CHAPTER 9

INTERNATIONALIZED STATES OF WAR

THE FORMER EMPEROR of Annam knew they would come. They always did. The fact that he had abdicated in 1945, that he had begged de Gaulle not to re-conquer Vietnam by force, and that he remained an advisor to Ho Chi Minh would not stop them. When the French came to court Bao Dai once again, this time to entreat him to be the titular head of state of their future Associated State of Vietnam, Bao Dai understood the Indochina civil servants very well. He knew their mindset and the colonial ideology driving them. Bao Dai even shared with them the same colonial godfathers—Albert Sarraut and Pierre Pasquier. We do not know what the former emperor thought of Nguyen Van Thinh’s tragic death in 1946, but we can be sure that whatever Bao Dai’s flaws (and they were many), naivety was not among them. The Indochina administrators wanted from him the very things for which Sarraut had fashioned Bao Dai as a child after the First World War—as a colonial weapon to fight anticolonialists, the living symbol of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, a ruler through whom the French could rally the peasant ‘masses’, and an administrative instrument through which to rule indirectly. This was not to be the first ‘Bao Dai solution’. It was the fourth. But three things distinguished this latest one: the French now agreed to extend the monarchy to all of ‘Vietnam’, not just central ‘Annam’; the Vietnamese head of state would work in tandem with monarchs in Laos and Cambodia; and the French would align all three states with the West in order to use the Cold War to preserve their colonial presence in Indochina.

AN ASSOCIATED STATE OF VIETNAM AS A WESTERN-BACKED INDOCHINESE PROTECTORATE?¹

Léon Pignon was the mastermind of colonial monarchy after the Second World War. As early as July 1946, he had castigated French military commanders for joining forces with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s leaders to run the non-communist nationalists out of Vietnam along with the withdrawing Chinese. Whatever the nationalists’ anti-French vitriol in public, the political advisor to the high commissioner said, it was just posturing. The French could and should use the nationalist opposition in order to combat the DRV. With characteristic Machiavellism, Pignon put the strategic goal to his boss in one simple sentence: ‘The opposition to the present government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam must serve the permanent interests of France in this country’. Divide and rule was once again at the core of French colonial policy. To this end, he suggested that his long-time collaborator, Jean Cousseau, travel to Hong Kong to contact Bao Dai. The colonial administrators were certain they could win over the former emperor once again. In January 1947, Thierry d’Argenlieu advised his government to pursue the restoration of the ‘traditional monarchical institution’. He immediately dispatched Cousseau and others to contact Bao Dai and initiate informal talks with others.²

The outbreak of war between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the changing international situation convinced a wide range of non-communist nationalists that they too could play the ‘Bao Dai’ card against both the French and the DRV. In February 1947, Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Hai Than created the All-Country National Union Front (Mat Tran Quoc Gia Thong Nhat Toan Quoc) and stepped up their contacts with Bao Dai. They renewed requests for republican Chinese assistance, hoping that the resumption of the long civil war between Chinese communists and nationalists would finally end the united-front strategy that had hurt Vietnamese non-communists so badly since the 1930s. In March, the All-Country National Union Front formally terminated its collaboration with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and laid out its plans to create a non-communist republic or a constitutional monarchy. The All-Country National Union Front also turned to the new global power emerging from world war—the United States. Nationalists betted that the Americans would help them, as they were helping China’s Chiang Kai-shek against the communist party’s Mao Zedong, and that they would force the French to decolonize as the Americans had done in the Philippines in July 1946. Ideologically, anticommunism would unify them all. In March 1947, Truman announced his doctrine of containment and began transforming Japan into America’s would-be pillar of Asian containment.

We now know the Americans would disappoint, but no one could know this then. A ‘third way’ thus seemed possible in 1947. Patriots inside Vietnam like Tran Trong Kim and Ngo Dinh Diem travelled back and forth to China to discuss plans with All-Country National Union Front leaders, Bao Dai, and foreign diplomats about what to do next. Vietnamese Catholics also distanced themselves from both the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s communist core and the French colonial hold over the country and joined discussions. Until 1950, the nationalist-minded Bishop Le Huu Tu transformed his diocese in Bui Chu and Phat Diem into an autonomous and armed religious micro-state in the lower Red River delta, complete with its own administration, tax regime, and troops. The idea that Vietnamese Catholics rushed to help the French re-establish colonial rule is wrong. The only religious groups Pignon could turn provisionally against the DRV in early 1947 were in the south, among the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, and whom the French immediately recruited into their Cochinchinese state. But Thierry d’Argenlieu was so suspicious of Nguyen Van Xuan’s nationalism that he replaced the president of the Cochinchinese republic with the Hoa Hao’s seemingly more pliant Le Van Hoach.³

Non-communists opposed to the DRV increasingly agreed that they would have to stand together behind Bao Dai and rely on a bloc of like-minded supporters in China and in Vietnam. They turned to the exemperor, not just because the French insisted on negotiating with him, but also because they believed that Bao Dai represented their best chance for forcing the French to accept Vietnam’s independence and unity and winning American support. In March, the All-Country National Union Front formally pledged its support to Bao Dai. For the time being, the former Nguyen emperor expressed his willingness to step forward for the good of the people, but held his cards close to his chest and left his political options open. He refused to break with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; talked informally with the French and foreign diplomats; and closely followed international and Indochinese events. Most importantly, he refused to return to his French handlers. He informed them instead that he, like Ho, expected them to honor the accords of 6 March 1946, meaning the independence of Vietnam within the French Union and the creation of a unitary Vietnamese state including Cochinchina. Two competing Bao Dai solutions—not one—thus developed after the Second World War.

In early 1947, the French coalition government in Paris approved financing for the war in Indochina, but announced that it was willing to implement a ceasefire to achieve a negotiated settlement with all of the Vietnamese, including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Upon replacing Thierry d’Argenlieu in March, the new socialist high commissioner, Emile Bollaert, dispatched one of the rare liberal-minded Indochina senior government administrators, and head of the Colonial Academy, Paul Mus, to meet with Ho Chi Minh and Bao Dai about finding a solution. While both men informed Mus that the French had to recognize Vietnamese independence and unity to move forward, each of these statesmen left the door open to negotiations. What changed over the summer was that anticommunists within the All-Country National Union Front objected to Bollaert and his socialist-led government’s willingness to negotiate with the DRV, fearful that such negotiations could see the non-communists taking orders again from Ho Chi Minh in a coalition government as in 1945–6. The colonial-minded Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP, or the Popular Republican Movement), the French army command in Indochina, and the Gaullists regrouping in the Rassemblement du Peuple français (RPF, or the Rally of the French People) agreed. The last thing they wanted to see was Ho return to power peacefully now that they were on the brink of destroying his state for good (Valluy was preparing a large attack over the summer to do precisely that.). The ousting of the French communists from the ruling coalition in Paris in May further convinced the Popular Republican Movement leadership that it could engineer the same thing in Indochina by winning over the anticommunists in the person of Bao Dai. Now in the majority, the MRP firmly backed Bao Dai over Ho Chi Minh, demanding nothing short of the latter’s capitulation. Unwilling to break with the Popular Republican Movement over this, in a fateful decision they would repeat in Algeria, the socialists toed the harder line within the coalition government in Paris. Government instructions now ruled out concessions on the questions of Vietnam’s independence and unity. Bollaert had initially planned to speak favorably of these matters in a major speech scheduled for 15 August, the very day the British were to accord independence to India and Pakistan. Instead, on 10 September, the high commissioner invited non-communists to negotiate with the French, intentionally excluded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but carefully avoided any talk of independence with any Vietnamese.

Although profoundly disappointed by Bollaert’s silence on independence, the non-communists had part of what they wanted strategically—the French exclusion of the DRV from negotiations—and that was enough for them to make the next move. A week later, Bao Dai broke formally with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in his address to the Vietnamese people and announced that he was ‘ready to enter into contact with [the] French authorities’. A few weeks later, Valluy launched Opération Léa to capture the DRV leadership and clear the way for direct negotiations with Bao Dai. It failed, but the message was clear: the Popular Republican Movement would not negotiate with the DRV either.⁴

The decision by the ‘Third Force’ (the term that emerged to describe these non-communist nationalists coalescing around Bao Dai) to enter into negotiations with the French in 1947 was a turning point in twentieth-century Vietnamese political history. It meant that non-communists were ready to risk continued civil war with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, using French military power to do so, instead of remaining within a national front with the DRV’s state and army in order to force the French to decolonize. The communist destruction of the opposition parties in northern Vietnam in mid-1946 hardly facilitated reconciliation. Indeed, the communists in control of the DRV in 1947 had scored a major military victory over their Vietnamese rivals in the previous year. Furious with the communist assault on them that year, Greater Vietnam (Dai Viet) supporters returned to colonial-controlled Vietnam convinced that the best strategy was to use the French to get rid of their enemies. As a result, Greater Vietnam members began to join the ‘administrative committees’ in Hanoi and Hue which the French had established after ousting the DRV there.⁵

This was, however, a very risky strategy. Unlike the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the nationalists lining up behind Bao Dai now entered into negotiations with the French without having an army or a ‘resistance’ government, neither inside the country nor abroad. The French civil service directed the administration of the parts of Vietnam controlled by the Expeditionary Corps, mainly in the cities and the surrounding deltas while the DRV tended to the rest. This ‘Third Force’ Vietnam would thus be a graft on to French Cochinchina and the colonial administration committees resuming their work in Annam and Tonkin. Any non-communist national army would be allied with the French. Non-communists like the Dai Viet were working on the assumption that the communists would lose and the French would agree to independence. But what would non-communist nationalists do if the Democratic Republic of Vietnam carried on or the Popular Republican Movement refused to accord the Vietnamese real independence and power . . . or both? Such an outcome could transform legitimate non-communist nationalists looking for an alternative to communism and colonialism into colonial puppets. And chronic factionalism among non-communists never helped. Vietnamese communists were many things, but as long as the French refused to negotiate any real independence for Vietnam, they fought on.

