 113.

51. Ibid.

52. FRUS 1950 Vol. VI p. 711.

53. Wolf, op. cit.

54. See, for example, President Truman's ‘State Of The Union’ Message: 5 January 1949.

55. Wolf, op. cit. p. 40.

56. Ibid. pp. 80–1.

57. Ninth Report of Economic Co-operation Administration, pp. 99–100. Quoted in Wolf, op. cit. p. 82.

58. For example by Charlton Ogburn, Policy Information Officer, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, who said: ‘The trouble is that none of us knows enough about Indo-China.’

59. FRUS 1950 Vol. VI 733.

60. Gaddis Smith op. cit. p. 315.

61. The paper may be found in FRUS 1950 Vol. I, pp. 235–92. It is criticized in J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, Ch. 4; by Samuel F. Wells in International Security, Fall 1979; and again by Gaddis in International Security, where there is also a reply by Paul Nitze, one of the principal authors of the paper.

62. Strategies of Containment, p. 94; p. 107.

63. FRUS 1950 Vol. I p. 288.

64. Wells, op. cit. p. 125.

65. FRUS 1950 Vol. III p. 1007.

66. Acheson's telegram to the US Embassy in Paris, 29 March, FRUS 1950 Vol. III p. 769.

67. Ibid. p. 939.

68. As the French explained to a sub-committee on colonial questions at the preparatory talks for the Foreign Ministers' meeting in May 1950, FRUS, Vol. III p. 949.

69. McClellan, op. cit. p. 383.

70. Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 673.

71. Accounts of the Melby-Erskine Report can be found in FRUS Vol. VI pp. 840–8; Spector, op. cit. pp. 111–15; and Melby's own memoir ‘Vietnam – 1950’, Diplomatic History, Vol. VI no. 1 Winter 1982, pp. 97–109.

72. FRUS, 1950 Vol. VI p. 858.

73. Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (London 1963), p. 30.

74. Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War (London 1967).

75. But the political impact of this appalling weapon had also to be weighed. In the words of the editor of an ultra-nationalist Hanoi Catholic paper: ‘Americans are too anti-communist and therefore neglect other considerations. They give napalm to the French and are surprised by the reactions shown by the Vietnamese against its use on innocent villagers.’ FRUS 1951 Vol. VI p. 444.

76. FRUS 1950 Vol. III p. 1416.

77. United States-Vietnam Relations 1946–1967, Book 8 p. 389.

78. FRUS 1950 Vol. VI pp. 865–7.

79. Ibid. pp. 862–4 (18 August 1950).

80. 27 November 1950, FRUS 1950 Vol. VI p. 938.

81. Acheson, op. cit. p. 674.

82. United States-Vietnam Relations 1946–1967, Book 8 p. 318 (2 May 1950).

83. FRUS 1950 Vol. VI, p. 947 (28 November).

84. Ibid. pp. 958–63.

85. FRUS 1951 Vol. VI p. 332.

86. FRUS 1951 Vol. VI p. 438.

87. Ibid. p. 451.

88. Ibid. p. 439–41.

89. Ibid. p. 401.

90. Ibid. p. 21.

91. Ibid. p. 562.

92. Ibid. p. 497.

93. Ibid. p. 502.

94.Ibid. p. 508.

95. Ibid. p. 521.

96. Ibid. pp. 540–2 (10 November).

97. As David McLean asserts in ‘American Nationalism, the China Myth, and the Truman Doctrine: The Question of Accommodation with Peking, 1949–1950’ Diplomatic History Vol. X no. 1, winter 1986, p. 40.