Chapter 3
DULLES AT THE BRINK: 1952–1954

 

 

 

 

Nineteen fifty-two, the year in which General Eisenhower announced that he was a Republican and returned to the US in triumph to secure his nomination and election as the first Republican President for 20 years, was also the year in which the US almost postponed its most important decision on whether or not it would commit its own men for the defence of an area which it had decided was vital for its security.

REPLACING THE FRENCH

It is generally understood that administrations which are nearing the end of their life, whether in America or Britain, will seldom embark voluntarily on a new and dangerous course, particularly if it is an avoidable choice, in foreign policy. Indo-China in 1952 was to be recognized in the State Department as a critical area for decision making, even more important than Korea, and under the threat or at least the impression of imminent Chinese intervention in Tonkin the Administration decided to define its position. The result was the National Security Council paper 124/2: the strongest position that the US had adopted so far towards Southeast Asia, but a paper which had taken six months to prepare.

From one point of view a six-months debate on a problem which had already existed for more than 18 months may seem something of a luxury even on the part of a government that may have been in no hurry to take a major decision but, from another, it may be seen as masking an agonizing choice: were there circumstances in which the US would have to intervene in Indo-China even if this meant war with China and, conceivably, the USSR as well? The immediate contingency had been Chinese intervention; but to this was added further uncertainty in what was, conversely, the first unmistakable sign that the French were, after all, and in spite of vociferous denials, preparing to pull out. On 6 January 1952, French Foreign Minister Schuman had told his party at a meeting of the MRP in Toulouse that ‘If an armistice can be concluded under honourable conditions France will not hesitate to make peace’.¹

At about the same time tri-partite military conversations on the defence of Southeast Asia which had been convened through direct negotiation between the American, French and British Chiefs of Staff, opened in Washington and it was only at the last moment that a single representative of each foreign ministry was permitted to be present as an observer. There was probably nothing particularly sinister in this, even if, in principle it might have cut out any countervailing ‘civilian’ opinion, but the presentation of General Vandenberg, the US Air Force Chief of Staff, left no doubt that he saw Indo-China as part of a bigger picture. ‘Eventually we military people must face the fact that in many fringe areas around the globe our nationals are being killed in battles with satellites, and the whole thing is directed by the Soviet Union.’² The meeting coincided with the visit of the new British government, in the shape of Churchill and Eden, to Washington and for a moment, an impression was created of allied solidarity. Eden, for example, in a speech which he gave at Columbia University and to which he referred several times afterwards, spoke of the conflicts in Indo-China and Malaya and said ‘These positions must be held’. However, when military discussions were continued in an ad hoc committee which included Australia and New Zealand and the participants were confronted with what could have been regarded as a logical implication of Eden's statement, agreement dissolved. Instead of insubstantial generalities, and even though these were contingent on Chinese intervention, they were confronted with plans for naval blockade and air attacks on China and what the British, at least, feared were possible attempts to overthrow the Chinese People's Republic as well as the dangers of activating the Sino-Soviet pact.

They, or again, at least the British, would probably have been even more alarmed had they known of the discussions that had been going on in Washington between the State Department and the Department of Defense. The cases that were being discussed by the military experts may, indeed, only have been hypothetical, and one can understand that they and practically everyone else were searching for an underlying political purpose, but it is hard to avoid the impression that, if only hypothetically, the US was preparing for war. Or perhaps one should say, was clearing its conceptual decks for war with China. For example, at one of the weekly meetings between State and the Pentagon, General Vandenberg wanted to know whether the British and French ‘would go the whole hog politically’ and whether the US was prepared to switch to a war economy. General Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, wanted to know whether he could count on the use of Chinese Nationalist forces and raised the rather delicate question of whether the US would be able to bomb the outskirts of Kowloon. He pointed out that the necessary course of action would undoubtedly result in the British loss of Hong Kong; to which Mr Nitze of the Policy Planning staff replied that: ‘while we cannot sell them a complete change of western strategy, we might be able to sell them on the idea that a serious risk of the loss of Hong Kong ought to be accepted, along with a spreading of the war to China, because of the importance of defending South-East Asia.’³

From these meetings it would seem to emerge that the civilians more than the soldiers were prepared for war and, moreover, were prepared to blur the distinction between plans which were contingent on Chinese intervention and those which were not. Logically, perhaps, this was impeccable. If the loss of Southeast Asia was unacceptable and, as Bohlen put it ‘If we lose South-East Asia we have, in my judgement, lost the Cold War’ (and in that case we would be headed for war with the Soviet Union sooner or later)’ then it did not seem to matter very much whether the objective was to prevent a Chinese invasion or a Vietminh victory. In comparing Southeast Asia with Greece, Bohlen continued ‘Was not South-East Asia equally worth the risk of general war?’ To which General Collins gave the forthright answer ‘I doubt it’.⁴

The alternative to a unilateral declaration of intervention on the part of the US was, of course, agreement on some sort of ‘allied’ intervention: something that could be presented as a technical decision on military grounds or else a concerted response to a commonly perceived threat. At neither level was it successful. Whether or not the ad hoc military committee only succeeded in producing parallel courses – American, French and British – which never met, Acheson eventually blamed the British for reservations which he said made their report useless whereas, for him, the answer to the problem lay in unrestricted military talks. Certainly at the political level Eden had been back-pedalling hard. Where Acheson favoured a joint warning to China – public or private – Eden reserved his position; and where the US had already announced that French efforts in Indo-China were an integral part of the free world fight against communist aggression, Eden said he was not now in a position to associate the UK with that statement. Very likely, as Admiral Radford, who was then US C.-in-C. in the Pacific told the ANZUS Council (from which Britain was excluded) the US, France and Britain were not working together politically. But it was most unlikely that, even in Britain's absence, the Australian and New Zealand delegates would have subscribed to Radford's proposition. In response to a question about the dangers of all-out war he said, ‘We are already engaged in such a war with communist China but are limited to a single theatre.’⁵

In the absence, then, of allied agreement on common dangers and common policies, what chance was there, that by continuing doggedly along the furrow which it had already started (in the recommendation of the new Assistant Secretary of State, that they should ‘keep on keeping on’) the US might by some means achieve success? Which meant, as he put it, that ‘the Vietminh was liquidated and therefore no longer an effective instrument of the Kremlin and Peiping.’⁶ Practically everything, it was now suggested, turned on ‘the formation and commitment to battle of the Indo-Chinese national armies’: as much, it seems, for political as for military reasons.

In Indo-China, as in other oriental countries, political stability as a practical matter, often results from the maintenance of a strong national army. In Indo-China the national armies will represent the only attribute of sovereignty and independence which captures the imagination of the indigenous population. Finally, only through the commitment to battle of Indo-Chinese troops can the problem of the shortage of French man-power in Indo-China be solved.⁷

In this particular paper it had been argued that over the previous two years US assistance had been remarkably successful and relatively cheap; but these rather comfortable assumptions were almost immediately challenged head-on in a remarkable memorandum from the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force who disapproved of ‘the sit-tight philosophy’, ‘the uninspired program of wait and see’ and who argued instead that it should be the US who trained and equipped the national armies and that ‘the out-phasing of French influence is essential’. Even they did not quite manage to square the circle. In spite of an unequivocal, finite, declaration of withdrawal, the French had to continue fighting and supporting the American programme, but they did succeed in presenting what was apparently an agreed inter-service position⁸ and it was from here that the Department of Defense took off on its inductive leap: that the US should be prepared to make as great an effort to prevent the loss of Southeast Asia in the Cold War as to counter overt aggression in that area.⁹

This recommendation, part of ‘A Cold War Program to Save South-East Asia For The Free World’ offered a detailed programme as well for ‘Removal of the bugbear of Western colonialism’ and concluded naturally enough that the Indo-China States should be free to choose whether or not they wanted to remain in the French Union. The possibilities of UN intervention were considered but the conclusion once more brought up the question of defence against Chinese aggression. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who submitted a separate paper, were hesitant about committing US ground forces in Indo-China – because it might ‘occasion overt Communist Chinese intervention’ – thought naval and air forces could be used without running that risk and asserted that, presumably for psychological reasons, ‘the presence of US naval forces could have an important effect as a deterrent to the international spread of communism’.¹⁰Even more important as far as the direction and character of US policy was concerned was the assertion that ‘In any event the JCS consider it may become necessary in the security interests of the US to take a calculated risk with respect to Communist China’¹¹: but this, in the opinion of the State Department, was just the sort of advice which would, for various reasons ‘result in the very situation which our past and present actions have been designed to avoid – an immediate choice between allowing Indo-China, and possibly all of South-East Asia, to fall into communist hands or attempting to defend it ourselves with little or no assurances of outside help’.¹²