When Bao Dai arrived in Ha Long Bay in December 1947 to begin talks with the high commissioner, he discovered to his dismay that the French were just as opposed to the idea of according real independence to him as they had been to Ho. In their formal declaration, Bollaert pronounced the magic word ‘independence’; but in a secret protocol initialed by Bao Dai to serve as a basis for negotiations, the French imposed all sorts of legal limitations on it, including the control of any future state’s diplomacy, defense, finances, and currency. Bao Dai returned to Hong Kong to discuss the proposals with his allies before resuming talks. Ngo Dinh Diem and others objected to the protocol, demanding that the French respect the March 1946 accords and follow the British lead on India a few months earlier. Constitutional constraints, the French countered, required them to maintain the French Union and thus impose limitations on colonial sovereignty. Diem insisted that an independent, national government had to come first, one which non-communists could then build up nationally and turn against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with the French and the West alongside. If the British could accord dominion status to India, Diem insisted, so could the French, despite the clause in the 1946 constitution preventing member states of the French Union from obtaining full sovereignty equal to France. Diem put his case to the French, but the latter were convinced that they could make the Union work and feared that equal independence with the French for the Vietnamese would bring down the entire imperial state they hoped to stitch together via the Union. When Bollaert sent him packing, Diem pulled out of the Third Force Bao Dai solution, convinced that the French were no more serious about recognizing anticommunist nationalists or decolonizing than they had been twenty years earlier. The French creation of special territories for the ‘ethnic minorities’ under their control in 1948 only reinforced Diem’s view (see chapter 14).⁶

Bao Dai carried on, however, convinced he could use his position in exile to continue to work in collaboration with Vietnamese nationalists inside the country to force the French to decolonize and thereby transform the Cochinchinese Republic and the administrative committees for Annam and Tonkin into an independent Vietnam on the Third Force’s terms. He left the task of testing whether the French would at least allow for the creation of a unitary Vietnam to Nguyen Van Xuan (a fellow socialist Bollaert had named to head up the Cochinchinese republic). Greater Vietnam personnel went to work in the administrative committees in Annam and Tonkin.

In early 1948, the high commissioner seemed to soften his position, when he accepted the idea of allowing for the creation of a unitary Vietnamese state under Nguyen Van Xuan’s leadership. In May, the latter presided over the formation of a Provisional Central Government of Vietnam, combining the Cochinchinese republic with the administrative committees for Tonkin and Annam. In June, Bao Dai and Bollaert met again in Ha Long Bay. After the usual legal word games about the nature of the French Union and national sovereignty, the high commissioner recognized the de facto unification of Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina, but reiterated the strict limitations on independence needed to preserve the French Union. A few days later, the Popular Republican Movement-led government disappointed nationalists profoundly by declaring that the latest Ha Long Bay accord in no way changed Cochinchina’s legal status. The constitution was clear, they said: As it was a colony, only the French National Assembly could approve such a modification. The French thus continued to rule Vietnam at the federal level, and Xuan, like Thinh before him, was starting to look like a colonial puppet. Bao Dai left for France to negotiate directly with the MRP, but he got no further than Ho had at Fontainebleau in 1946. The talks with Bollaert were dead.

Failure, however, was not an option. The refusal of the most important non-communists to collaborate with the French undermined their colonial presence and ability to defeat the Democratic Republic of Vietnam politically (Operation Léa had failed militarily). In October 1948, the French redoubled their efforts to build a state around Bao Dai, when the Popular Republican Movement named Léon Pignon as the new high commissioner. From his office in the Palais Norodom in Saigon, France’s most important Indochina administrator since Albert Sarraut was finally in charge. He immediately mobilized his longtime associates in the colonial administration and focused his full attention on solving the Vietnam problem. Like Sarraut, Pignon was also an astute observer of the international scene. He watched carefully as the Berlin Crisis, the communist coup in Prague, and the Marshall Plan brought the superpowers to the brink of war in Europe. The polarization of the post-1945 international system into two blocs was obvious to the high commissioner, as was the growing American commitment to Western Europe, symbolized by the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949. In Asia, Pignon understood that events in China would directly influence the fate of French Indochina. And what he saw in early 1949 did not look good: Mao Zedong was on his way to defeating Chiang Kai-shek and would undoubtedly seal an alliance with the Soviets that would extend the communist bloc to Indochina’s northern border. Just as worrisome, decolonization was on the march—Burma, India, and the Philippines were all newly independent. Unimpressed, Pignon watched as the United States, the United Nations, and India pressured the Dutch to let go of Indonesia in 1949.⁷

Against the odds, the high commissioner, his core team, and the government he served remained convinced that the maintenance of French Indochina (and French Africa) was vital to the French national interest and that the Bao Dai solution remained the best way to hold on. Rather than follow the Anglo-American example in India and the Philippines, Pignon pushed a three-pronged strategy designed to placate some of the Third Force’s demands but without terminating France’s continued colonial presence. First of all, the high commissioner abandoned the pentagonal Indochinese Federation (it had existed de facto since late 1945) in favor of creating three separate but associated states of Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This meant that the French would accept Cochinchina’s unification with Annam and Tonkin, but only on the condition that Bao Dai returned to lead it within the French Union. The French were willing to accord greater independence to all three Indochinese states, provided that each accepted that France would continue to play the role of the ‘fourth’ member handling relations among them (currency, customs, immigration, etc.) and military affairs. This is what ‘quadripartisme’ (a four-party system) meant in the new legal vocabulary introduced by Pignon’s team. It was colonial federalism by another name.

Secondly, for the high commissioner, the Associated States of Indochina grand strategy could only work if each state stood behind loyal national monarchs. Like his trusted administrators, Pignon was convinced that the Indochinese peasant majorities remained loyal to their sovereigns and that the best way to attract and rule them against communists and nationalists was through the intermediaries of these monarchs. The young King Sihanouk had already rejoined the French in 1946, while his Laotian mentor, Sisavang Vong, had never left them. To bolster these kings and their legitimacy, Pignon opened negotiations to rally dissenting nationalist groups in each country. This meant winning over the Khmer and Lao nationalist groups whose leaders had taken refuge in Thailand and contested French rule since the Second World War. From 1945 onward, Lao Issara (Free Lao) nationalists had operated a government in exile from Bangkok. The Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) movement also created a resistance government in 1948. By their very existence (and the quality of their leaders), these governments-in-exile undermined the legitimacy of the Khmer and Lao monarchies allied with the French. Undeterred, Pignon dispatched emissaries to meet rebel leaders and used the French embassy in Bangkok to rally most of the dissident Khmer and Lao freedom leaders to his grand Indochinese strategy of associated states.⁸

But without Bao Dai, there was no royalist solution and time was running short. As the Chinese Red Army marched across the Yangzi River in early 1949, the French government accepted the unification of Cochinchina with Annam and Tonkin. In exchange, Bao Dai had to return to lead the Associated State of Vietnam (ASV) and align himself with kings Sisavang Vong, Sihanouk, and the king-maker himself, Pignon. ‘We need a hero, too’, the high commissioner sighed to Lucien Bodard one day, ‘against Ho Chi Minh, we have to have an anti-Ho Chi Minh’. That Pignon never thought twice about the poverty of what he was saying speaks volumes of the official colonial mind at the time.⁹

The third part of Pignon’s strategy focused on the international dimension. Starting in late 1948, the high commissioner began recasting the fight against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and for the Associated States as an integral part of the West’s wider Cold War struggle against the spread of communism. The idea was to win over Atlantic support for the Indochinese states in the fight against communism and to put pressure on Bao Dai to return to run an independent associated state inside Vietnam or risk being left behind. The Americans’ strategic desire to contain communism globally at all costs would trump their reluctance to be seen as backing outdated French colonialists. The French repeated to anyone who would listen on the European desk in the US State Department in Washington and to the American Ambassador in Paris that France (Western Europe) and French Indochina (Southeast Asia) were vital to America’s global containment strategy. French propaganda changed accordingly. Ho Chi Minh was not a nationalist, but an internationalist communist of the very worst kind—and the French provided all sorts of documents to prove it. The military high command in Indochina chimed in with this, badly in need, as they were, of increased military assistance. The French also targeted the British, who were dealing with a communist uprising in Malaya in 1948 where the British, too, had refused to relinquish their colonial hold. The French connected the British ‘emergency’ in Malaya to their war in Indochina, both the result of an alleged Sino-Soviet plot to take over Southeast Asia. The British needed little prodding. Keen on holding on to Malaya and Singapore, they joined the Americans in stepping up their support of the most recent Bao Dai solution as the lesser of two evils. Pignon had a much harder time bringing postcolonial India on board, however. Nehru preferred to steer a neutral course between communists and colonialists and the superpowers standing behind them in Asia.¹⁰

