By March 1950, Mao Zedong’s forces had virtually consolidated their control of South China and had taken up positions opposite the line of French forts along the Indochina frontier. Chinese Communist commanders were entering into liaison with Viet Minh guerrillas operating along the border. The French were still uncertain as to how much of a commitment Mao Zedong would risk making to the Viet Minh. They were not aware that the Chinese were making preparation for the delivery in April of large-scale military aid.
In late March, I flew with Audrey from Saigon to Hanoi for an interview with General Marcel Alessandri, commander of French forces in Tonkin, Vietnam’s most northern region. We stayed at the Metropole, a decaying French colonial hostelry on the edge of the Red River delta whose wine menu, high-ceilinged bedrooms, and bathroom bidets were about the only remnants of its former French colonial hauteur. Ceiling fans turned futilely above huge double beds encased in white mosquito netting. The netting spared us injury on our first night in Hanoi. We were asleep when an artillery blast from a nearby French battery interdicting Viet Minh infiltration onto the delta shook loose a large, heavy section of the ceiling plaster. It struck the netting, which sagged to within an inch or two of our heads.
The next morning, we met with Alessandri at his headquarters. One of the best of the French generals, the fifty-two-year-old officer who had spent almost all of his entire twenty-year army career in Indochina had just completed a sweep of the delta, driving most Viet Minh units out of the great northern rice bowl. He told us that his artillery was firing during the night on Viet Minh forces which had staged a lightning incursion onto the delta, and he expressed regret, with a slight smile, that we had become targets of our bedroom’s ceiling plaster. Alessandri said he was planning an offensive against Viet Minh mountain positions along the border. The general said he had not seen any evidence that the Chinese Communists as yet were shipping arms to the Viet Minh on a major scale, but recently his troops had seized American rifles smuggled by gunrunners, probably based in Macau, to the Viet Minh via China. He was confident that his troops could repulse any counteroffensive by the Viet Minh to retake their positions on the Red River delta even if they were reequipped with weapons supplied by the Chinese. When I pressed the general for permission to visit the frontier, he was hesitant. Two large French convoys traveling along Route Colonial No. 4, the main supply road serving the border posts, had just been ambushed with heavy casualties. Finally, Alessandri relented and agreed to take me and two other American correspondents who had just arrived in Hanoi, Carl Mydans, the Life magazine photographer, and Wilson Fielder of Time magazine, to Lang Son, the principal fortress town on the frontier. Audrey, then four months pregnant, stayed on in Hanoi.
We flew with Alessandri to Lang Son in an old three-engine German Junker, dodging through cloudy mountain passes to a red-dirt strip, where we were met by a spit-and-polish Foreign Legion honor guard and taken straight to a meeting with Colonel Jean Constans, commander of the Frontier Zone. Constans told us he was attempting to seal off the frontier. His mission was to curtail the flow of Chinese arms to the Viet Minh and to block any attempt by them to descend onto the Red River delta for an assault on Hanoi. But closing what was known as the “Chinese Door” posed enormous strategic problems. Constans commanded four major French forts athwart the four traditional invasion routes from China into Indochina. On the western flank, isolated and supplied largely by air, stood the Lao Kay fort, which dominated a network of roads. The other three major forts were linked by R.C. 4, which had been dubbed “Rue du Mort” (Road of Death) because of repeated bloody Viet Minh ambushes. The highway bent along the China frontier for 150 miles from Mon Cay on the east coast through Lang Son to Cao Bang in the west. Fifteen miles to the northwest of Lang Son lay the outpost of Dong Dang, directly opposite the mist-shrouded mountain pass of Nam Quan. This was the historical invasion route. Traditionally, imperial envoys traveling from Peking had come through the Nam Quan Pass to Lang Son and then south down what became Route Colonial No. 1 to Hanoi and Saigon. Lang Son itself was a pleasant town of ten thousand inhabitants, constructed in the French provincial style with wide streets and low yellow-brown houses.