Acheson, perhaps thinking about the unthinkable, had, as he put it, been hoping for ‘progress without commitment’ and although he suggested a thorough-going study of priorities – the importance of Indo-China compared specifically to NATO – it looked as though he himself did not yet have the answer to his question of what the US was really prepared to do to keep the French in Indo-China. Even if he was unable to assemble them into the structure of an obvious answer, the fragments of evidence and probabilities were depressing. For example, Ambassador Heath in Saigon, whose optimism had been so resilient, was reporting on what was now evidently a tremendous struggle, evenly matched (something like 11 m. people on either side) where, in spite of ‘numerical, material and financial superiority’, the bulk of the French Union troops were still hemmed in the Tonkin perimeter; and where the enemy, in spite of tremendous privations, had kept on fighting and were indeed apparently more efficient, more dedicated, more disciplined and more hard-working than the legal government. Perhaps they were also more ruthless; but another fragment, remarkable in that it came from the head of that legal government, was Bao Dai's comment to Heath on the ‘sad fact’ that Vietnamese troops entirely under French command were now committing the same excesses as did African soldiers.¹³

By this time, Acheson, who probably never had many illusions about Bao Dai, had completely lost patience with his inactivity and pretensions,¹⁴ but even at a lower level there were few signs of the vitality in the Vietnamese political struggle which would give hope of an acceptable, i.e. non-communist, political solution. Among other things it was reported that four of the Vietnamese cabinet members had French wives; and while this may have impugned their nationalist credentials Acheson faced far more embarrassing questions when he went to Paris for the tripartite Foreign Ministers' meeting at the end of May. Were the French, asked Defence Minister Pleven, fighting for themselves in Indo-China or was it in the allied interest? It would, of course, as Pleven pointed out, be extremely difficult for his government to defend the European Defence Community Treaty which had been signed the day before if there was not a rapid and generous increase in US assistance for the national armies in Indo-China. In case Acheson had not got the point, Robert Schuman articulated France's major fear of European disequilibrium: that Germany would receive US aid without having to apply it to Indo-China.¹⁵

Having heavily, if not quite inextricably, involved itself with French fortunes in Europe as well as in Southeast Asia, having a two-year-old commitment in Vietnam and having a number of other actual or potential allies in the area who were watching it closely, it was perhaps time for the Truman Administration in its last months to have made an unequivocal statement of policy on Southeast Asia; and, at first sight, this is probably what its statement of objectives and courses of action seemed to be in the final draft of its position paper, NSC 124/2, which the President approved on 25 June 1952.¹⁶

IDENTIFYING THE TARGET

The objective was clearly stated: to prevent the countries of Southeast Asia from passing into the communist orbit. But instead of the initial premise, Chinese intervention, it was now communist domination, by whatever means, of Southeast Asia which would endanger, seriously in the short term and critically in the longer term, the security interests of the US. In a statement of the domino effect two years in advance of President Eisenhower's better-known version, it said that the loss of any single country in Southeast Asia would probably lead to relatively swift submission to, or an alignment with, communism by the remaining countries of the group – and it did not stop there. Communist alignment of India and most of the Middle East would in all probability follow eventually – and it would be extremely difficult to prevent Japan's eventual accommodation to communism as well. Ultimately, however, one may say the trail of causes and consequences led back to China, which was where France's problem arose and America's dilemma began. In the event of overt intervention in the Indo-China conflict by Chinese communist forces, including volunteers, the responses envisaged by the NSC were comparatively clear-cut even though the fact of intervention had to be determined in consultation with the French: an appeal for immediate action by the UN, failing which maximum international support for the minimum courses of military action. The US would provide naval and air forces for the ‘resolute defence’ of Indo-China and they would expect to provide the major forces for ‘Interdiction of Chinese communist communication lines including those in China’. In addition, subject to French and UK agreement, there would be a naval blockade and intensified operations in and against communist China to disrupt lines of communication and military supply areas. At the same time as Chinese Nationalists were being sent in, the US would help, if required, in bringing the French and the British out of Tonkin and Hong Kong.

In retrospect, at least, this may be seen as a schedule for rather a risky operation but it may also be seen as a measured response. If it did not work, or, as the paper put it, if ‘the US determined jointly with the UK and France that expanded military action against communist China is rendered necessary by the situation’ then

the US should take air and naval action in conjunction with at least France and the UK against all suitable military targets in China, avoiding insofar as practicable those targets in areas near the boundaries of the USSR in order not to increase the risk of direct Soviet involvement.

In the event the concurrence of the UK and France to expand military action against Communist China is not obtained, the US should consider taking unilateral action.

All this, it will be remembered, was to be in the event of open Chinese military intervention in Indo-China. What, however, was to be done if this did not happen? There was in para. 10 of NSC 124/2 an extraordinary qualifying clause: everything that was to be done in the event of open intervention could also apparently be undertaken if Chinese communist forces were ‘covertly participating to such an extent as to jeopardise retention of the Tonking Delta area by French Union forces.’ What was to be understood by Chinese ‘participation’? And was this the major premise? Or was it ‘retention of the Tonking Delta’? The first had not yet been established. Once it was, it offered a drastic way out of the American dilemma, what to do about Vietnam, on the assumption that China could be safely blockaded and bombed into compliance and that this might be achieved without the support of America's apprehensive British ally – or the intervention of the USSR. It was however, instrumental, a means to an end, so that the Vietminh ‘rebellion’ could then presumably be reduced to manageable proportions but, in the event, the NSC at this point had not decided to light the fuse. The decision was postponed but the dilemma remained: if the Tonkin Delta and Vietnam had to be retained, was there any other way to do it than by that course which led inexorably to China? When the first Indo-China war reached its climax in 1954 and the US approached the brink of intervention and war with China, in the latter respect at least the arguments had been rehearsed two years before. It was not as if Dulles had stood US policy on its head: simply that he was following that earlier argument to its logical conclusion.

In the meantime, as the French position in Vietnam showed little sign of improvement, the US was looking for a more flexible definition of ‘Chinese aggression’.¹⁸ Military representatives of the ANZUS countries, plus Britain and France, meeting in Washington in October 1952 ‘to consider the defence of South-East Asia in the event of Chinese aggression’ decided that nothing much could be expected of a naval blockade but were also assuming that ‘The retention of South-East Asia within the allied sphere is considered vital’; while the State Department Director of Philippine and South-East Asian Affairs (Bonsai) asserted in November that ‘a defeat of the present communist forces affords the only prospect for the constitution of a really viable and dependable non-communist government in Vietnam’. More French forces were needed, said Bonsai (‘although SHAPE would probably yell its head off) and he took a hopeful view of the military prospects, more particularly if as few as two French divisions could be ‘seconded’ for even a limited period.¹⁹

As far as the military aspects of revolutionary war were concerned this last was essentially an amateur opinion. Again, a serious re-examination of the military situation and prospects was recommended: but now it was time also for ‘the incoming President to make a statement as soon as possible regarding the importance of the Indo-China struggle’. As it happened, on the date this recommendation was made, 18 November 1952, Truman and Acheson were briefing the newly elected President Eisenhower on Indo-China. France, they said, lacked a militarily aggressive attitude and the Vietnamese were sitting on the fence. The US was bearing up to half the cost of the war but many Frenchmen thought it was a lost cause. Five-power military discussions had failed to devise agreed military solutions in the event of overt Chinese intervention and it was, said Truman, an urgent matter on which the new Administration must be prepared to act.²⁰

Thus, in the last year of their Administration, Truman and Acheson had been told by the Army (General Collins) that the French were going to be driven out unless the US did something soon to prevent the Chinese Communists from getting supplies down into Indo-China; but they had rejected the Air Force proposal (General Vandenberg) ‘to really go in to clean the thing up’ – in this case meaning China. Almost to the end they had resisted the commitment of US forces but in the Truman Administration's dying days, fortified perhaps by a North Atlantic Council resolution that the campaign waged by the French Union forces in Indo-China deserved continuous support from the NATO governments, the first insignificant decision was taken which would put US servicemen in to Vietnam. On 22 December 1952 Assistant Secretary of State Allison's telegram to Saigon and Paris read:

‘Department concurs in US participation maintenance C-47's by 25–30 USAF personnel at Nha Trang on temporary loan basis. Defense notified and has taken similar position.’²¹

VISIONS OF VICTORY

As with nearly all new Administrations, the Republican Presidency of General Eisenhower promised to get American foreign policy moving again. As a soldier, Eisenhower had promised to end the great military stalemate of the outgoing Democrats with the offer that he would go to Korea. So unpopular had that war become in the US that it seems likely that it was this issue above all that ensured Eisenhower's election. While there were those who looked forward to an apocalyptic ending in which the forces of evil would be destroyed, most Americans probably trusted Eisenhower's military experience and insight to provide a less dramatic finale. Stressing the heavy casualties that had been suffered, Eisenhower talked about ‘the job of finding an intelligent and honorable way to end the tragic toll’ and, having seen for himself the nature of the struggle, observed ‘small attacks on small hills would not end this war’. That, of course, was Korea, those were US casualties, and, along with the promise of peace, there was to be the threat of war. But, if the US was preparing in whatever circumstances to negotiate with the communist enemies in Korea, what were the prima facie objections to the French, who had been fighting almost three times as long, drawing the same conclusions and looking for the same result?