Pignon’s internationalization of the Indochina problem reached its zenith in January 1950, when Mao and Stalin formally recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Worried that Sino-Soviet support of the DRV could turn the tide against the French militarily, the high commissioner repeated to his government in the clearest possible terms why the French had to internationalize the war now. The French would continue the fight ‘to keep Indochina out of the communist grip’, but in so doing the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had to provide increased military aid, recognize the Associated States of Indochina diplomatically, and accept a continued French colonial presence there. This was, Pignon concluded, ‘the price which we can accept for this [our military] commitment’. In reality, his team had already prepared this course of action in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In February 1950, the British and Americans recognized the Associated States of Indochina, followed by the rest of the Atlantic alliance. The Indians did not, nor did the Indonesians or Burmese. They preferred to remain unaligned.¹¹

If one scholar has qualified the Algerian nationalist movement’s success in turning the international system against the French as a ‘diplomatic revolution’, surely Léon Pignon and his Popular Republican Movement backers achieved a successful diplomatic counter-revolution for the colonial side when Bao Dai signed the Elysée accords with President Vincent Auriol on 8 March 1949, creating the less than fully independent Associated State of Vietnam. Similar accords followed for Laos and Cambodia. The seemingly insurmountable constitutional obstacles blocking the unification of Cochinchina with Vietnam disappeared with revealing alacrity. On 22 May the French National Assembly, supported by the hastily convened Cochinchinese Consultative Council, voted in the unification of Cochinchina with the north and the center. French settlers never had a chance. For the first time, they got a taste of what it was like to be on the wrong side of ‘colonial democracy’. Within weeks Bao Dai was back in Vietnam, (supported, indeed pressured by the Atlantic alliance), where he formally presided over the creation of the ASV on 2 July 1949. He became head of a single Vietnamese state and allowed his prime minister to run a government that was no longer provisional.¹²

But the French government was still in control. Unlike the Democratic Republic of Vietnam it opposed, or the Republic of Indonesia that obtained its independence that same year from the Dutch, all three associated states remained subject to colonial limitations in the financial, commercial, legal, and military domains. Pignon’s three-pronged strategy created what was effectively an internationally backed Indochinese protectorate in the form of three associated monarchs—Bao Dai, Sihanouk, and Sisavang Vong. French colonial federalism remained in effect, as the continued operation of the Indochinese piastre by the Bank of Indochina demonstrated. As Bodard put it, ‘“Quadripartisme” was the extension of [French] Indochina in an indirect form’. From 1948 the communist core of the DRV and the spread of the Cold War across Eurasia allowed the French to exploit American fears of communism in order to prolong their colonial presence in Indochina, whereas the same priorities led Washington to pressure the Dutch increasingly to grant independence to the non-communist-led Indonesian republicans.¹³

This French diplomatic victory in 1949–50 dealt Vietnamese noncommunists a terrible blow. Bao Dai realized it immediately upon his return to Vietnam in April 1949, when the French refused to transfer to him the Palais Norodom in Saigon, the seat of the High Commissioner of Indochina and the center of French colonial power since 1863. Bao Dai knew that Pignon was using the Associated State of Vietnam—like the Cochinchinese republic before it—as a weapon to hold on colonially. He did not take his life in protest as Nguyen Van Thinh had done. Instead the ex-emperor withdrew into his world and holed himself up in Dalat. He resisted the French passively and tried, when he could, to advance the ASV’s interests. He placed a palm branch on the monument dedicated to the Vietnamese the French had executed during the battle of Hanoi. He refused all colonial efforts to crown him again. He would rarely dress up in royal garb or tour the countryside to serve as the protectorate’s cultural intermediary. His refusal to play his part as head of state drove the Indochina hands up the wall, as his immobility undermined the legitimacy and laid bare the poverty of the French ‘Bao Dai solutions’ from Sarraut to Pignon, once again. Sitting in Jean Cousseau’s Dalat villa, Lucien Bodard later recalled Cousseau’s furious words when the latter got off the phone with Bao Dai: ‘“Tough. So Bao Dai thinks he’s so smart. He wants to play what he calls his game. This will perhaps finish badly for us, but it will end even worse for him—don’t forget what I said.” “He’s a lard ass”, Cousseau repeatedly told me after having tried to prove unsuccessfully to Bao Dai for hours that the peasants in the delta were awaiting him, that by appearing before them he would become again the Son of Heaven’. But rather than turning the monarchy on the colonizer and the communists by leading a crusade for independence against the French as Norodom Sihanouk and Mohammed V would do in Morocco in 1953, and 1955, respectively. Bao Dai intentionally let it die. In fact, the king of the Nguyen dynasty knew that the French had already killed it. But his French-bred passivity (and possibly French money) ensured that non-communist Vietnamese nationalists could never make the last Nguyen emperor take action against the colonizers, or the communists, much less both. Bao Dai preferred inertia as resistance. It was not enough, though. It prevented him from building up any popular support worthy of notice and ensured that the monarchy would never be revived.¹⁴

Pignon’s Associated States of Indochina were, however, part of larger French efforts to preserve their international standing in the Atlantic alliance. This took on particular importance from 1950 onward when the crisis in Berlin in 1949, followed by the outbreak of the Korean War, sparked Western fears of a communist assault on both sides of Eurasia and accelerated Western efforts to reinforce the defense of Western Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the creation of a Western European army known as the European Defense Community. French leaders used the Indochina War as a way of demonstrating their commitment to the Atlantic alliance and obtaining American aid to continue prosecuting the war as part of the global effort to contain Eurasian communism. For some scholars, France’s blind commitment to the war in Indochina undermined its European ambitions. Others insist that the First Indochina War actually allowed the French to keep themselves at the Great Powers table and promote their ambitions in NATO and European integration and defense. By committing more troops to Indochina in 1951, one of France’s strongest defenders of the Atlantic alliance and the maintenance of the French Union, Georges Bidault, pointed out to his colleagues that ‘our action in Tonkin preserves us on the Rhine, since it preserves the Atlantic community’.¹⁵

RECASTING COMMUNIST VIETNAM: TRANSNATIONAL STATE-MAKING AND MODERN WAR

Vietnamese communists had their own version of the Associated States of Indochina. Mirroring the colonial transformation of the Indochinese Federation into the Associated States of Indochina in 1948–50 was the communist decision to divide the Indochinese Communist Party along national though equally associated lines. In 1949, Vietnamese communists began preparations to create the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, formally approved during the second party congress held in 1951. They could have left it and the colonial model of Indochina there and focused on Vietnam. Instead, like their French opponents, they simultaneously approved the establishment of associated states, national fronts, and communist parties for Laos and Cambodia. The fact that there were hardly any non-Viet communists in Laos and Cambodia did not stop them. In 1950, drawing upon Sino-Vietnamese models and experiences, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Lao and Khmer nationalist fronts—the Pathet Lao (Lao Nation) from the previous Lao Issara (the Free Lao organization) and Khmer Issarak (Independent Khmer, out of the earlier Free Khmer movement). Vietnamese communists then created two respective ‘resistance governments’ (‘chinh phu khang chien’) to stand next to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In order to attract popular support, the Vietnamese turned to disgruntled Laotian royalty in the person of Prince Souphanouvong and to Cambodian Buddhism in the person of a Khmer-Vietnamese monk named Son Ngoc Minh. Both were fluent in Vietnamese. They followed this up with instructions to cadres in western Indochina and among the Vietnamese diaspora in Thailand to create proto-communist parties for Laos and Cambodia, while Vietnamese officers led by Vo Nguyen Giap began building liberation armies. New possibilities and forms of collaboration emerged as Vietnamese communists initiated their own state-building projects. The son of a Vietnamese bureaucrat in Laos, Kaysone Phoumvihane, joined Giap in creating the Pathet Lao army. Thanks to the Vietnamese, he and Souphanouvong would, one day, rule Laos.¹⁶

What explains communist Vietnam’s attraction for the rest of Indochina? On the one hand, it was a matter of national security. The communists needed allies in Laos and Cambodia to help them in the event the French turned their Associated States on DRV Vietnam militarily (with American support). They also needed their own friendly states in Laos and Cambodia to prevent the West from attacking them diplomatically by accusing DRV troops or cadres in Laos and Cambodia of violating the territorial sovereignty of the states now led by Norodom Sihanouk and Sisavang Vong. The disappearance of French Indochina as a sovereign territorial bloc would now have real legal implications: by creating national borders between Vietnam on the one hand and Laos and Cambodia on the other. This is why the communists needed a policy of association of their own. Despite the fact that Ho Chi Minh’s team had changed the party’s name from that of the Indochinese Communist Party to the Vietnamese Workers Party, Vietnamese communists still managed to lead revolutionary Indochina through their own (indirect, communist) policy of association.