On our first night in Lang Son we dined at the Foreign Legion officers’ club and listened to old songs of the legion over rounds of cognac. Two days later, with Constans’s reluctant permission, in a jeep driven by Lieutenant Andre Wastin, a short, dark, cocky French officer, we set out for the China border. We were escorted by a weapons carrier loaded with ten heavily armed Legionnaires, all Germans. We followed in the trace of a foot patrol that had been clearing the road of mines planted by the Viet Minh during the night. The road twisted through bare brown hills. It was ideal ambush country. Debris of clashes with the Viet Minh lay all about. There were lines of parallel trenches across the road, “piano keys” as they were called, dug by the Viet Minh at night and filled in by the French road clearers during the day. When we turned off the road for Chi Ma, an outpost on the border, the lieutenant halted the jeep and said to us: “Gentlemen. You must now make a choice, either our jeep goes ahead on the road, which often is mined by the Viet Minh, or the Legionnaires go first in their truck. If we go first in the jeep and hit a mine, one or two of us may be killed or wounded, but the Legionnaires will be able to beat off the Viet Minh who will attack after the mine explodes. However, if the Legionnaires go first and their truck hits the mine, we probably will be overwhelmed and killed by the Viet Minh ambushers. Now take your choice—which goes first, our jeep or the truck?” We exchanged glances: Carl Mydans, a short dynamic man, wise in the ways of war, who had distinguished himself in covering World War II, Wilson Fielder, the young, amiable Time magazine reporter, newly based in Hong Kong, and me. We nodded at each other and elected to go ahead of the Legionnaires’ truck in the jeep.
At a fast, rattling clip we made it to Chi Ma. The French army post faced two Chinese Communist-held outposts, with a village in between. We walked through paddy fields to within thirty yards of the village gate, guarded by two Chinese soldiers. Mydans photographed the sentries as one of them looked us over with field glasses. We returned to Lang Son that night. Mydans and Fielder left for Haiphong the next day en route to Korea to cover the war. I never saw Fielder again. He disappeared in Korea during the battle for Taejon. He was last seen with an American Army unit that subsequently was overrun by the North Koreans. Mydans searched for days before he learned that Fielder’s body had been found beside a road near a nameless village.
In Lang Son, I waited to join a convoy that was forming up for a dash along R.C. 4 southeast to Khe Thu on the Gulf of Tonkin. Beyond Khe Thu lay Hong Gay, the southern terminus of R.C. 4. On the suggestion of a French officer, I had sent a message to Audrey in Hanoi proposing she meet me at Hong Gay, which is situated on the extraordinarily beautiful Halong Bay on the Gulf of Tonkin. I did not realize then that I was launching Audrey on a journey nearly as dangerous as the convoy run I was about to make.
The mission of my convoy was to pick up arms, munitions, medical supplies, and the all-important vin rouge at the small port of Khe Thu for transport to Lang Son. From Lang Son the supplies would be sent northwest to key forts along R.C. 4. It was a tenuous supply line. Convoys traveled northwest from Lang Son infrequently since the thirty-six-mile run to the first outpost at That Khe was extremely hazardous. Beyond That Khe, except for the isolated fort midway at Dong Khe, the Viet Minh controlled the thirty-five-mile stretch to the terminus at Cao Bang, which was provisioned almost entirely by air.
Not long after dawn, our convoy formed up in the drizzling morning mist that hangs over Lang Son during the rainy season. I was in a jeep, which was mounted with a light machine gun, seated with a carbine across my knees beside the convoy commander, a cheerful, lean lieutenant of the French Marines. The commander had insisted that I accept the carbine, which I did with some hesitation. As a former infantryman, I had no problem in handling the weapon, but journalists by custom usually worked unarmed. Led by a French sergeant, a patrol of ten Goumiers, Moroccan mountain fighters, brown-skinned bearded men, their soft-brimmed French campaign hats atop shaven heads, trudged past our fog-shrouded jeep and ahead of us down R.C. 4. The red clay road twisted for fifty miles through steep foothills to Khe Thu. Our convoy would have to reach the safety of Khe Thu before dark because the road belonged to the Viet Minh at night. Our jeep was the lead vehicle in the point detachment that was to clear the first six miles of road. We moved slowly behind the Goumiers’ patrol, which scrutinized the hillsides and checked the road for mines. Behind us came two armored personnel carriers, each mounting a .30- and a .50-caliber machine gun covering two truckloads of Legionnaires. Three miles out of Lang Son, the detachment began dropping off files of Legionnaires, who climbed to the top of the ridges bordering the road to screen the passage of the convoy. French posts all the way to Khe Thu were sending out similar security patrols. Some of the posts were only small brick blockhouses, each manned by about six native partisans. Others ranged from those with several watchtowers within a bamboo enclosure perched atop a hill to that at Dinh Lap, which was garrisoned with infantry, artillery, and tank units. The isolated posts were favorite targets for Viet Minh night raids made in overwhelming force. By day, when the French made retaliatory forays into surrounding territory, if they came upon deserted villages, indicating they belonged to the Viet Minh, the patrols would burn them and shoot the water buffalo in the rice fields.