In the first place, perhaps, was the fact that, for the French and the Vietnamese they were supporting, although the war had not been won it had certainly not been lost and, given the weight of American assistance and a sufficiently prudent approach, it seemed unlikely that the Vietminh on their own could defeat the French in the foreseeable future. By contrast, at least in the French presentation, it still appeared as if a French victory was just around the corner and even if it were not, the ‘situation mondiale’ might change, something might turn up, but in the meantime there were enormous reserves of Vietnamese manpower to be tapped, as well perhaps, as an inexhaustible flow of American assistance. Even if the French had by now little reason to want to hold onto Indo-China in itself – in one of his first recorded opinions as Secretary of State on the matter Dulles said they did so because of the French position in North Africa – and in spite of their determination to present their struggle in terms of an allied cause they had even less reason to accept the more exalted premises on which the Republicans had based their presidential campaign.

Before he became Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was probably most widely known for his rather sensational article ‘A Policy of Boldness' which had appeared in Life the previous May. This essay in liberation theology had enlivened the Republican attack on post-war US foreign policy – ‘the negative, futile and immoral policy of containment’ – and Dulles' stress on a ‘liberation policy’ which would create hope and resistance inside the Soviet Empire held out the promise of an eventful foreign policy when, after some apparent hesitation, he was chosen by Eisenhower to be his Secretary of State.²² Eventually the Republican campaign rhetoric was inscribed in national policy; and in its statement of basic national security policy (NSC 162) approved by the President on 30 October 1953 one could clearly see the reflected image of liberation and the ideological context within which specific policies were made. If, in general, the American purpose was ‘to reduce the strength of Communist Parties and other pro-Soviet elements’ and if, in order to counter any threat of ‘a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Soviet control’ achieving dominant power in a free-world country, the US would take ‘all feasible diplomatic, political, economic and covert measures’ to prevent this happening, it was unlikely that the Vietminh and their associates in Indo-China would be given the benefit of any doubt about their communist credentials.²³

To begin with, however, even though he had attacked the basic premises, Dulles did not really need to do much more than continue the previous Administration's policy towards the French in Indo-China although, as he discovered on his first ministerial trip to Europe, there was a further complication in the relationship in the shape of the European Defence Community within which alone the French were reluctantly prepared to accept the idea and the fact of a rearmed Germany. The US would before long link their assistance in Vietnam with the French ratification of EDC – hence the contribution of German forces to the defence of Europe – but with over 70,000 French troops in Indo-China, including 5,500 officers and men engaged in training the new Vietnamese army, and the possibility that more rather than less would be needed if there was to be much hope of military success, it would be difficult to say who at this point was able to put more pressure on whom. However, with 25 per cent of France's regular army officers and almost 40 per cent of her regular NCOs serving in Indo-China and with an increasingly apparent need for them in Western Europe where they would balance the German contingents in a European army, at least psychologically, it was also increasingly obvious that there was a basic problem here of limited means and competing ends.

It was not, however, reckoned to be an insoluble problem and although, at least in retrospect, there was little evidence deriving from contemporary operational performance of the French Union and Vietminh forces, from French intentions, or from popular support that would bolster such optimism, 1953 was the year in which French and Americans exchanged visions of victory. On the US side, certainly in Admiral Radford, the Pacific Commander-in-Chief who was soon to become the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they sometimes suggested irrepressible confidence and some mistaken ideas about the nature of the conflict. In the critical Tonkin Delta for example Radford reported that two good American divisions with the normal American aggressive spirit (a spirit, incidentally, which the French were usually reckoned to lack) could clean up the situation in ten months.²⁴ A subsequent, even less balanced opinion, suggested that 10,000 African troops might wind up the war within six months.²⁵ In the State Department there was still the same expressed necessity to defeat and destroy Communist aggression in Indo-China and while, in Washington, this went with the caveat ‘if at all possible’, in Saigon Ambassador Heath said the US was entitled to receive, in forthcoming talks with the French, a plan of offensive operations calculated to break the Vietminh resistance in so many months or so many years.²⁶

As far as the duration of operations was concerned this, of course, was again in the nature of an amateur opinion but the prospect of victory – defined as breaking the back of the Vietminh – within a matter of months now had a military hallmark as well. If French Union forces were to be increased by the new units which were under consideration, Brigadier-General Trapnell, who was heading the American Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam, reckoned the job could be done within about 18 months.

While success in Indo-China would not be achieved solely through military means, Trapnell said that military success was the prerequisite for political progress: something which he reaffirmed when the reverse order was suggested.²⁷ Could it really be achieved in a definite time and at a definite cost? Just before the members of a new French government led by Prime Minister Mayer arrived in Washington at the end of March 1953 Dulles had told the NSC that it was beyond French capabilities simultaneously to meet their commitments in Europe and in Southeast Asia and that he was going to explore with them a programme which within a year or 18 months would substantially reduce the strain.²⁸ No more details seem to have been given but in a telegram to the Paris Embassy to prepare the ground with the French Dulles had called for considerable increased effort on their part and the liquidation of the principal regular armed forces of the Vietminh was suggested ‘within a period of, say, 24 months’.²⁹

When the French and Americans began their cruise on the Presidential yacht on 26 March Eisenhower opened their meeting by recognizing the Indo-China war as part of the general struggle against communism, not merely a French colonial affair, and is then recorded as saying, engagingly but perhaps rather disingenuously, that the US was most interested in hearing of any French programme for the solution of the Indo-China question. There followed the usual explanations and assurances – one new item was Mayer's suggestion that the axis of the communist offensive now seemed to be aimed at India across Laos and Siam – but in regard to Indo-China the obvious purpose of the French visit, greater US aid for the Indo-China war, was now tied up specifically by Eisenhower to America's need to know what the French plans were, both political and military, for the conduct of the war.³⁰ Although it is not recorded in the FRUS documents, according to the notes made by the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Mr Nash, the President apparently told Mayer ‘in a very pointed manner’ that before the US could consider providing any additional aid, the French would have to produce a plan which ‘if it did not lead to complete victory, would, at least, give hope of an ultimate solution’.³¹ The result, says the official US Army historian, was that ‘American insistence engendered the so-called Letourneau plan; a clever piece of improvisation produced by Letourneau and his staff on the spot in Washington’. Whether or not it was quite so impromptu, what is of considerable interest in another respect is that, having called for defeat of the Vietminh in 24 months, the US now received the perfect echo: while he could not promise complete victory Letourneau said that the French plans – to create 54 new ‘light’ battalions of the Vietnamese army – would break the back of the Vietminh in 24 months.³² Even this, in the circumstances, splendid offer was described by Eisenhower as rather disappointing and while it may, in general, have been because it did not seem to be much of a plan it was, in particular, because of the ‘slowness of its time-table’.³³

Re-reading the discussions and exchanges in the first year of the Eisenhower administration it becomes increasingly evident that they wished to believe and then largely persuaded themselves that something like victory in Vietnam was attainable in a period of between one and two years; and that two years was rather too long to wait. Over the longer period, however, as it emerged from Letourneau's ‘strategic concept’, the US would be expected to pay for the training, arming, and equipping of 135,000 additional Vietnamese troops. In a war which seemed to be evenly balanced in numbers this was a dazzling prospect. Together with other Franco-Vietnamese units they would somehow ‘clean up’ the enemy centres of resistance in south and central Vietnam, the more heavily armed Franco-Vietnamese regular units would then take on their Vietminh counterparts in the north and ‘it is estimated that these latter forces will be brought to a decisive battle during the first half of 1955’.³⁴ It was also, at least in retrospect, wildly optimistic not least in its assumption that these ‘light’ battalions, starting from scratch, would be able to take on even the regional forces of the Vietminh, many of whom had been fighting for years. Hopeful signs, of course, could always be found. Day by day, Letourneau said in Washington (he left out the ‘in every way’ part of M. Coué's popular pre-war psychotherapy) things were getting better. In some respects, however, they seemed to be getting worse. The French performance in the 1952–53 fighting season had been a great disappointment – at least to the Americans. When General Mark Clark had visited Vietnam General Salan told him of the Vietminh's ‘surprising capability’ of mobilizing three regular and one heavy division for an attack on a French position (Na San) the previous autumn against which the French could only oppose eight battalions; and Salan was already anticipating a Vietminh offensive with four divisions against northern Laos. At the political level Bao Dai told the visiting Adlai Stevenson that the Vietnamese National Assembly would be fairly useless since half of his country was in enemy hands³⁵, but after wide-ranging discussions in the State Department on everything from exchange rates and taxation down to on-the-job training for Vietnamese civil servants and subsidized imports of raw silk, it must have seemed that instrumentalities such as these held out sufficient hope; and on 9 April 1953 a new Assistant Secretary of State, Walter Robertson, in a memorandum evaluating the French plan authorized the opinion ‘If Defense finds the French concept militarily acceptable, the Department (of State) supports it from the political point of view’.³⁶