On the other hand, Vietnamese communists believed in Indochina. They believed in the Comintern-approved model holding them to bring communist modernity, civilization, and socio-political revolution not just to Vietnam, but also to Laos and Cambodia. A devout internationalist, Ho himself had helped create communist parties for Malaya and Thailand two decades earlier (and may well have created the first communist cell in Laos in 1929). The only difference between the French colonialists and the Vietnamese communist internationalists in 1950 was that the latter actually created Lao and Cambodian states where none had existed before. The result was nonetheless the same: two sets of opposing Associated States of Indochina—six in all—came into being during the First Indochina War, one under the French colonialists, the other under the Vietnamese communists ruling through a revolutionary protectorate. Ironically, as Ho Chi Minh and his entourage were hosting Souphanouvong and Son Ngoc Minh in northern Vietnam to celebrate their revolutionary Indochinese ties in 1950, Albert Sarraut explained to their opposites at the Conference of Pau in France why the Indochinese Federation had had to give way to the Associated States of Indochina within a French Union. Sarraut described it as a ‘continued creation’. Ho would have agreed. And because men like Truong Chinh, Ho Chi Minh, Léon Pignon, and Jean Cousseau continued to cast their wars and state-making in these Indochinese ways, they guaranteed that war would come to Laos and Cambodia with all of its devastating consequences.¹⁷

Similar transnational state-making occurred inside DRV Vietnam itself. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin’s decision to recognize Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam in January 1950 ended the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s international isolation and re-incorporated the Vietnamese communist party into the internationalist fold it had first joined in the early 1930s. Like the French, Vietnamese communists welcomed the internationalization of the conflict. Not only did it provide them with military assistance, but it also provided them with direct access to international communist models for modernization and state-building. While Pignon called on the West to stand united behind the French to keep Vietnam free from communism, Truong Chinh promised the communist bloc that it could count on the Vietnamese to lead the Indochinese revolution and assume the Southeast Asian burden in the global battle against Western capitalism and imperialism. In exchange, he called upon Moscow, Beijing, and their allies to assist the Vietnamese.¹⁸

Positioned on the Asian front line of the Eurasian communist bloc, the Chinese took the lead. They were determined to ensure their new state’s security and expand communism where they could. With Stalin’s approval, Mao Zedong supported his longtime communist allies located on China’s vulnerable flanks—Ho Chi Minh in Indochina and Kim Il-sung in Korea. A high-ranking Chinese communist emissary, Luo Quibo, travelled to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in February 1950 to help them make a list of Vietnamese needs. Militarily, the Vietnamese requested modern arms (machine guns, artillery, ammunition) assistance in creating a professional army, and medicines. Politically, they wanted help to build a bona fide single-party communist state along the Maoist lines that had just led the Chinese Communist Party to victory. This included the introduction of Sino-Soviet mobilization techniques, land reform, and advice on and models for creating a communist-orientated security service, economy, education system, and culture. A remarkable transnational transformation of Vietnamese statecraft began in the DRV zones in Vietnam in 1950—and this in the middle of a full-blown colonial war which was now turning into one of the hottest conflicts of the Cold War.¹⁹

Meanwhile, the Americans threw their weight behind the Associated States of Indochina: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. As Luo Guibo was visiting the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the American State Department dispatched Robert Griffin to tour Indochina at the request of the French government. Accompanying his February visit was the first courtesy call of the Seventh Fleet to Saigon, just as Pignon had requested a few weeks earlier, and which Mao now feared. Griffin met with the high commissioner and the military high command, carefully listing the French economic and military needs for the Associated States of Indochina. On his return to Washington, Griffin urged his government to provide large-scale aid to Indochina in order to keep it and the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands. He also warned that if the United States did not aid the French, then they might well cut their losses and pull out of Indochina completely. Pignon had clearly gotten his message through and was drawing the Americans into protecting the Associated States of Indochina through the French.

Growing anxieties over Korea reinforced the commitment of the main belligerents to support their allies. Within months, as they slid toward war in Korea, the Americans and the Chinese dispatched military advisor groups to Indochina. In September, American General Francis Brink presided over the creation of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon. Between September 1950 and May 1953, the Americans supplied 286,000 tons of material to French Union forces. In 1952, Washington had assumed around 40 percent of the military financial burden. By 1954, it reached almost 80 percent. It is not so much that the Americans were buying the war from the French, it was rather an indication of the fact that it was becoming their war too, and that they were fighting it indirectly through the French-run Associated States of Indochina, the French Expeditionary Corps, and the Indochinese armies the French now agreed to build for Laos, Cambodia, and most importantly, Vietnam itself.

Although the communist bloc could never match the quantity or the modernity of the American military aid to the French, the Chinese committed themselves to helping their allies in Vietnam in order to protect their southern flank, contain American expansionism in the Pacific, and keep a communist-run state alive, as they were doing in Korea. The communist Chinese Advisory Group was created in 1950 and arrived in DRV Vietnam shortly after the Korean War began. Luo Guibo personally presided over two sub-delegations, the military advisory group led by generals Chen Geng and Wei Guoqing, and the political one he personally directed. The military delegation channeled aid to the Vietnamese army, trained troops and officers in northern DRV Vietnam and southern China, and helped devise battle plans. Between May 1950 and June 1954, the Chinese communists provided 21,517 tons of assistance to the DRV Vietnamese. This included machines guns, rifles, ammunition, and artillery. The Chinese aim was not simply to build up the guerilla war, but, as Mao Zedong had instructed his advisors, to ‘organize a professional army’. The Chinese did not create Ho’s army, but they wanted to strengthen it in order to oppose the Franco-American threat on their southern flank indirectly.²⁰

Meanwhile, the Chinese political delegation helped Vietnamese communists to create a veritable party-state capable of running this new type of war. Chinese advisors introduced comprehensive rectification campaigns. This Maoist brainwashing specialty sought to train communist-minded cadres, a new class of civil servants, to run the party, the state, the army, and mass organizations. ‘Reform’ and ‘instruction’ started at the top of the party, thanks to courses organized by the Chinese delegation. Newly formed party schools then trained rectification specialists, who fanned out across the country to inculcate party themes, instructions, and models for midlevel provincial officials and those further down the administrative chain. Together, these ‘rectified’ and loyal bureaucrats and officers would form the backbone upon which a new party-state would operate vertically, with the army and the security services receiving special attention. In 1952, based on Sino-Soviet communist techniques Luo Guibo’s team introduced, Vietnamese communists formally launched the rectification campaigns. As the party began to consolidate its hold over the state, non-communist nationalists unwilling to undergo rectification were sidelined, persecuted, or defected. Ideological loyalty was essential to the functioning of this new single-party state born of war.

To further increase party control and communize society, the Vietnamese accelerated Sino-Soviet inspired ‘new hero’ worship, patriotic emulation campaigns, and stepped up the cult of personality around Ho Chi Minh. ‘New heroes’ (‘anh hung moi’) were exemplary men and women whom all Vietnamese were expected to venerate, not only for their patriotic and heroic deeds, but also for their revolutionary virtues and commitment to communism. Since 1948, the party had begun selecting socialist heroes from among the peasants, workers, and soldiers. Locally organized propaganda drives, schools, and the army encouraged all to emulate them. During the first half of the Indochina conflict, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam relied on patriotic emulation campaigns (‘phong trao thi dua ai quoc’) as a way of mobilizing people to support the war against the French by providing labor, rice, and loyalty. Campaigns lasted from a few weeks to several months in length as cadres fanned out into the villages. Relying on local mass organizations, family ties, and propaganda, officials organized local fun and games, urging men and women in one village to try to outdo their counterparts in another for the good of the nation.

In 1952, now engaged in set-piece battles, communists reorganized the emulation campaigns under strict party control, backed up by the army and police and advised by the Chinese, and focused them increasingly on class issues. From this point, patriotic landowners and bourgeois in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam zone, regardless of how much support they might have provided the cause over the years, became ideological impediments to the party’s control over the state, territory, people, and its ability to transform them in communist ways. At the summit of the new hero worship and emulation campaigns was the party-sponsored worship of Ho Chi Minh, the perfect embodiment of communism and nationalism. New hero worship, emulation campaigns, and the cult of personality were all tools by which the party sought to increase its control and communize its civil servants and society. Again, this does not mean that all of Vietnam suddenly became or was destined to become ‘communist’, any more than one can speak of a timeless ‘Confucian Vietnam’ covering all of the country down to ground level. However, like others centuries before them, Vietnamese communists now willingly looked to China for models to help them in building a new state, in centralizing party control right down to the grassroots, and in establishing ideological homogeneity. And like the Le dynasty’s entry into the East Asian Confucian civilization in the fifteenth century, which had distinguished it from its Southeast Asian neighbors, something very similar happened in the mid-twentieth century when Ho Chi Minh’s party embraced Maoism and the internationalist communist movement from which it flowed in order to build a new state and army.²¹

This also means that the Chinese (as well as the Americans) were deeply involved in ‘nation-building’ in Vietnam. Chinese advisors certainly introduced the Sino-Soviet model for communist land reform. It was another instrument by which the party could destroy ‘feudal’ and other social structures in the countryside in order to replace them with new ones. Maoist land reform further reinforced the party’s vertical control over the state and, theoretically, its ability to mobilize peasants. Not only did the party accord the peasants a plot of land in order to generate their support, but it also began recruiting them into the bureaucracy, the army, and the security services. This social revolution in the countryside began in late 1953 as the war against the French reached its denouement and continued until 1956. We will return to this question later.