Our advance detachment moved forward another mile before meeting the tank patrol from Loc Binh, six miles away. The road was open. From Loc Binh, the signal went back to the convoy. The Viet Minh were not on the road, and once more with the morning, R.C. 4 southeast from Lang Son belonged to the French. At 10 A.M. the convoy, led by a truckload of Legion-naires and an armored radio vehicle, followed our advance detachment into Loc Binh, a small town of clay-plastered buildings and a gray stone Catholic church. Traveling at 200-yard intervals behind us came thirty-three civilian and forty-five military trucks mounting machine guns. Another radio car and a truck carrying Legionnaires brought up the rear of the column. The convoy moved on slowly to Dinh Lap, the largest French post between Lang Son and Khe Thu. Here were stationed the intervention troops with their tanks and artillery. When the radio cars of a convoy signaled a Viet Minh attack or contact was lost, the intervention troops moved swiftly to its assistance.
Southeast of Dinh Lap, the convoy passed from the land of the Thos, a people of Tibetan origin, into the Nung country inhabited by mountaineers closely related to the Chinese. With the foothills more densely covered with jungle foliage, it was ideal ambush country and the most dangerous leg of the journey. The convoy commander checked the grenades in the open glove compartment of the jeep and the Tommy gun beside him with the safety off, and I fingered my loaded carbine as I wondered what I would do if the Viet Minh attacked. The Viet Minh attacks were very much alike, the lieutenant said. They usually came within the large gaps between French posts with hundreds of Viet Minh hiding in the thick roadside jungle growth. A convoy often would know it was under attack only after it had suffered its first casualties. The convoy would speed up, but if a truck was crippled, blocking the narrow road for the vehicles behind, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of Viet Minh would swarm down throwing grenades. Trucks would be burned. French wounded would be killed. The Viet Minh would then disappear into the mountains, taking with them prisoners and captured matériel. They were usually gone when intervention troops arrived and the King Cobra fighter planes from Lang Son came overhead.
At 5:10 P.M. our command jeep halted with its accompanying radio vehicle at the Na Peo outpost to drop off a truck with engine trouble. The radio operator tuned into an English-language broadcast of the Voice of America. Legionnaires gathered around to listen. One German, a baker by trade, asked if he could settle in the United States after completing his enlistment. About half of the Legionnaires were Germans who had signed up for the five-year enlistment; only one-fifth were French, and most of the others were central Europeans who did not want to return to their countries behind the Iron Curtain.
Several miles beyond Na Peo, the heavy roadside jungle had been cleared away. The Viet Minh had attacked a convoy here. Twenty-five had been killed, fifteen wounded, and twenty-five men taken prisoner. Fourteen trucks were burned.
When our jeep entered Khe Thu at 6:10 P.M., a French Tricolor was flying over the post at half mast. There had just been a funeral for twelve soldiers; one of them a French warrant officer who had arrived in Indochina four days before. They had died two days earlier in a Viet Minh ambush eight miles south on Route No. 18. A detachment was going out in the morning to reopen the road. I went with the detachment.