Was the concept acceptable? Was the plan workable? Were these, in fact questions to which there were military answers? The French, said General Trapnell, were too conservative and overly cautious in their operations – but otherwise the plan appeared to be sound and, barring unforeseen developments, would probably succeed. General Collins was sceptical about the French plan, as he was about their ‘totally negative attitude’ to training procedures which the US had found to be successful in Korea, and about what he called the spurious reasons the French gave for not creating units larger than battalions. But when Dulles, after pointing out ‘the implications of the fall of Indo-China to the whole South-East Asian picture’, asked him whether the US should be prepared to stop all aid to Indo-China he replied ‘No, but we should use maximum effort and persuasion to get them to adopt a more sensible program’.³⁷

There seemed therefore to be the possibility that the play might develop with an alternative script. One, suggested by Collins, was that the French should construct their defence line across, and thus presumably interdict, the Vietminh's supply lines from China. Another suggestion from Saigon was for increased American control and leadership in the aid programme: a new look at the Indo-China war and every right to demand that new conditions be met.³⁸ The Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the French were not sufficiently aggressive and, again, wanted big unit operations, something that would cut the enemy's supply lines in northern Indo-China. Overall, however, although the French plan could be improved, they thought it was workable; but when asked (by Nitze, of the Policy Planning Staff) what that meant, the optimism began to evaporate. General Vandenberg, for example, said that if the French did a lot of other things there might be some slight chance of success and among them seemed to be something like a NATO solution: sending an additional two French divisions to Indo-China even though this meant, as General Collins said, that the French would have to change their conscription law.³⁹

There was, then, at this time what looks like an increasing and self-induced American conviction that something was almost within their grasp which would change the course of the Indo-China war: and change it comparatively soon. It would have to be achieved comparatively quickly and for two reasons. The first, as Dulles told the French in Paris in April, was that there ‘would have to be a program where we could in effect say to Congress: this program has enough chance of success that if you invest a certain amount for a certain time it will largely clear up the situation’ although by this he meant not actual victory but reducing the dimensions of the war to those of Malaya or the Philippines.⁴⁰ Second, the French were becoming tired, restless and, in spite of official optimism, by no means altogether convinced that victory was possible. Particularly as it was becoming clear that the US, having been unable to achieve its enlarged objectives in Korea, was about to settle for a compromise peace which, after three years of war, had left the country divided at approximately the same line as it was in 1950. ‘The conclusion of an honourable armistice, the immediate cessation of hostilities and the prompt initiation of political discussion leading to the holding of free elections’ were the particulars of what Eisenhower called ‘the last chance for peace’ in a speech he made on 16 April 1953: but these were the conditions for peace in Korea. In Indo-China, however, as far as the US was concerned there were no acceptable conditions for a negotiated settlement, bar one. In a reasonable anticipation of the Vietminh terms the Western European desk in the State Department said that the withdrawal of foreign forces would be a precondition for a plebiscite and ‘a plebiscite under present conditions could with certainty be predicted as giving a thumping majority to the Vietminh’. If there were two Vietnams, that ‘state of affairs could not be expected long to endure what with greater dynamics of the Communist elements in Vietnam coupled with the half-heartedness of Bao Dai and his government’. However, two Vietnams were a possibility provided most of the French forces in Indo-China stayed in south Vietnam for a long time. ‘There should be no illusion that anything much better would be possible in negotiation without hitherto unimaginable military success.’⁴¹

The unimaginable had now to be imagined and, moreover, it was to be what another level of the State Department described as ‘the necessary basis of any settlement which our side could honorably accept’.

The key to the problem remains prompt and vigorous military action by our side with US material support leading, in as short a time as possible, to a serious curtailment if not an elimination of the military potential of Ho's regular divisions.⁴²

By now, the US was involved in another part of Indo-China with the crisis that developed in Laos as Vietminh forces threatened the royal capital of Luang Prabang and the US responded, as it had on a previous occasion, by sending more transport aircraft, this time with civilian American pilots to fly what for the French was an unfamiliar model. The Laotian crisis seems to have taken Eisenhower by surprise and his reaction was to press for more vigorous French leadership. He described most of the French generals who had been sent to Indo-China as ‘a poor lot’ and had apparently already tried to secure the appointment of General Guillaume as French Commander there. That evidently having failed Eisenhower now recommended General Valluy, presumably also on military rather than political grounds but, having ordered the bombardment of Haiphong in 1946, to appoint Valluy would have been rather like proposing General Dyer as Commander-in-Chief, India, after the Amritsar massacre. In the event, the French decided to send Marshall Juin's NATO Chief of Staff, General Henri Navarre.

After the débâcle at Dien Bien Phu which effectively terminated his brief career in Vietnam, Navarre maintained that he was never given a clear political brief in Paris; but even before he had arrived in Saigon the combined civil and military opinion in the US embassy was that the test of French sincerity would be whether or not Navarre adopted ‘a more positive attitude’ towards the war.⁴³ When Ambassador Heath returned to Vietnam he had no doubts on this score but attributed what he called Navarre's ‘sharpened attitude’ and ‘acceptable plans’ to the arrival of General O'Daniel, Commander of the US Army in the Pacific, and to the presence of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group. O'Daniel had apparently been sent out to do far more than a survey of French military requirements and Dr Spector, the US Army historian, says it was at O'Daniel's urging and with his assistance that Navarre prepared an aggressive new concept for the conduct of operations in Indo-China, soon to become known as the Navarre Plan.⁴⁴ Whoever should be given the credit (or blame), one may wonder whether it was O'Daniel who persuaded Navarre that he could succeed, and then reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Navarre's ‘full co-operation’, his ‘new and aggressive concept’ that would emphasize larger formations and initiate a three-division offensive by mid-September.⁴⁵ If Navarre was given political support O'Daniel said he would do much to bring the war to a successful conclusion; but as one examines the details of O'Daniel's report, one may suspect that this was as much as anything because the war was beginning to look more like a Franco-American joint enterprise.

It was also, after France had been more than a month without a government, and after a brief caretaker administration, looking as if the Laniel government offered the last chance of a victorious conclusion to the Vietnam War; although this was to be measured in political determination rather than enhanced military capabilities. After him it was assumed, in a revealing State Department memo, that there would be ‘out and out negotiations with the Communists’ which would lead to a French evacuation but it must already have been becoming clear, from what the French made no attempt to deny, that they would be hard put to maintain their existing military effort. Navarre's requests – and O'Daniel's expectations – of another two French divisions were, said Defence Minister Pleven, out of the question.⁴⁶ For all the continuing, egregious, and perhaps by now exasperating optimism radiating from Ambassador Heath in Saigon – ‘persuading the French of the possibility, I would say certainty, of French victory’ – the State Department position paper in July 1953 was fairly depressing and its most hopeful word was ‘persevere’. At one of their regular joint meetings with the JCS General Collins, somewhat surprisingly, suggested that the French already had enough troops to do the job, if they would use them properly, but when he was asked ‘If we were faced with the loss of Indo-China to the communists what would your advice be from a military point of view?’ he answered, rather lamely, ‘I think we would just have to sit down with our political leaders and talk the things over’.⁴⁷

This was another meeting in which the basic contradiction lay near the surface. Was Southeast Asia essential to the US from a military point of view? Yes. Was the US willing to commit two American divisions? No, that was something that was up to France and the Associated States. But, as General Collins put it, it would not just be a question of putting in one division. ‘If we go to Indo-China with American forces, we will be there for the long pull. Militarily and politically we would be in up to our necks.’⁴⁸ When Foreign Minister Bidault came to Washington a few days later to ask for another 20 billion francs he was already pessimistic about the Navarre plan even though he said it was being speeded up. Dulles, on the other hand, sought to persuade him – or perhaps convince himself – that ‘with the necessary strength and spirit of initiative’ the destruction of substantial organized enemy forces seemed possible; and it was this belief which he nurtured until he was able to secure formal assent in the early autumn.