The Vietnamese used all of these Sino-Soviet techniques to make the transition to modern, conventional war as well. A year before the Chinese advisors arrived in 1950, Vietnamese communists had already begun shifting to the third phase of Maoist military strategy, the ‘General Counter Offensive’. Although the Democratic Republic of Vietnam never abandoned guerrilla operations, these were no longer sufficient. The only way to drive the French out of Indochina and create the conditions for remaking Vietnam was through decisive military force. This meant that the DRV had to field a professional army capable of winning military victory on the battlefield. Thanks to Chinese assistance and instruction, including the outfitting and training of tens of thousands of troops in the safety of Chinese territory, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was now in a position to push its military revolution forward by building main force regiments and divisions, a much better-trained officer corps, general staff, and by deploying thousands of party-trained political cadres in its ranks. By 1952, Chinese training and military aid had helped the Vietnamese to assemble a regular army consisting of six armed divisions. It operated via expanding and increasingly professionalized intelligence, logistics, supply, and medical services. In mid-1950, and not before, the People’s Army of Viet Nam (Quan Doi Nhan Dan Viet Nam), otherwise known as PAVN, was born. Its ‘birth’ paralleled the emergence of the American-backed one for the Associated State of Vietnam. Both armies now operated on international models coming from opposite sides in the Cold War.

Ho Chi Minh thus presided over a political and a military revolution in a time of war. Between 1950 and 1954, these divisions and the party-state emerging to run them allowed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to take the fighting to the French across upper Vietnam and into western Indochina during eight set-piece battles. In 1950, Vo Nguyen Giap and his Chinese advisors focused on opening a direct supply route in the border province of Cao Bang in order to create a safe passage to China. Giap threw his best troops against retreating French Union troops, scoring a spectacular victory that cost Léon Pignon his job and made thousands of French Union troops DRV prisoners of war. Emboldened, General Giap turned his attention to the Red River delta and set his sights on Hanoi. The new French high commissioner and commander-in-chief, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, welcomed his opponent’s willingness to engage in set-piece battle, convinced that superior French air and firepower—now backed up by the Americans—would ensure victory. Giap overreached and paid for it dearly in a bloody defeat during the battle of Vinh Yen in January 1951 and a second one a few months later at Dong Trieu. As the French had themselves learned during the First World War, fervor and attacks made in waves did not guarantee victory in modern war. Wave attacks on the Red River delta in 1950–51 left tens of thousands of PAVN soldiers maimed and killed, destroyed by the very things the guerilla army had always avoided—artillery, machine guns, and bombers. Thanks to the Americans, the French also dropped napalm for the first time. A People’s Army of Vietnam veteran of Vinh Yen later recalled the experience:

Be on [the] watch for planes. They will drop bombs and machine gun [you]. Cover yourselves, hide yourselves under bamboo. The planes dived. Then hell opened up before my eyes. It was hell in the form of a big clumsy egg, falling from the first plane [. . .] An immense ball of fire, spreading over hundreds of meters, it seemed to me, sowing terror in the ranks of the soldiers. Napalm. Fire that falls from the sky [. . .] My men ran for cover, and I could not stop them. There is no way you can stay put under this rain of fire that spreads out and burns everything in its path. From everywhere the flames leap up. Joining them was the burst of French machine gun fire, mortars and artillery, transforming into a burning tomb what was only ten minutes earlier a small forest [. . .]²²

This phosphorous gel also fell on innocent civilians, including children. As a twelve year-old, Nguyen Cong Hoan, recalled how his best childhood friend, Huu, ‘was lying on the ground, burned by napalm. She wasn’t dead, but she was dying. We sat around her at night watching her. Her body glowed with phosphorus’.²³

The Vietnamese and their Chinese advisors abandoned any hope of taking the delta quickly. From late 1951 onward, they shifted their attention to the highlands, where the jungle canopy and long distances would prevent the French from concentrating their firepower on attacking PAVN forces. It was in this context that Giap and his advisors focused on controlling Hoa Binh—a strategic interchange located between the highlands and the plains and between northern and central Vietnam. In November 1951, de Lattre de Tassigny recovered Hoa Binh in order to thwart his enemy’s attempts to push through a supply route toward central and southern Vietnam, to infiltrate troops into the delta, and to reassure highland minority groups of French resolve. Giap was determined to take Hoa Binh for all these same reasons and saw an advantage in attacking the French there, given the craggy, mountainous terrain. Attacking at night, hoping to avoid the full brunt of French airpower, in December 1951 Giap threw thousands of men against the French Union forces in a bid to encircle, overwhelm, and destroy the camp. Fighting was intense, with French artillery inflicting heavy losses on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s troops again. On 22–3 February, as the Vietnamese massed for a final knock-out punch, the French withdrew their troops. It was a victory, but an incomplete one for Giap.

The DRV wanted a decisive win. And so did the French, criticized by their American counterparts for failing to take the battle to the enemy. In late 1952, in a bid to block the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from taking control of northwestern Vietnam and eastern Laos, de Lattre de Tassigny transformed Na San, a small upland village located along the Lao border, into a major entrenched position, which bulldozers cleared of trees while soldiers and thousands of civilian workers marched in to dig trenches, install heavy artillery, and helped to build an airbase to supply the camp from afar. Some 20,000 men turned it into ‘a fabulous war industry for the time’. General Giap was confident that he could win, but he miscalculated at Na San. On 30 November, the People’s Army of Vietnam commander sent waves of his troops against the camp, but was shocked by the ferocity of the French response. Enemy artillery and air strikes decimated his young PAVN soldiers. No sooner had the battle started than Giap had to call it off. The Vietnamese lacked the artillery needed to knock out such a fortified position. Nor did they have the logistical capacity to transport large quantities of food, arms, and equipment to the front line to sustain such an assault. Giap also realized that his inability to destroy the airstrip meant that the French could continue to supply it. Instead of taking Na San, the Vietnamese ended up going around it. The Vietnamese learned three things from this defeat, however: the need for better logistics, heavy artillery, and the ability to sever the enemy’s air supply. Giap would not forget this, as his party began preparations to win at Dien Bien Phu.²⁴

TOTAL WAR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH?

In order to make the transition to modern war and transform the state and society in communist ways, the DRV had to mobilize on an unprecedented social scale and in record time. To do so, the government incorporated mandatory military service in late 1949, declared a state of general mobilization in early 1950, and initiated full-scale land reform to induce its majority peasant population to defeat the French and the feudal, landowning class at the same time. As Truong Chinh spelled it out, ‘those who have riches must contribute money, those who have their manpower must contribute their strength, those with talents must donate them [. . .]. This is the time that requires us to apply correctly the method of total people’s resistance, total resistance’ (‘toan dien’). ‘No one’, the secretary general declared, ‘can roam the shores of the resistance war’.²⁵

In addition, in order to ensure that weapons, ammunition, medicines, and especially food actually reached soldiers on the battlefields, the DRV needed a logistical system. The problem was that the People’s Army of Vietnam lacked mechanized transport—no trucks, no planes, no ships. To take the battle to the French, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam thus had to rely disproportionately on human and animal force, drafting hundreds of thousands of civilians as porters, requisitioning tens of thousands of bicycles, rafts, horses, and oxen, all the while pushing peasants to produce more rice to feed the growing army and phalanx of civilian transporters. As a result, the party’s decision to fight a modern war and to create a large standing army, but to do so via massive mobilization of people like their Chinese counterparts, made this conflict an ever-more totalizing one in terms of its social reach. The already blurred line between civilians and combatants broke down massively in northern and central Vietnam when the Vietnamese engaged in eight set-piece battles between 1950 and 1954 which relied almost entirely on human (and animal) transport. Not only did the Vietnamese communists maintain the guerilla war as the Algerian and the Indonesian republics’ fighters did, but they also doubled it up with a conventional war which carried within it a full-blown social and military revolution.

Starting in early 1950, with military draft and full mobilization laws on the books, the party dispersed its cadres across Democratic Republic of Vietnam territories (backed by the police and the army), to work with district and village authorities to recruit, organize, and mobilize civilian manpower for the war effort. These cadres relied on local mass organizations, kinship ties, personal relations, peasant, youth and women’s associations, as well as force, to recruit and requisition labor. Those who balked faced legal prosecution and incarceration. Emulation, rectification, and the ‘new heroes’ campaigns exhorted local populations to support the army, the state, and the war cause by providing labor. For those who joined the civilian logistical apparatus, efforts were made to take care of their families, replace their labor in the fields, and guarantee financial support to the family in the event of the injury or death of those drafted. Before being mobilized, these civilian laborers received an official military status, that of fighter laborer (‘chien si dan cong’). These porters received crash courses in patriotism and socialism. Then off they marched under the guidance of the party cadres.