The hills were steaming in a hot early morning sun when our detachment, a section of Legionnaires and a company of Nung partisans, reached the area where the small convoy had been ambushed. It was a “classic ambush,” a French lieutenant told me. There had been thirty-five officers and men in four trucks who had been building a brick blockhouse at a ferry landing of the Song Ba Che River. The first truck, carrying a French lieutenant, a warrant officer, a sergeant, and three Moroccan privates, was going through a road cut lined with bamboo when ambushed. It was a complete surprise. The Viet Minh opened with one machine gun firing along the axis of the road, and three other machine guns blazed from the hillside, where more than two hundred Viet Minh were concealed. Everyone in the first truck was killed in the first hail of fire. The other three trucks halted at intervals of 100, 200, and 500 yards. Two men manning the machine gun on the second truck were picked off quickly. Several of the men in the second truck retreated to the next, where a defense was mounted. The Viet Minh charged down the road. They were repulsed, but only after they had reached the first truck and collected the weapons of the dead. Six Nung partisans stationed in a tiny nearby post were the first to come to the assistance of the convoy. Two were wounded by the Viet Minh. One of them dragged himself off, taking the bolt of his rifle with him so it could not be used by the enemy. The Viet Minh withdrew when they heard vehicles of the Khe Thu intervention force approaching. They carried off about twenty of their own dead.
“That is all that happened,” the lieutenant said. “That is all that ever happens.” Soon another convoy would go out to complete the building of the river blockhouse.
I returned to Khe Thu to spend the night, and the next morning with a French security detail I drove to Hong Gay, worried sick about Audrey. It was March 29.
Audrey had received my message five days earlier saying that I hoped to be in Hong Gay on March 27. She had approached the French Information Service in Hanoi for help in getting to Hong Gay. Contrary to the advice given me in Lang Son, she was strongly advised against making the trip. Viet Minh guerrillas were operating along the sixty-five-mile road between Hanoi and Haiphong. The small riverboats, which plied between Haiphong and Hong Gay, passed through hilly country where the banks were controlled by the Viet Minh. Determined, nevertheless, to go to Hong Gay, Audrey found a Vietnamese taxi driver in Hanoi whose fears about driving to Haiphong were assuaged by a wad of bills. Perched on the back seat of an old Citroen, dressed in slacks, all of twenty-one, with her blonde braids piled on top of her head, Audrey was driven at high speed to the Haiphong port. She checked into a decrepit French guesthouse and was lying in a four-poster bed in her room when in amazement she heard familiar American voices. In the adjacent room, she found Mydans and Fielder. After failing to dissuade her from making the dangerous trip, the two took her the next morning to the river dock. The boat to Hong Gay was a native craft, less than thirty feet in length, pushed by a gasoline engine, and loaded with bags of rice, sixteen Vietnamese, and a Frenchman carrying a submachine gun. The Frenchman had been assigned to look after Audrey and was not at all happy about making the trip. The Vietnamese looked uneasily at Audrey’s blonde braids, a target that might draw fire from the Viet Minh.
As the boat slipped out of Haiphong port and upriver, the Frenchman popped a conical Vietnamese peasant hat on Audrey’s head and ordered her down among the rice sacks. “Keep your blonde head out of sight,” he said as he crouched beside her. As the boat nosed through the narrow defiles for the next six hours, the Frenchman kept his machine gun trained on the cliffs towering above them. There were happy cries from the Vietnamese when the boat entered Halong Bay, chugging through limpid waters afire with the intense colors of the sunset. In Hong Gay, at a French guesthouse fronting the bay, Audrey waited for three days hearing rumors of a Viet Minh ambush of a convoy—in fact the convoy that had preceded my own. That is where I found her. She was in a screened-in porch munching bananas, the only decent food available. “Is that you?” she cried out. She tugged at my black beard, and embracing, we told our stories. We remained in Hong Gay for several days, boating on the magnificent bay amid the strange rock formations jutting up like temple altars and huge idols carved by denizens of a forgotten land now covered by the sea.
Flying back to Saigon, I came to jarring conclusions as I reviewed what I had observed on the frontier. In Saigon and Hanoi, American and French officials told me that the French troops had effectively sealed off the frontier except for small-scale infiltration by the Viet Minh. In fact, the Viet Minh could quite easily transit to China through the gaps between the forts on R.C. 4 over roads they now controlled. The isolated French forts and smaller posts were highly vulnerable to Viet Minh attacks and difficult to keep supplied, particularly in the rainy season. They might very well be overrun if the Chinese Communists elected to bolster the Viet Minh forces by supplying them with weapons and training their assault troops in safe havens on the China side of the border. The Viet Minh could thus be provided with an excellent base area from which to prepare a massive descent upon the Red River delta and Hanoi. The future course of the Indochina War was thus in effect being decided in Peking.