There could now be little doubt, however, that the US was engaged in a race against time; or at least was moving fast to the point where they would have to decide whether or not they would augment or even replace the French. Peace, said Bidault, linking Korea and Indo-China, was indivisible. If there were no prospects for peace the French government would be in an absolutely impossible situation; and while Dulles held to the Navarre plan as the only way to bring the war to an end – and seemed to be hinting a propos the ending of the Korean war, at some sort of comparable and ‘massive’ retaliation – Bidault was already envisaging a negotiated peace on the basis of free elections under UN supervision. For Dulles, evidently, there could be no negotiation except from a position of strength and although he denied that the US wanted to keep the war going ‘except for the purpose of protecting interests vital to all concerned’ he described negotiations ‘where our side would have no alternative’ as bankrupt, ending only in disaster.

There can be equally little doubt that, for Dulles, there was no alternative to victory and that this was something that the French could have if the US paid. For the sake of argument one may even locate the approximate point at which the US took over the baton (or went into the lead) in its determination to win the war. At the same time (3 August 1953) as the French political adviser (Claude Cheysson, who eventually became French Foreign Minister) to Vietnamese President Tarn told Ambassador Heath in Saigon that the French – ‘Reynaud and others’ – had no intention of continuing the present effort over any protracted period and were hoping for ‘sufficient victories’ to make some sort of deal with the Chinese or Vietminh – ‘and thus allow France to withdraw troops and reduce expenditure without apparent loss of face or honour’,⁴⁹ the State Department (5 Aug) recommended that the National Security Council agree to a further increase of $400m in US aid provided only that, in the opinion of the JCS, ‘the French plan holds the promise of military success’.⁵⁰

CONGRESSIONAL INTERESTS

So, a week after it had decided that Korea was an unwinnable war, the American administration had chosen to persuade itself that in Indo-China, on the contrary, and in spite of discouraging evidence, there was likely to be the promise of military success. In spite of subsequent rather nervous qualification by the JCS there was no official dissent, but readers of this presentation of US foreign policy may reasonably complain that it is more appropriate to the late-18th or early-19th centuries when it was argued that its conduct was executive, altogether, than to the middle of the 20th century when Congress, if not the Judiciary, had been admitted to equal partnership. Nevertheless the US entanglement in Vietnam was altogether executive. There was, as yet, no surge of public emotion, there was little public interest even, no part or process of American life or business that could be identified in or with Vietnam. But, at least in Congress, one could say it was beginning. In May 1953, on the day Senator John F. Kennedy addressed a list of 47 questions on Indo-China to the Secretary of State, he and Senator Mansfield had lunched with Mr Ngo Dinh Diem. The lunch had been arranged at the Supreme Court Building by Mr Justice Douglas; Diem was identified as a Catholic Vietnamese Nationalist leader; and Gullion, of the State Department, filed the report.⁵¹ Kennedy's interest in Vietnam went back to a trip he had made there in November 1951 when he had succeeded in annoying General de Lattre. The annoyance was obviously mutual and at the end of June 1953, when the bill to provide another $400m in military aid reached the floor of the Senate (there had been very little discussion in Committee), Kennedy was highly critical of the French performance in Vietnam. Using Diem's words Kennedy said that the concessions to Vietnamese independence had been ‘too little and too late’ to win the Vietnamese over from a position of sullen neutrality and he wanted all the US Mutual Security funds to be spent and administered in such a way as to encourage freedom and independence. This, as Dr Gibbons and his staff point out in their study of the executive and legislative roles in relationship in the Vietnam War,⁵² was the first serious debate to have been held since the war had begun and it was also perhaps the last occasion before the climax at Dien Bien Phu when the Executive might have had to take account of Congressional restraint. In the event, and somewhat ironically, Senator Kennedy's criticism was accepted as part of an amendment to the US aid bill that had been proposed by the conservative Republican, Senator Goldwater, which required the French to give a fixed date for complete independence in IndoChina. In the event, also, the amendment was heavily defeated and it seemed as if most of the Senators accepted the proposition that it was the President rather than Congress who should be making foreign policy ‘when a war is now actually in progress’. Perhaps it is rather sentimental to feel moved by Goldwater's quotations from the Declaration of Independence and when he asked if, perhaps, they did not apply to Indo-China; but whether one considers it naive or not it was, ultimately, an instrumental argument. Unless the French conceded real and proper independence and freedom it would end up with American boys in the jungles of South-East Asia. Or, as Kennedy put it to the Secretary of State: ‘The American people want in exchange for their assistance the establishment of conditions that will make success a prospect and not defeat inevitable.’⁵³

As far as the Eisenhower administration was concerned the irrevocable commitment to a French victory in Indo-China was made in the National Security Council on 9 September 1953: ironically, in Eisenhower's absence. Two points stand out from this momentous meeting. The first was that if, as Dr Spector suggests, the new Joint Chiefs had been even more cautious about predicting success and had, in effect, withdrawn the earlier endorsement of the Navarre Plan, there was no sign of caution or disapproval on the part of their Chairman, Admiral Radford, or of the Secretary of Defense. Indeed, although Radford entered a caveat about the skill and effectiveness with which the plan was carried out, he stated the Joint Chiefs’ firm belief that it ought to be supported and, speaking personally, observed that for the first time the political climate had actually improved to a point where military success could be achieved. There was, perhaps unfortunately, little ambiguity about this statement and even less about Radford's prediction that, with aggressive prosecution, the war could be reduced to mere guerrilla operations in the course of a single fighting season – certainly in two.⁵⁴ The second is the way in which Dulles presented his case as if only the formality of approval was necessary. The President, he said, had already indicated his general approval of how to assist the French – although the NSC was free to discuss the details. Perhaps, on the reasonable assumption that the Secretary of State enjoyed the President's full confidence, no one was going to challenge Dulles when he reduced the issue to what he said was essentially a financial problem. A month before, the chances that the State Department, the Foreign Operations Administration and all the Services, as represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would agree on the feasibility of the Navarre Plan seemed somewhat remote. Now, instead of any one of them saying ‘It isn't going to work’ everyone agreed it might work – and the brakes were taken off. Again, more as a formality than a necessity, it was agreed that Congress would be informed; and at the other end of the contingency scale, France, it was also agreed that it would be a mistake to attempt to secure written assurances from the French government that, in return for this assistance, it would press for ratification of the EDC treaties. Any such written assurances, it was said, would be certain to leak out.

It is, of course, more than conceivable that the decisions would have been the same even if Eisenhower had been present and it may be suggested that, having just received news of the successful CIA coup against Mossadegh in Iran, the President in particular and the foreign policy establishment in general were in a buoyant and optimistic mood. They were also in the final stages of putting the US into a fundamentally different defence posture, the ‘New Look’, in which its capacity for massive retaliation would be the principal US contribution to the defence of its allies and other parts of what it called ‘the free world’, but where the underlying theme was not so much the idea of retaliation per se, but that of seizing the initiative.⁵⁵ After the unwelcome sensation caused by the explosion of the first Russian hydrogen bomb in August 1953, the Navarre plan certainly looked as if it would regain the initiative in what was designated as an area that was vital to US security. If, that is, it worked. Inside the National Security Council doubts were stifled. Outside, there was at least one muted protest in the Senate: ‘pouring money down a rat hole’, ‘it was going to be one of the worst things this country ever got into’, but the President had decided and so Democratic Senator Russell would keep his mouth shut. However, as the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Saltonstall, pointed out, Congress now had to underwrite the President's open-ended commitment to the Navarre plan. And, one might add, to Vietnam.