The number of civilians the DRV mobilized into its logistical service is mind-boggling. During the first major battle of the Indochina War which ended in the French retreat from Cao Bang in late 1950, the DRV mobilized 121,700 civilians. In his bid to take the Red River delta from the French at Vinh Yen in early 1951, Vo Nguyen Giap relied on 300,000 porters. The numbers peaked during the Battle of Hoa Binh in late 1951 and early 1952, when there were 333,200 fighter laborers. The burden of this social mobilization occurred in villages running from northwestern Vietnam to areas in the central part of the country. With the shift from the delta to the highlands in late 1951, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam expanded its territorial control over upland rural areas in the northwest, in the highlands in central Vietnam, and into eastern Laos and Cambodia. Mobilization not only brought war to civilians in these ethnically non-Viet territories but, in so doing, it simultaneously introduced the party-state as the People’s Army of Vietnam increased its territorial control. In 1954, 200,000 porters followed the PAVN as it engaged French Union and Associated State of Vietnam forces violently in the central highlands. In all, between 1950 and 1954, the DRV mobilized 1,741,381 people as civilian porters, almost all of them peasants.²⁶

The PAVN’s manpower needs led cadres to recruit more and more women into its logistical ranks. They were made to push rice-laden bikes across rugged territory, carry heavy packs over hundreds of kilometers, and to help rebuild bombed-out roads and bridges. It was grueling work, sometimes lasting several months, six months for the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. And of the 122,000 civilians mobilized for the Battle of Cao Bang in late 1950, the majority were women. This high level of female participation apparently remained the case for the following battles. If true, this would mean that the total number of women civilians involved in military logistics would equal at least half of the total number of all those mobilized (1.7 million), therefore about 850,000 women out of the total Democratic Republic of Vietnam-controlled population of 10 million. While DRV women did not hold combat positions like their Soviet counterparts did during the Second World War, the former often found themselves involved in military operations. Dao Thi Vinh, a female porter who was about twenty-five in 1954, recalled her experience during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu as follows:

I worked as a porter behind the front lines. I only came to the front lines one time. On the way there, we carried ammunition and on the way back the injured. We had to climb up the slopes of the mountains or passes. Falls were commonplace. To carry a crate of ammunition, it took two volunteers. On the way back, these two could take care of one wounded person. Every two or three kilometers, we stopped and asked the injured person if he wanted to drink or piss. When he wanted water, we had to bring it to his lips. Many soldiers suffered. They moaned out of pain. We didn’t know how to take care of them. All we could do was encourage them. Sometimes, they did not survive their wounds and died en route. At night, we marched and during the day we rested. We were careful when we carried the wounded. When we carried supplies and ammunition, we would sometimes sleep while walking, we were so tired.²⁷

From 1950 onward, the French too mobilized the Vietnamese population in unprecedented numbers. Upon his arrival in Indochina, General de Lattre de Tassigny pushed Bao Dai to institute the draft in mid-1951 and modernize the Associated State of Vietnam’s army with American assistance. Thanks to the obligatory military service, the ASV army numbered 167,000 troops by 1954. To this one must add the 200,000-strong Expeditionary Corps, bringing total French Union forces facing the People’s Army of Vietnam in 1954 to 350,000 soldiers. In other words, there were threeconventional armies now in play—one French, two Vietnamese. All of them were increasingly well armed and competing intensely for Vietnamese recruits and laborers. In all, almost half a million regular troops were in uniform. The two Vietnams each also counted around 300,000 rural militiamen and women in their territories. (DRV militia forces protected their villages from French attacks, but didn’t engage with the French army directly.)²⁸

From 1950, Franco-Vietnamese forces also recruited Vietnamese labor on a large scale. These civilian porters called ‘supplétifs’ (‘auxiliaries’) accompanied troops into battle zones, often moving with their whole families. In 1954, they numbered in all around 100,000 individuals. As the intensity and cost of the war increased from 1950 onward, the French found themselves looking for other sources of labor. And this led them to begin using prisoners of war (‘Prisonniers internés militaires’) to help them in their fight in what might well have been a violation of the Geneva Convention. While there is no study of this question, the total number of prisoners of war probably numbered in all, between 1950 and 1954, 100,000 men and apparently women too. Like the DRV’s logistical fighters, they helped the French repair roads, bridges, and transport supplies and equipment across the rugged terrain which trucks and planes could only access with great difficulty. They also ended up in the line of fire.²⁹

ENDING THE WAR?

Dien Bien Phu: Forcing Decolonization in a Set-piece Battle³⁰

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was one of the most important battles of the twentieth century. Between November 1953 and May 1954, the DRV organized and then engaged the Western colonizer in a violent set-piece battle and won. One cannot understand the full significance of this epic clash without situating it in its Franco-Vietnamese, international, and military dimensions. On the French side, Prime Minister René Mayer was a vigorous believer in strengthening France’s role in Europe and the Atlantic community. That the Americans were pushing to rearm West Germany in order to better contain the Soviet Union only reinforced the priority of Europe over Asia in French strategic thinking. Financially, France could not afford to continue an ever more costly conventional war in Indochina and still contribute to European defense. So, having invested massively in continuing their Asian empire, the French were now finding themselves in a war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam backed by the Chinese and the Soviets, when their real priority lay in defense of their homeland half a world away.

An honorable end (‘une sortie honorable’) to the conflict had to be found. In May 1953, René Mayer named General Henri Navarre as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Indochina. The French government instructed Navarre to create the necessary military conditions on the battlefield so that diplomats could reach a favorable solution at the negotiating table thereafter. Navarre came up with a two-pronged plan. During 1953–4, the army would avoid large-scale battles with the enemy in order to rebuild French Union forces, and then, in 1954–5, deliver a decisive military blow to Giap’s army in order to force the adversary to the negotiating table on terms favorable to the French. Second, upon his arrival in Vietnam, Navarre focused his attention less on the northern delta than on areas in central Vietnam controlled by the DRV. One of Navarre’s main operations, Operation Atlante, was designed to retake southern central Vietnam from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and place it under the ASV sovereign control before opening negotiations. At the outset, Navarre had no intention of fighting a major battle in the valley of Dien Bien Phu.

Nor did his adversary, Vo Nguyen Giap. Like the French, the DRV leadership made decisions in 1953 that would affect the direction of the road leading to Dien Bien Phu and the negotiating table in Geneva. In the usual military conundrum, the pause the French gave themselves to rebuild and retrain their forces allowed their opponents to do just the same. In January 1953, the party accelerated preparations to implement land reform and mobilize the logistics needed to win a major battle. Giap’s high command decided that not only did the army have to bring in its own artillery and anti-air defense forces to take out an entrenched enemy position in any future battle, but it also had to devise a strategy to disperse the Expeditionary Corps’ troops across Indochina so that they would not be able to concentrate forces in the event that the French would try to repeat the strategy they used in the Battle of Na San. Throughout 1953, the DRV reorganized its main artillery regiment, created a new one, and constituted its first anti-air battalion. Most importantly, the Vietnamese and Chinese agreed that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam needed to score a major battle victory in light of the international détente which the death of Joseph Stalin and the armistice in Korea had opened up by mid-1953.

All of this was underway on the Vietnamese side when the French adopted the Navarre Plan in July 1953. By mid-September 1953, the DRV’s intelligence services had ‘acquired a good understanding of the basic elements of the Navarre Plan’. This allowed the Vietnamese politburo (its supreme policy-making body) to better devise its own strategy. Because Navarre was ‘massing his forces to occupy and hold the Tonkin lowlands’, the politburo decided, ‘we will force him to disperse his forces out to other sectors so that we can annihilate them’. Rather than trying to attack the delta, where the French could easily concentrate their artillery and air power with devastating effect, the politburo decided to disperse the French toward northwestern Vietnam and upper Laos, then toward central and southern Laos, and even as far as northeast Cambodia. In mid-November 1953, the Vietnamese politburo approved its Winter–Spring Plan along these lines. Thinking that his opponents were bent on taking Laos, Navarre decided to commit troops to Dien Bien Phu (on the main route to Laos) to stop them from moving westward. But Laos was never the DRV’s goal. Diversion was, and it worked.³¹

On 20 November, the French began by parachuting six battalions into Dien Bien Phu. Surprised, Giap immediately put two questions to his intelligence people: ‘Is the enemy going to withdraw?’ and ‘How are they deployed?’ Navarre’s decision to send French Union troops toward southern central Vietnam (in Operation Atlante), Laos, and northwestern Vietnam, and then to take a simultaneous stand at Dien Bien Phu, unexpectedly presented the Vietnamese high command and politburo with exactly the type of battle that they wanted to fight.

Drawing upon the Na San battle experience, General Henri Navarre ordered the creation of an even bigger and more solidly entrenched camp in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. An airstrip would serve as the vital lifeline to supply some 15,000 French Union troops. Many high-ranking French and American military officials and politicians agreed that the camp could hold and break the back of the enemy’s main forces (‘casser du Viet’, or ‘break the Vietnamese’, was the expression). French artillery, air power, and resistance positions, each of which was given a feminine name from A to H (Béatrice, for example), would mow down the attacking enemy soldiers, destroy Giap’s core divisions, and thus hand the Vietnamese an even worse defeat than the one they had suffered at Na San. The French stationed twelve battle-hardened battalions to defend the valley in all. Morale ran high. Many were actually worried that the Vietnamese would not attack, mirroring, paradoxically, Vo Nguyen Giap’s fear that the French would pull out before he could ‘casser du français’ (‘break the French’).