On June 19 I was back in Lang Son, where I found the military situation fundamentally changed. The French no longer thought that Mao Zedong, preoccupied with Korea and girding for an invasion of Taiwan, might exercise restraint. In April they had become aware by reports from intelligence sources and reconnaissance flights that the Chinese had initiated a large-scale program of military aid for Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Roads leading to the Indochina frontier were being built or improved employing the labor of thousands, many of them captured Nationalist soldiers. On these same roads one day in the 1960s and 1970s Russian trucks would carry Soviet and Chinese arms and supplies to the North Vietnamese in the war against the Americans. A Chinese Military Advisory Group (CMAG), headed by General Wei Guoqing, had been established at Nanning in South China, with a staff of almost three hundred advisers. Thousands of Viet Minh were being trained there and closer to the border in centers at Yanshan, Longzhou, and Jingxi in Yunnan Province. Field hospitals had been erected to care for Viet Minh wounded. Viet Minh troops were beginning to return from the training centers uniformed, equipped with field kits, and fully armed with automatic weapons, bazookas, and other modern weapons, many of which were American arms captured by the Chinese Communists from the Nationalists during the Civil War. The guerrilla units were being reorganized into regular army divisions and regiments with political commissars and Chinese advisers attached.
Earlier, on May 25, Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese military commander in chief, had tested the French defense line along R.C. 4 by attacking and taking the post of Dong Khe, the strategic midway staging point, between Cao Bang and That Khe. For the first time, Viet Minh employed antiaircraft guns, which scored hits on the French King Cobra fighter planes intervening in support of the post. Only about 10 percent of the garrison of four hundred French-officered Moroccan and Vietnamese partisan troops managed to escape. Two days later, a French parachute battalion airlifted from Hanoi was dropped on Dong Khe and retook the post. But I found that the Viet Minh strike had shaken the confidence of the French officers, who told me privately that the R.C. 4 defense line might become untenable. Fears were expressed to me by French officers of a debacle if the frontier force was not pulled back to more defensible positions on the Red River delta perimeter. Secretly, the plan for an offensive against the Viet Minh mountain strongholds, described to me by General Alessandri in March, had been ruled out by the commander in chief of French forces in Indochina, General Marcel Carpentier. A new plan was put in place that would precipitate the most significant battle of the French Indochina War. Over the vehement protests of Alessandri, Carpentier decided to withdraw the garrison at Cao Bang in a move designed to reorganize and consolidate the French defense line.
I was in Saigon when the Viet Minh roll-up of the French frontier line began on September 16, 1950, with the blow falling again on Dong Khe. Four Viet Minh battalions newly trained and outfitted in China and supported by heavy mortars and artillery struck at the post, defended by about 250 Foreign Legionnaires. The attack had been planned meticulously in conjunction with the chief Chinese field adviser, General Chen Geng, a veteran of the Chinese Civil War and a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The Legionnaires fought gallantly for sixty hours, retreating foot by foot to the southern section of the citadel while French fighter planes and bombers flying through heavy mists hit at the attackers. The Viet Minh were estimated to have suffered some five hundred casualties. On the morning of September 18, when a French Junker observation plane flew over the post, the firing had ended, the post was burning, and the Tricolor had disappeared from above the defense works. There was no radio contact. Only one officer and some twenty others managed to escape into the jungle. Dong Khe was a prelude to the most decisive battles of the French Indochina War.
On October 1, French troops executed a surprise thirty-six-mile sweep northwest from Hanoi and the Red River delta up through the rugged Tonkin ese Mountains to seize Thai Nguyen, the principal political stronghold of the Viet Minh. Two flanking columns and paratroopers dropped north of the city and successfully enveloped the mountain communications center. It was an important psychological victory, but the French assault force did not seize the Viet Minh political leaders in the hastily abandoned town, nor did it divert the Viet Minh from their targets on the frontier. In fact, the operation served Giap well by tying up badly needed French troops—sixteen battalions, two squadrons of tanks, four groups of artillery, and most of the air force—which could have been usefully employed against him in the impending battle for the frontier.