Virtually from this point on one could argue that events were in train. The French had had some tactical success in Vietnam – the ability to destroy large quantities of Vietminh munitions and, more to the point, the ability to extricate their forces either by land (Lang Son) or by air (Na San) from such operations without significant loss. For those who were impressed by France's solemn declarations there had been yet another, on 3 July 1953, which would perfect the independence and sovereignty of the Associated States; but while they had avoided and, indeed, in the early stages of the Navarre plan intended to avoid, large-scale encounters with the danger of defeat, the French suffered almost irreparable political damage when, in the effusion of a Vietnamese national congress – in lieu, that is, of anything like a national assembly – they were told that the French Union should not endure, at least as far as Vietnam was concerned, and was in fact quite contrary to the sovereignty of an independent nation. This meant that for many Frenchmen, such as Bidault, there really was not much left to fight for even though, in circumstances which are still not fully explained, the French Union forces were about to launch an operation which would indeed be one of the decisive battles of the 20th century. So much has been written about Dien Bien Phu, yet not enough to account for such a dreadful mistake.⁵⁶ Had it worked, had its purpose been kept clearly in mind and its chances of success constantly evaluated, and had French resources been large enough to allow it to have been mounted on a sufficiently large scale, it could conceivably have met the American criteria for operations that would have cut or at least disrupted the Vietminh's supply lines as well as give them, the Vietminh, some anxiety about political or prestige attacks to which the French would be bound to respond in Laos. To begin with, when the parachute battalions dropped on 20 November 1953 and even after signs that the Vietminh were responding to the challenge, the French saw no cause for alarm and were, it seems, genuinely looking forward to a Vietminh attack and the chance of a decisive engagement. Thirty years later General O'Daniel wondered whether Navarre might have been influenced by the sort of operation in Korea which drew the enemy into the range of US artillery but concluded, as did Eisenhower after the event, that it was an absurd place to choose.

As Navarre himself presented it, Dien Bien Phu was not a major scheduled operation, indeed his purpose was to avoid a battle on such a scale so early in his plan. But, as it developed, it became the focus of the entire Vietnam war as well as drawing in men and munitions from the other scheduled operations which Navarre had in mind. Perhaps when he revealed to his influential visitor, Senator Knowland, in mid-September, that he only had three divisions in his ‘corps de bataille’ whereas the Vietminh had approximately seven, the alarm bells should have started ringing in Washington; although it is easy to see, the decision to support Navarre having just been taken, why they did not.⁵⁷ When General O'Daniel went out to Vietnam for the second time, in November 1953, it was to try to persuade Navarre that he should seal off the Red River delta; but as Navarre pointed out he could hardly do that as well as build up his own divisional forces. In spite of the Vietnamese light battalions, which had had one or two unhappy experiences at the hands of their more experienced Vietminh opponents, the war was having to be fought on two levels by the French Union forces; and, as the map in Navarre's memoirs shows quite clearly, the Red River delta was already riddled with villages under Vietminh control. The French, therefore, were not very receptive to US advice on how to conduct the war, at least at this level, and the disparity between the way in which they were fighting and the advice which, based on their Korean experiences, the US gave them on how they should fight was never really overcome. Towards the end of 1953, then, apart from the question ‘how’, one should ask who was fighting for what in Vietnam. On one side an emperor who represented French hopes and at least their political investment but, as far as Vietnamese were concerned, little more than a non-communist alternative future; and that only as long as his government was supported by French Union troops and US money. There was no pretence of democratic government or parliamentary assembly to lend credibility to a ramshackle régime but at least for Vietnamese there were few of the exactions of a totalitarian system nor was there any compulsion to defend it. For the French, who were there in fact rather than in name, what happened in Vietnam was perhaps more a matter of consequence elsewhere. If the French Union were to hold, more especially in North Africa, it would have to hold in Vietnam. And if numbers of Vietnamese in whose name the French were fighting had no intention of remaining within the French Union, and furthermore, were likely to be in a position of power once the French had left, then, from a French point of view, the continuation of the war was futile. But not as America saw it. Rather, it was an enterprise deserving of allied support for the transcendent purpose of defending her allies, her friends and herself but one to which the US had not yet decided, and perhaps might never need, to commit more than material support. On the other side, whatever it was that kept them fighting, was associated with, if not deserving to be, branded as communism; not least because of the support that was given by the Chinese Peoples’ Republic and the USSR. Without their help the war conceivably would not have lasted as long as it had. With their help it was very likely going to last a lot longer. Yet this might have been the wrong perspective from which to view an event that, rather than war, could equally well be presented, from the beginning, as revolution.

While, historically, one might argue that America had ambivalent feelings towards revolution, the record of the Eisenhower administration, like the attitude of its predecessor, was unequivocal towards what it regarded as communist revolution. In Guatemala, in Cuba and even in Iran when Mossadegh had been unfortunate enough to have the Iranian communist party rioting in the streets on his behalf, Eisenhower and Dulles, with the invariable assistance of John Foster Dulles' brother Allen as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been prepared to intervene and in two countries out of three succeeded by their intervention in overthrowing men who they regarded as their political enemies.⁵⁸

In Vietnam, however, the US was dealing with a much more intractable problem and one which, if it was to be solved, would call for a far greater commitment. The French, obviously, were unable, and unwilling, to fight the war on their own. For example, with so many isolated positions they relied heavily on American-made transport aircraft. By the end of 1953 the US had already lent a small aircraft carrier and were about to lend another. Most of the strike aircraft which the French were using were American also, as was their artillery. Large numbers of French Union forces came from North and West Africa and from the Foreign Legion; and the US was paying for the Vietnamese ‘light’ battalions. None of this had so far been enough although it always seemed possible to hold out the prospect if not the promise of success.

In December 1953, America's European allies, Britain and France, came to a summit meeting in Bermuda; and from Bidault they heard once again that things in Indo-China were going well, Vietminh forces were ‘facing a stagnation in strength’ while the French Union forces were creating ‘a force of manoeuvre of considerable size’ and from Churchill they heard of his great admiration for French exertions in Indo-China. The admiration was somewhat retrospective, for Mr Churchill, who seemed rather out of step, was making a favourable comparison of the French in Indo-China and the way in which the British had left India – ‘a colossal disaster’ – although he did refer to the splendid work that France was doing in North Africa. Perhaps this was at least the semblance of allied unity from which more might be expected if the Vietnam war could be presented as a sort of extension of NATO interests; although it could equally well have been an occasion when, instead of Churchill's extravagant comments, French prospects in Indo-China might realistically have been examined. As it happened, however, and although this is not a definitive sequence, Dulles presented Communist China as the promoter of aggression in Indo-China. He was obviously convinced that by sending atomic weapons to Korea, and making sure the Chinese knew, the armistice there had been achieved from a position of strength⁵⁹ and as soon as the allies had gone he told the National Security Council on 10 December 1953 that he had encountered very stubborn resistance from the British and French ‘to any idea of the automatic use of atomic weapons’ and what Dulles described as ‘our suggestions with regard to normalising’ their use. The specific point of reference here was in the case of a communist renewal of hostilities in Korea but it was something that had implications for Indo-China as well. In the event of ‘an actual US military commitment’ the CIA, together with the intelligence organizations of the Services, the Joint Staff and the Department of State, concluded that: ‘The chances are probably better than even that the Communists would accept the risk involved and that the Chinese Communists would intervene openly and in force in an effort to save the Communist position in Indo-China.’⁶⁰

WAR PLANS

At about the same time as the Intelligence Advisory Committee was concurring in this estimate in mid-December 1953, and the noose was beginning to tighten around Dien Bien Phu, the Joint Strategic and Logistic Plans Committees of the Chiefs of Staff were drawing up their paper on whether or not to commit US forces in Indo-China. For the first time one might say that the US was facing up to the full implications of its declared policy on Indo-China. More like a Seventh Cavalry than a Seventh Fleet solution, the French were to hold on until the US and its allies rode to the rescue. In addition to the usual litany, of varying resonance – warning to China, UN action on the Korean model and a regional effort to include, surprisingly, Burma as well as, possibly, Nationalist China – there were similar fantasies of development for indigenous forces: if necessary by means of US-supervized training. Setting out a number of options its recommendation was for Alternative A: which was to support and intensify the development of indigenous forces and deploy US and allied forces (ground, sea, and air) to Indo-China to undertake operations with the objective of reducing Communist activity to the status of scattered guerrilla bands. This, the most positive recommendation, would offer the greatest assurance of success while the others ranged in estimated probability from ‘some chance for success’ to ‘the very likely result of military defeat’. It would, however, present several problems. Specifically, that it would require seven US divisions: but only five were ‘readily available’. Concomitant disadvantages included ‘an increased calculated risk adversely affecting war plans’, major alterations in fiscal and budgetary policies and programmes, major increases in military production and mobilization schedules, and a reversal of policy planning to reduce the size of the US Armed Forces. However, whether Alternative A, B, or C was initially adopted, if US forces engaged in combat in Indo-China, the US must be prepared to commit whatever forces were necessary to ‘insure’ [sic] military success.⁶¹

This, in its recommended action, was now very much more than a contingency plan. Indeed, it was so sensational, ‘the substance of the Special Annex was so controversial, and the questions it discussed so sensitive’ that, as Gibbons points out, it was thought prudent not to have it in circulation. However: ‘contingencies referred to in the Special Annex would henceforth be discussed only orally, and all copies of the Annex would be recalled for destruction’.⁶²

Given its premises, that the retention of Indo-China, Tonkin in particular, was vital to US security and that the French were in danger of losing it, these recommendations may have been logically impeccable but, given what was understood at the time to be US defence policy, they were both unlikely and, strictly speaking, politically irresponsible. It was, after all, a proposal that the US should go to war in Vietnam six months after it had stopped the war in Korea and yet, given the supremacy of end over means, this was the case that was put to the National Security Council on 8 January 1954 at the beginning of the great governmental debate on US intervention. It was, that is, a case for a limited war but not, said Eisenhower, vehemently, one in which the US should contribute ground forces because, as he foresaw, it would become a war ‘that would absorb our troops by divisions’. This, however, was not the only option and where Admiral Radford wondered hopefully whether a squadron of US planes over Dien Bien Phu for as little as one afternoon might save the situation, even Eisenhower said it was certainly going to be necessary to work out some way by which US planes could be used even if ‘we could not just fly them into combat off the carrier.’