The answer came on 3 December when Democratic Republic of Vietnam military intelligence informed Giap that Navarre had committed his side to battle. With the international context firmly in mind, the Vietnamese politburo issued orders instructing the army to surround the camp and wipe it out entirely, all the while continuing the other campaigns designed to disperse the French forces as far across Indochina as possible. Massive mobilization began, as hundreds of thousands of peasants started to transport rice, weapons, and artillery to the hills surrounding the camp. Chinese-supplied Soviet trucks hauled in weapons and rice from the Chinese border. The People’s Army of Vietnam finally had mechanized logistics, but 250,000 civilian porters still had to carry supplies to the battlefield. The policy of land reform referred to earlier officially began in earnest in December 1953, in areas in upper-central and northern Vietnam whose laborers supplied Dien Bien Phu. Meanwhile, on 17 December 1953, the politburo approved a resolution about their policy of fighting and negotiation. This effectively meant that losing this battle was not an option. Victory had to be achieved at ‘one-hundred-percent’ before negotiations to end the war could begin, Ho told Giap. This need for certainty was why the DRV cancelled its initial attack against Dien Bien Phu which had been planned for 25 January 1954.³²

However, even though Navarre realized in early January that the Vietnamese were successfully bringing artillery into Dien Bien Phu, he refused to cancel Operation Atlante. Moreover, rather than concentrating all his forces there, on 29 January, Navarre launched Operation Atlante against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in central Vietnam, while Giap concentrated his best divisions on wiping out Dien Bien Phu. At the head of the elite 308th Division was General Vuong Thua Vu, the man who had commanded the Battle of Hanoi. Hubris certainly explains part of the French miscalculation. But preparations, operations, and morale were so advanced by mid-January that it was too late for Navarre to pull out by air or via Laos without repeating the Cao Bang débâcle and handing the adversary a de facto victory at a key point in international negotiations. (The Berlin Conference, 25 January–18 February 1954, had brought together the USA, UK, France and the USSR to discuss among other things the need to settle the two ‘hot wars’ in Asia—those in Korea and Indochina.) On 13 March, the Vietnamese finally let loose their artillery with deadly accuracy. They quickly knocked out a number of unprotected French artillery guns and destroyed the airstrip which severed the camp’s lifeline to the outside within days. They also launched their first massive and costly attack on the same day as troops moved under heavy French artillery and machine-gun fire to submerge the advance posts of Béatrice and Gabrielle.

However, in response, the French Union forces dug in—quite literally. Indeed, the battle for Dien Bien Phu strangely resembled the trench warfare of the First World War. Some spoke of Verdun. This is hardly surprising, since each side possessed artillery, which forced men to go underground to hide when they weren’t ordered to go over the top and attack. What differentiated the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s use of trenches in 1954 from those at Verdun in 1916 was that the Vietnamese ones were mobile, expanding slowly to surround the enemy camp instead of forming a straight, static line. But like the trench warfare of the First World War, young Vietnamese boys ordered to attack suffered terrible casualties when they ran into intense machine-gun and artillery fire, as did French Union forces counter-attacking. For both sides, torrential rains quickly filled the trenches with mud, water, blood, and disease, as soldiers often had to make their way around rotting corpses. Although American pilots flew supply missions over Dien Bien Phu, Washington refused to try to save the camp by launching what would have been their own, first direct military engagement, Operation Vulture, a major bombing campaign. The White House approved of indirect intervention in the form of advisors, military assistance, intelligence, and covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, but not of putting official American troops on the ground or in the air. The French Union soldiers were on their own as the DRV’s army launched two more wave attacks, extending their trenches meter by meter, hill by hill, slowly strangling the enemy, until they reached the camp on the valley floor of Dien Bien Phu and it finally fell on 7 May 1954 at 17:00 hours. That same day, negotiations formally began in Geneva to find a political solution to end the war.³³

Over the next year, negotiations secured the release of tens of thousands of prisoners of war. The French returned 65,000 men and women prisoners to the Vietnamese in late 1954, but internal reports conceded that 9,000 had died in captivity or had been executed. For the 9,000 dead, only 2,080 graves could be identified. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam returned around 20,000 POWs taken between 1945 and 1954, but as many as 20,000 had disappeared in captivity, reported as ‘absentees, missing or unreturned’. Thousands died as the DRV marched them for hundreds of kilometers from Cao Bang (in 1950) and Dien Bien Phu (in 1954) to insalubrious and often disease-ridden prisoner-of-war camps with little medical care. Families on both sides pleaded with their governments to find these POWs or their bodies.³⁴

Geneva 1954: A Failed Peace³⁵

While the Americans resisted, fearful that the communists would win by diplomacy what they could not achieve on the battlefield, the rest of the international community, including the British, were looking to cool down the two hot wars in the international system in Korea and Indochina. The death of Stalin in March 1953 and the end of the shooting in Korea a few months later opened the way for a thaw in what had until now been very bitter East–West relations. The new leadership emerging in Moscow wanted to reduce tensions in both Europe and Asia in order to focus on internal economic matters. Détente would facilitate this process. Their Chinese allies shared this view. The Korean and Indochinese wars had proved a heavy drain on the new Chinese state, as had radical social change and land reform. Zhou Enlai, now the seasoned foreign minister of communist China, announced that a solution to the Indochina conflict could be found based upon the recent Korean model.

Vietnamese communists duly noted Beijing’s position, agreeing that the time was right to give peace a chance, all the while strengthening their position on the battlefield. On 26 November 1953, in an interview with the Swedish paper Expressen (The Express), Ho Chi Minh had indicated his side’s willingness to open negotiations to reach an eventual negotiated settlement to the war. The party’s official line was now one of simultaneous fighting and negotiating. A month after Ho’s interview, Truong Chinh issued a special clarification to cadres across the country explaining that the party’s desire to open negotiations with the French was not a ploy. The time had come to negotiate, as part of the Sino-Soviet shift toward international détente (‘hoa hoan quoc te’).³⁶

The Soviets took the lead first. On 28 September 1953, Moscow had sent a note to France, Great Britain, and the United States which proposed to hold an international conference in Geneva to ease international tensions. In Europe, this included the crucial question of Germany. In Asia, the conference would have to discuss the two major wars dividing the two blocs—those in Korea and Indochina. This conference, the Soviets argued, had to include the People’s Republic of China, given that it was involved in both Asian wars, directly against the Americans in Korea and indirectly via Beijing’s support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On 8 October, Zhou Enlai expressed his support of the Soviet proposal.

Easing tensions over Germany was first on the list of topics when French, British, Soviet, and American foreign ministers convened in Berlin in early 1954. When the Soviet Union failed to get communist China recognized as one of the official powers at the upcoming conference in Geneva, the Americans agreed that the four main powers could invite delegations of their choice, which allowed the Soviets to invite the Chinese to take part in their first major international conference. (The Soviets and British were co-presidents of the Geneva Conference.) Besides the ‘four powers plus China’, the conference also included the main Indochinese parties concerned: the Associated States of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Pham Van Dong led the DRV’s delegation to Geneva. His government failed in its attempts to get its associated states in Laos and Cambodia (the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Issarak) accepted officially at the negotiating table.

The Sino-American split cast a long shadow over the Geneva Conference (26 April–21 July 1954) from beginning to end. Zhou Enlai wanted an end to the First Indochina War but also to find a solution which would keep the United States from replacing the French on China’s southern flank. He had already begun developing a policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ toward non-communist countries in Asia in order to neutralize this part of the world against American attempts to bring those states into a collective security alliance to contain and perhaps even ‘roll back’ communist China. On the American side, Washington threw its weight behind Chiang Kaishek’s Republic of China (now based on the island of Taiwan after its defeat by the Chinese communists), and signed a security treaty with him in 1954. But despite his strong opposition to dealing with the Chinese communists, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, went along with the French desire to try to negotiate an end to the war. Most importantly, the American Secretary of State did not want to endanger French ratification of the European Defense Community by opposing them at the Geneva Conference.

On 8 May 1954, the day after Dien Bien Phu fell, the conference took up the question of Indochina. The French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam adopted hardline opening positions. The Vietnamese, having timed their military actions perfectly, felt that their historic victory on the battlefield permitted such confidence. The French government led by the Popular Republican Movement’s always hawkish Georges Bidault made it clear that the French might have lost a battle, but not necessarily the whole war. Moreover, going into the Geneva Conference, Bidault was deeply involved in holding the French Union together, as Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians pressed for independence like the Vietnamese. Committed to the Atlantic alliance, Bidault always connected Indochina to European questions and threatened to rally to the more hardline American position, if need be, to get his way.