To carry out his plan for a withdrawal of the garrison from Cao Bang, Carpentier had three choices: an airlift to Lang Son, a retreat southwest down R.C. 3 to Thai Nguyen, or a dash along R.C. 4 to the safety of the frontier post at That Khe. Overriding Alessandri’s warning that it was an invitation to disaster, Carpentier chose withdrawal to That Khe.
On October 3, after blowing up their military stocks and a good part of the town, the Cao Bang garrison, comprising 2,600 troops, including crack Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan Goumiers, set out southeast on R.C. 4 toward Dong Khe. Some 2,500 civilians, including all the women, children, and sick, had already been evacuated by air in late September, but some 500 civilian men weighed down with personal possessions accompanied the garrison. The Cao Bang evacuation plan, dubbed Operation Therese, called for a relief force of 3,500 Moroccan troops commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Le Page to fight northwest up R.C. 4 from That Khe, retake Dong Khe from the Viet Minh, then proceed north to the village of Namnang and meet the Cao Bang garrison there, whereupon they would undertake a joint withdrawal to the safe haven at That Khe. Both Le Page and the Cao Bang commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Charton, complained repeatedly but to no avail that the plan was deeply flawed given the hilly jungle terrain and the vulnerability to Viet Minh attack. In fact, prior to the attack on Dong Khe, the chief Chinese adviser, Chen Geng, as Chinese archives would later reveal, had made plans with Giap to ambush the Cao Bang column if the French chose to withdraw overland.
The Cao Bang column reached Namnang, the rendezvous point, twenty miles from Cao Bang, at noon on October 4, and there Colonel Charton received a stunning message. Giap’s battalions in overwhelming strength had been waiting in ambush on the heights above Dong Khe and had descended and shattered Le Page’s column. Le Page’s troops had been driven off R.C. 4 and were now trapped in the Cocxa jungle ravine southwest of Dong Khe. Charton was ordered to hasten down a jungle trail, the Quangliet, which paralleled R.C. 4, to the relief of the Le Page column. Charton in evacuating Cao Ban had ignored orders to destroy his heavy equipment, including artillery and motor vehicles, and make the dash down R.C. 4 on foot. Confronted now with orders to move along the jungle trail, the garrison destroyed its heavy equipment and proceeded along the ill-defined Quangliet jungle trail but soon came under repeated devastating attacks by thousands of well-armed Viet Minh troops. Survivors of the Cao Bang column finally joined the Le Page columns on October 7, but the combined force was overrun by the Viet Minh as they struggled to break out through the mountains to That Khe. A few survivors made it to That Khe after days of wandering in the jungle only to find that it had been abandoned and was in Viet Minh hands.
Altogether, in the debacle of Operation Therese, the French lost six thousand troops, including some of the finest units of the French Army, and enough equipment to outfit another Viet Minh division. The faces of the gallant French soldiers I had known on the frontier paraded through my mind as I wrote my dispatches. Unnerved, the French command undertook a precipitant wholesale abandonment of the frontier.
More than any other night, that of October 20, 1950, is burned indelibly into my memory. It was the night I reported the fall of Lang Son, and it was the night that Susan, our first child, was born. Cascading flares lit up the skies over Saigon, and there was the distant thud of artillery fire as Audrey in labor was wheeled on a cot into the surgery of the French military hospital. At the door of the operating room, I was listening apprehensively to the distant crackle of small-arms fire when I heard Audrey cry out. Susan, the first of five daughters, was born. The delivery was a harbinger of the violent world in which our family would live. The French doctor who cut Susan’s umbilical cord wore a smock stained with the fresh blood of wounded soldiers. Artillery fire was still puncturing the night. The French were laying down a protective barrage around a perimeter outpost under attack by Viet Minh guerrillas. I left the hospital distraught on leaving Audrey and our newborn baby girl, but Audrey typically urged me to go back to my typewriter, knowing that one of the most important stories of the war was taking shape. I went directly to the little alcove in our apartment, which served as my office, and checked with my assistant, Max Clos, who had been in touch with his French military sources. French officials had revealed that Lang Son had been abandoned, the evacuation being undertaken so hastily that the military installations and the supply depots had been left intact. French planes were at the moment bombing the depots, which contained enough matériel to outfit an entire Viet Minh combat division.