From one point of view it looked as if Dulles had already begun to set the scene. On 6 January 1954 he had apparently reassured Democratic Senator Walter George of the Foreign Relations Committee that Congress would not be asked for its approval to send in American troops; but Dulles' memorandum of conversation adds ‘We talked about possible sea and air activity, to which he did not seem seriously to object’.⁶³ On 7 January, speaking to the Foreign Relations Committee, Dulles had said ‘There is no doubt whatever in the minds of our people that the thing can be licked’ but this meant that, with qualifications, it could be achieved in another fighting season ‘if the French will stick to it’. This was the doubtful element.⁶⁴

Although it is not to be found in the official record of US foreign policy it would appear from another source, the Pentagon Papers, that Dulles at the meeting of the NSC on 8 January must have presented the State Department view: that the French position was so critical already as to ‘force the US to decide now to utilise US forces in the fighting in South-East Asia’.⁶⁵ The Chief of Naval Operations had proposed a similar course to the Secretary of Defense; but, from another professional point of view, partial involvement, the use of naval and air units only, was a delusion and Vice-Admiral Davis wrote himself into the literature of the Vietnam War with his comment: ‘One cannot go over Niagara Falls in a barrel only slightly.’⁶⁶

At this point, however, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had still not been able to make up their minds on intervention and in the National Security Council as a whole the official record reveals the most intense opposition, both service and civilian, to Admiral Radford's proposals – for example supporting the French at Dien Bien Phu with a US aircraft carrier – and his assumption that the US was already in the war in a big way.⁶⁷ The strongest recorded opposition came from Treasury Secretary Humphrey who said he simply did not see how we could talk of sending people, as opposed to money, to bale the French out. Even the loss of Dien Bien Phu could not, he thought, be bad enough to involve the US in combat in Indo-China. What came out of this meeting therefore, instead of agreement on intervention, was a discussion of what the US might do by way of a sub fuse commitment, whether General Navarre could be persuaded to take several hundred US officers to train the Vietnamese forces, or, failing that, whether, as Eisenhower put it, they could find a little group of fine and adventurous pilots ‘and then we should give them US planes without insignia and let them go’. The distinction between intervention and non-intervention was becoming dangerously thin. Admiral Radford was entitled to his complaint that once again the issue had been side-stepped, although the US was now at least one step nearer intervention.

The fundamental question, which it was perhaps indelicate to raise at this point, was whether or not the US was going to war. The Assistant Secretary of State, Walter Robertson, had warned Dulles that public opinion in America was not ready for a decision to send troops to Indo-China: but the caveat was unless it seemed necessary to save South-East Asia from communist domination.⁶⁸On the other hand, when the question was put to him direct in the House Foreign Affairs Committee and he was asked whether all the force that was necessary to save Asia would be used, Dulles, unless he was greatly misunderstood, at least gave the impression that it would. There is, he said, a will to act, there are plans of action; and even though he may have reassured the Committee when he said ‘We have in mind the Constitution which says only the Congress can declare war’ it would take a very good lawyer to work out from the record what Dulles actually told them. In any event one needs to look elsewhere for clear-cut opinions as well as for the options that were being closed off. The most important of these related to the French and while it was the US position to continue to support the French without direct military intervention this was threatened from two sides, or, as it were, by two converging lines of advance. First, on the diplomatic front, the Foreign Ministers' conference which opened in Berlin on 25 January 1954 had, after considerable US resistance, agreed to put Indo-China on its agenda, thus opening the way to a negotiated settlement. Second, having decided to accept the challenge, the Vietminh divisions were themselves converging on Dien Bien Phu where the French forces were already surrounded and entirely dependent on air supply. So far the Vietminh had stayed outside the range of French artillery and until the battle actually began both French and Americans summoned up or gave way to gusts of rather foolish optimism. To begin with it did not seem to matter that much whether the opinions which were so confidently advanced by Radford, for example that the Vietminh were not really going to attack Dien Bien Phu after all, turned out to be so dreadfully mistaken nor his assurance that even if the Vietminh brought up anti-aircraft guns they could be knocked out by fighter attack. At the beginning of the year even Navarre was worried by these anti-aircraft guns which would prevent French planes knocking out Vietminh artillery and although Navarre conceded that the Vietminh might now take Dien Bien Phu he declared bravely that even the loss of as many as ten battalions would not prevent him moving on to eventual victory.⁶⁹

Quite obviously, if only to judge from the list of requirements which he submitted (including a small observation balloon!) at the beginning of January 1954, the French were in very serious difficulties and largely unable to provide the equipment that was needed for their own war effort. But so far it was only an impending crisis even if, in Washington, the reaction of columnists and commentators was sometimes more realistic than that of the State Department. Nevertheless it was sufficiently critical for the creation of an extraordinary Special Committee on Indo-China which was set up in January headed by General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's wartime Chief of Staff, who was to fill roughly the same role with regard to Indo-China. It was this Special Committee which dealt with the French request for more aircraft and for American mechanics to keep them flying. In the event, the request for 400 mechanics was cut in half but as soon as this recommendation was agreed it was approved by the President and the men were dispatched. A year before, Acheson's recommendation in the dying days of the Truman administration led to the dispatch of a handful of mechanics. Now it was 200: plus an agreement to send civilian pilots hired by the CIA as well as Bedell Smith's firm and influential opinion that the importance of winning in Indo-China was so great that if the worse came to the worst he would favour intervention with air and naval forces.⁷⁰

In the Senate it seemed that the Armed Services Committee had been very unhappy with this development, even though the Air Force technicians were only supposed to be on bases where they would be secure from capture and would not be exposed to conflict. But when asked by the President ‘What is the alternative?’ and as it was, after all, a commitment that was now limited in time as well as in numbers, reluctance did not amount to dissent. Senator Mansfield, for example, might warn of a swiftly developing crisis: but he was opposed to a negotiated peace and was still hoping for clear-cut victory. Mansfield still had every confidence in men like Navarre and Bao Dai; he was very glad that the government was spending $1200m in Indo-China; and he would vote for another billion or more next year. Senator Fulbright seemed to be closer to the mark when he said that the war would not be won by B-26s or anything else that the US could put in but he, too, suggested that if Bao Dai was no good, the US ought to get something else. From here, perhaps, one can see the ball beginning to roll that would take the US to the brink of intervention in 1954. For the moment, however, it seemed to be more a matter of helping Sisyphus to reach the top of the hill; but when the rock began to roll back the question was whether the French would be crushed and what the Americans could do to prevent this happening.

DIEN BIEN PHU AND THE QUESTION OF INTERVENTION

Whether and how the US would or could come to the assistance of France in her Indo-China war was, at the time, one of the most critical and most intensively argued issues in post-war American foreign policy; and it is a question which has never been closed. The debate began when it was realized that intervention might, first, be necessary to keep the French fighting; and then, when the scale of her difficulty at Dien Bien Phu became evident, it became equally obvious that she might have to be saved from a self-inflicted and unanticipated defeat. Once Indo-China had been placed on the Foreign Ministers' agenda and the challenge had been issued and accepted at Dien Bien Phu, there was a certain uneasy awareness that this was to be the critical battle. Images of ‘a veritable jungle Verdun’ notwithstanding it became clear that the critical factor was air power, both in supply and attack, in which the French were hopelessly under strength. For the moment, however, and although the French were surrounded in their unhappy compromise between a fortress and a launching pad, the Vietminh attack had not begun at Dien Bien Phu and the National Security Council in Washington could still afford the luxury of more relaxed debate in which the President, against a background of recorded and presumably good-tempered laughter, wanted to find a good Buddhist leader to whip up some real fervour in Vietnam. It was still a time of relative complacency and hope even if, on another reading, the situation was basically hopeless. Thus, in the same meeting where Eisenhower was looking for his militant Buddhist, Dulles said that the most disheartening feature of the news from Indo-China was the evidence that the majority of people in Vietnam supported the Vietminh rebels.⁷¹Overall, however, the good news prevailed. In Saigon there was the irrepressible Ambassador Heath, who could not understand French pessimism. Two or three divisions, he said, could turn the present stalemate into early victory. In Washington there was the impermeable Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford, who unworthily attributed the pessimism of General Trapnell, who was on the spot in Vietnam, to the fact that he had been a Japanese POW. In between, as it were, was the Director of South-East Asian Affairs in the State Department (Philip Bonsai) who reckoned that optimism would be the major asset in the coming weeks, presumably wished to nurture it, and conversely, warned Ambassador Heath that when the American Consul in Hanoi returned to the US he should not ‘highlight unduly’ the more sensational and pessimistic aspects of the situation.