With a green light from the Soviets to take the lead on solving this prickly Asian problem, Zhou Enlai immediately went to work behind the scenes to bring the belligerents together to reach an acceptable political solution. He started by getting the French and the DRV delegates to sit down in private on 17 May and discuss the issue of recovering wounded soldiers at Dien Bien Phu. On that same day, Soviet Foreign Minister Viatcheslav Molotov proposed the debut of negotiations on the armistice. In a concession designed to advance negotiations, Zhou Enlai announced on 20 May that the situation in Laos and Cambodia was different from that of Vietnam. In short, the Chinese premier no longer supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s right to speak for western Indochina. Not only did this respond to Western demands to reject the ‘counter associated states’ created by the DRV in 1950, but it was also part of Zhou’s plan to neutralize non-communist Asia in relation to the Americans, including Laos and Cambodia, if proved to be necessary. More than anyone else, Zhou Enlai rolled back Vietnamese internationalist claims to western Indochina in order to show his wary Indian, Burmese, and Indonesian counterparts that the communists were no longer serious about exporting communism beyond Vietnam’s borders in postcolonial Asia. The Vietnamese agreed and, in so doing, let go of their Indochinese ambitions, at least for the time being.³⁷

The second concession was about where to provisionally partition Vietnam. On 10 June, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam delegation informed the French that they would be open to the idea of dividing Vietnam until general elections could be held to unify the country. However, negotiations hardly advanced beyond that. There was little agreement as to where, exactly, the line dividing Vietnam should go. And when the conference’s discussions on Korea broke down in mid-June, things looked equally bleak for Indochina, where an armistice had not even been reached.

To head off a diplomatic failure, on 16 June 1954 Zhou Enlai informed the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that he would be able to get Pham Van Dong to agree to pull DRV troops out of Laos and Cambodia. This coincided with the fall of the French government on 13 June and its replacement by one headed by Pierre Mendès France, who was determined, like Zhou Enlai, to reach a negotiated settlement at all costs. Not only did Mendès France up the ante by announcing that he would personally negotiate at Geneva and resign in one month’s time if an agreement were not reached, but he also threatened to institute a national draft and bring in the US in order to put added pressure on his communist counterparts to make a deal. Bluff or not, this seriously alarmed the Chinese, the Soviets, and the DRV. Outstanding issues included determining the line of partition for Vietnam and setting a date for general elections within the country.

As for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, its leadership was opposed to accepting the seventeenth parallel as the demarcation line, since it would mean surrendering vast territories in central Vietnam the DRV had ruled since 1945. On 23 June 1954, Zhou Enlai informed Mendès France that the questions of elections and partition would have to be negotiated one way or another to reach an agreement. He then left the conference to consult his government, regional neighbors, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam leadership. In Asia, Zhou Enlai stopped over in New Delhi, where he reassured Nehru of communist China’s peaceful intentions, which would be demonstrated in exchange for the implicit neutrality of non-communist Asia. Zhou Enlai informed Nehru that the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia would be neutral, part of what he and Nehru called ‘Southeast Nations of a New Type’, that is non-communist and non-aligned postcolonial Asian states. On 29 June 1954, Zhou Enlai signed the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence’ with his Indian and Burmese counterparts.³⁸

Zhou then made his way to the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou, where he held a crucial meeting with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap on the final negotiating strategy to be adopted at Geneva. Between 3 and 5 July 1954, Zhou Enlai argued that direct American intervention was possible, even likely, in the event the Geneva Conference talks failed. Such a scenario, he stressed, would greatly complicate the DRV’s war, not to mention China’s own security. He explained that neutral countries such as India and Burma were hostile to American intervention in the region, but needed to be reassured that Sino-Vietnamese internationalism remained limited to Vietnam. This meant that the Vietnamese had to let go of their Indochinese ambitions. It was eventually agreed that the sixteenth parallel could serve as the temporary dividing line for Vietnam; a non-communist political solution was to be accepted for Cambodia; and that the Chinese and Vietnamese would negotiate strongly in order to acquire regrouping zones for the Pathet Lao in upper Laos. These areas would be the provisional home to Pathet Lao troops and administrators until elections were held to create a new government for all of Laos. Ho concurred, and both sides agreed to coordinate their policies so as to reach an agreement with Mendès France. Upon his return, Ho argued successfully to his party that these concessions, including the division of Vietnam at the sixteenth parallel, were vital to obtaining an accord and preventing the Americans from intervening directly.³⁹

Back in Geneva, Zhou, Eden, Molotov and Mendès France accelerated their efforts to reach an agreement before the Frenchman’s deadline arrived. With the clock ticking, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam finally agreed to pull its troops out of Laos and Cambodia and accepted the partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel falling just south of the city of Vinh, a serious further concession of territory. DRV troops and personnel in Cambodia, Laos, and southern Vietnam would be regrouped to northern Vietnam, whereas those of the Associated State of Vietnam and French Union forces would regroup to the south. Son Ngoc Minh’s Cambodian forces laid down their arms and were reintegrated into the royalist forces or returned to civilian life. In Laos, regrouping zones were created for the Pathet Lao in the Lao provinces bordering northern Vietnam, Phongsaly and Samneua. The Geneva conference created an International Commission for Supervision and Control for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Elections were scheduled to be held in mid-1956 in all of Vietnam in order to decide under which Vietnam—the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or the State of Vietnam—the country would be unified. In the early hours of 21 July 1954, the French and the DRV initialed a ceasefire. The first Indochina War had officially come to an end.

Vietnamese communists agreed with the Sino-Soviet decision to shift to détente and open negotiations on Indochina. They also shared the Chinese fear that if an agreement were not reached at Geneva, then it was likely that the Americans would intervene directly. This they did not want. In February 1954, as talks were underway in Berlin, and again on the eve of the opening discussion of Indochina at Geneva, the Vietnamese communists affirmed their commitment to adopting a negotiating strategy to end the war and which would contribute to bringing peace to Asia and the world, in collaboration with the Soviets and Chinese. During the negotiations at Geneva between May and July, the Soviets and Chinese did indeed push the Vietnamese to back off from the international communist model of Indochina and accept the neutrality and reality of royalist governments there. The Chinese put pressure on their counterparts to accept the seventeenth parallel in order to cut the final deal at Geneva. But Vietnamese party documents also show that their politburo had agreed that it could not continue the war. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was a glorious victory, but the war, especially the shift to conventional warfare and simultaneous social revolution, had exhausted the people and the army.

During the party’s sixth plenum held between 15 and 17 July 1954, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s leaders justified the decision to sign the Geneva accords by shifting from an armed line to one of negotiations. Drawing upon arguments he had developed with Zhou Enlai a week earlier at Liuzhou, Ho explained that the main enemy in Indochina was no longer the French, but the Americans, who were now bent on war at both the global and Indochinese levels. Ho argued that while the victory at Dien Bien Phu demonstrated the increasing strength of the DRV’s armed forces, it had also served to draw the attention of the Americans to Vietnam. This had increased Washington’s resolve to take a more direct stand against the communists in Indochina and to broker a deal in Geneva in order to prevent the DRV from taking all of Vietnam, either diplomatically or military. Ho insisted that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had to exploit the contradictions in the international system, especially the reluctance of the British and French to follow the Americans, in order to reach an international agreement that could isolate the USA. If the DRV could achieve unification via elections and negotiations, then all the better. He added that while the Vietnamese had become stronger compared to the French, they did not yet have the decisive (‘khong phai tuyet doi’) threshold needed to impose a crushing victory in all of Vietnam. Two days later, the communists’ general secretary, Truong Chinh, conceded that the DRV’s armed forces had become stronger and that increased force had culminated in the Dien Bien Phu victory, but that the change in armed force was not yet a ‘fundamental one’ (‘nhung chua thay doi ve can ban’). The armed forces had won a battle, but they were not necessarily in a position to win the war decisively throughout the country. He also pointed out that there was a war faction in French ruling circles, one which was intent on carrying out the war to the end. These leaders were quite ready to use the Geneva Conference as a way of internationalizing the war to isolate the Democratic Republic of Vietnam along Cold War lines. They were also ready to turn to the Americans to help them finish off a war they themselves could not win. This, the general secretary warned, was a reality the leadership simply could not ignore. As Truong Chinh put it, the Americans had already replaced the French as the DRV’s ‘Enemy no. 1’ in the Indochina War. The time, he said, had come to change their strategy from that of an armed line of protracted resistance to one of peaceful negotiations. In short, the Vietnamese had to win by peaceful means that which they could not win on the battlefield in the short term. On 17 July 1954, the Vietnamese politburo officially changed its policy from an armed to a peaceful strategy and agreed to sign the resulting armistice on 21 July.⁴⁰

The Geneva negotiations did not produce a peace accord, but simply an armistice and a declaration, a pledge by those signing it to organize elections to unite Vietnam once and for all, under one sovereign state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now based in Hanoi, or as the Associated State of Vietnam operating from Saigon. That in mid-1954 the Americans and the new prime minister of the State of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, then refused to sign the declaration boded ill for the prospects of peace in Indochina. And the Geneva negotiations provided no concrete ways for requiring either of the two Vietnams or their respective backers to comply with the declaration. The DRV hoped to win by the ballot box in the future what its army had been unable to win on the battlefield, whereas the ASV sought to get rid of the French colonialists in order to build up a viable nationalist alternative to the communists with the backing of the United States. The Geneva negotiations might have achieved a ceasefire, but the declaration it produced could do little to stop the Vietnamese from going to war against each other. Nor could they stop the Americans from transforming their indirect war in Indochina into a direct one.