As the French border posts fell, I reported in a dispatch to the Associated Press that the Viet Minh had “won control of the North Indochina frontier and ended French chances of winning a decisive military victory.” Describing the loss of the frontier forts as “the turning point” in the war, I wrote: “Yielded to the Viet Minh is a near impregnable mountain base area with good trans-frontier connections to supply sources and training centers in Red China. This means that the Ho Chi Minh regime now has the space and means of preparing a full-scale military offensive against the principal French strongholds located further south. The purely guerrilla phase of the war in Indochina has ended.”
Washington was not unaware of what would be the impact on French military prospects if Mao provided large-scale assistance to the Viet Minh. As early as March 27, 1950, the National Security Council estimated that “it was doubtful that the French Expeditionary Forces, combined with Indochinese troops, could successfully contain Ho Chi Minh’s forces should they be strengthened by either Chinese troops crossing the border or by Communist-supplied arms and materiel in quantity.” The secret memorandum NSC 64, recorded in the Pentagon Papers, the official history of the American role in Indochina, balanced this warning against the need to contain Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. The memorandum propounding the domino theory stated: “The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under Communist domination if Indochina were controlled by a Communist-dominated government. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.”
The domino theory, which would be shown by subsequent events to be fallacious, provided a strategic rationale for meeting President de Gaulle’s demands for assistance in Indochina in return for French military cooperation in Europe. Six weeks after the NSC 64 estimate was made, President Truman recognized the Bao Dai government and initiated his assistance program to the French with an allocation of $10 million for the year. The allocations mounted steadily to $1.06 billion in 1954, the year of the final French military collapse. When Chinese Communist “volunteers” entered the Korean War on October 25, 1950, the National Intelligence Estimate submitted to the president in December concluded that large-scale Chinese intervention in Indochina was “impending.” Aid to the French in Indochina moved higher on the list of priorities. The French Union Army, made up of 130,000 troops, including a cadre of French soldiers, Foreign Legion units, African Colonials, and 50,000 Indochinese auxiliaries, were seen as the most reliable force for the containment of China.
Despite the loss of the frontier, the French were buoyed with the arrival on December 19, 1950, of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny as the new commander. Anticipating momentarily a Viet Minh descent on Hanoi and the Red River delta, the French were in a panic. General de La Tour, who replaced General Alessandri as the commander in Tonkin, had ordered the evacuation of women and children from Hanoi. While pledging to defend the city, de La Tour began emptying military depots and trucking the matériel to the port of Haiphong to be shipped out. De Lattre, a World War II hero, sometimes referred to as the “French MacArthur,” flew to Hanoi at this moment. The imperious general lined up the northern military commanders on arrival, questioned them, and reassigned several whom he found failing on the spot. He electrified the Expeditionary Force by declaring that they would “no longer give an inch.” He took the risky decision of ordering the evacuation of civilians in North Vietnam halted. The passenger liner Pasteur at Haiphong, dispatched to bring out French civilians, was instead loaded with wounded soldiers and sent back to France two-thirds empty. The construction was begun of new fortifications at the mountain passes leading to the Red River delta backed up by mobile infantry-artillery teams.
On January 16, 1951, Vo Nguyen Giap initiated a general offensive toward Hanoi with an attack on Vinh Yen, at the western end of the Red River delta. He employed the “human wave” tactics which the Chinese had employed in Korea. De Lattre was prepared, his reinvigorated command having been reinforced with newly arrived American fighter planes and artillery. The Viet Minh were beaten back with more than 4,000 dead left on the battlefield. The French suffered some 400 dead in repelling the repeated attacks. Many of the Viet Minh panicked as they were caught for the first time in the open on the flat Red River delta by King Cobra fighter planes dropping napalm bombs. Two subsequent “human wave” drives were also repulsed in March and May. In June, on the advice of his Chinese advisers, Giap conceded in a radio broadcast to his army’s political workers that Viet Minh troops were not yet ready for “the final phase” and ordered them to prepare for a “long and arduous war.” Giap reverted to Mao’s strategy of protracted war. For the French, de Lattre’s stand before Hanoi was their army’s finest hour in the Indochina War, but it was only a respite.