It was with similar determined and rather perverse optimism that Dulles was apparently waiting for the Geneva Conference to begin: even if the context of his remarks suggests he may have been misunderstood. Whether he was or not, he is reported as telling the National Security Council at the end of February 1954 that both he and Bidault were approaching the forthcoming conference ‘with considerable equanimity’. Dulles did not believe that the French would push too hard for a negotiated settlement. When the fighting season ended in May, the heat, as he put it, would be off so if the French government could hold on for a couple of months or so, Dulles did not anticipate too much difficulty. But there was a condition, which was repeated: that there should be no real military disaster prior to or during the conference. Nothing specific was mentioned and the dominant chord was optimism: that there was at least the fair probability of securing both French membership in EDC and the continuation of the struggle in Indo-China. All the same, two further thoughts occur. First, that by fixing his gaze on Geneva Dulles had momentarily taken his eye off the ball, or, rather, off the match that was about to begin in Indo-China. Second, that such a consummate lawyer as Dulles would be bound to put in a caveat that would allow him to extricate himself when the major premise collapsed. More to the point, perhaps, was that no one in the National Security Council at this time wanted to expose the foundation of his argument and no one mentioned Dien Bien Phu. Two weeks later, on 13 March 1954, the battle began with a Vietminh artillery bombardment of unimagined intensity, the French immediately lost their first outposts, and the US government reacted as if it, too, had been precipitated into a hitherto unforeseen political crisis.

A week after the attack began the French Chief of Staff, General Ely, arrived in Washington at the invitation of Admiral Radford. Air power was now the only way of saving Dien Bien Phu; which meant it would have to be American; and the requests would be made for it in all shapes and sizes. – More B-26 medium bombers, for example: but the French did not have enough air crews for those which they had. Ten or twenty B-29s, with French crews who scarcely knew how to fly them, operating from US bases in the Philippines whose government might not have been willing to give their permission. – A US airlift of two parachute battalions from North Africa was requested although in the event the French battalions were not yet ready to go. The wide-screen version, as it was projected by American enthusiasts such as Admiral Radford, eventually featured squadrons of B-29s, flying by day or by night, with fighter and fighter-bomber squadrons from US aircraft carriers, up to a total of some 350 aircraft; but in the meantime the French wanted bigger bombs and the large C-119s, the ‘flying box-cars’, adapted to carry napalm. Ultimately, it seems, Dien Bien Phu was important enough to the US to justify apocalyptic risks. The innocuously titled Joint Advanced Study Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently concluded that three tactical atomic weapons, properly employed, would be sufficient to smash the Vietminh effort at Dien Bien Phu – ‘clean up’ was the expression used – and Admiral Radford's special assistant had been sent over to the State Department to ask whether, in the event of an allied coalition being formed, the French were likely to give their approval for such a cataclysm.⁷²

BLUFF?

For approximately three months, from the middle of March to the middle of June 1954, the US administration discussed, projected and negotiated the possibilities of intervention in Indo-China. From the fact that, in the end, nothing happened it is possible to infer that nothing was intended and that even though, for political reasons, Eisenhower and Dulles may have been forced to tack from time to time they were in fact steering a course of determined non-intervention. They were, that is to say, nowhere as near the coast of Vietnam as the presence of US aircraft carriers at the time would otherwise suggest and there were no circumstances other than Chinese intervention in which the US would have been involved. Thus, for example, when Eisenhower set conditions for intervention he made them deliberately impossible; when he sent Dulles and Radford to talk to Congressional leaders he was expecting, and had presumably intended, them to refuse support; and when Dulles spoke of united action, this was clearly an absurd idea. None of it, therefore should be taken too seriously.⁷³

On the other hand, given the apparently immutable importance of Indo-China to American security, it would have been surprising if the French predicament at Dien Bien Phu had been ignored or their exertions in Indo-China written off as a bad job. In any case, a couple of days before the assault began, the Special Committee had come up with a programme for military victory because, to continue the Verdun metaphor, ‘on ne passe pas’, at least not in Indo-China, and if this could not be done with make-shift methods such as US volunteers then, if things got worse or the French were difficult, the US might wish to consider direct military action.⁷⁴ To do what? With the Geneva Conference due to begin on 26 April 1954 it could have been to permit the French to negotiate from that elusive ‘position of strength’ or, rather, so that they should not have to negotiate from the humiliation of defeat. In practice this meant that something had to be done to relieve the French at Dien Bien Phu if that were at all possible but it also meant, given the guidelines that had been drawn, that because the idea of a negotiated settlement was unacceptable, intervention would have been as much to dissuade the French from giving up as to defeat the Vietminh or deter the Chinese. Beyond this fairly clear if negative object there lay a great deal of uncertainty: in method, in consequences, and in record. When, for example, Ely came to Washington in March 1954 one does not know whether, with perhaps limited English, he misunderstood Admiral Radford's remarks to mean the offer of nuclear weapons nor does one know the mood or the message in his off-the-record talks with the President. Ely, in turn, when Radford took him to meet Dulles, may not have known what to make of the Secretary of State's elliptical argument that, if the French wanted open US participation, it might involve a much closer partnership: although these, said Dulles, were simply broad considerations of principle and one may assume, as a lawyer, he intended them without prejudice. Ely, however, could have been in no doubt of one thing: in the hypothetical case of US intervention they would have to win: ‘We could not afford thus to engage the prestige of the US and suffer defeat which would have world-wide repercussions’.⁷⁵

Would it be necessary? And how was it to be done? On the assumption that French power was collapsing in Indo-China the further assumption which Dulles presented to the National Security Council (25 March 1954) was that the US would have to fill the void rather than China; and for Eisenhower the question was how far the US should go in employing ground forces in saving Indo-China from the communists. In view of the subsequent nervousness about using anything except US naval and air power this was a significant starting point, and after considering the prospects of UN approval or assistance the discussion centred on what would be necessary to obtain Congressional approval. If, for example, Vietnam were to invite assistance from various countries and the invitations were accompanied by treaties Eisenhower thought they could probably get the necessary two-thirds majority vote in the Senate: and Congressional approval was essential.⁷⁶

The question of using ground forces would obviously have meant a much more deliberate and long-term commitment than the sort of single air strike which Dulles and Eisenhower had talked about the previous day – Eisenhower said it would have to be decisive – but either would have involved the sort of risks about which Dulles was apparently talking: risks which, he said, would be less if taken then rather than in several years' time.⁷⁷ It was as much as anything this element of danger that created world-wide concern when Dulles gave his highly publicized radio and TV broadcast speech on 29 March in which he called for united action to meet what he implied was a Chinese and Russian threat to the whole of Southeast Asia and it was certainly commensurate with what Eisenhower had publicly identified as an area of ‘transcendent importance’. All the same, it was a curious speech, not least for its warning to ‘a potential aggressor’ where his aggression could lead him, and its emphasis on the Chinese connection. The Vietminh, by contrast, were hardly mentioned and where they were they were described as having been largely trained and equipped in Communist China and supplied with artillery and ammunition through the Soviet-Chinese Communist bloc.⁷⁸ Rather as if he were an advocate addressing a jury Dulles managed to convey far more than the qualifications would permit. Thus, the substantive purpose of Red China and Russia was to dominate Southeast Asia; and it would be more difficult to remember that it was, in fact, as Dulles said, only their propagandists who made this apparent. Apparent, again, this time probably from French sources, was the less than substantive basis for the number of 2,000 Chinese who, Dulles said, were functioning in key positions with the Vietminh; although, even if this figure was accurate, according to the French half of them were Chinese Army lorry drivers.

CHINA: THE SUFFICIENT CAUSE?

The most detailed as well as the most familiar accounts which deal with the question of US intervention in Vietnam in the spring of 1954 for the most part consider it in terms of these two factors: the US and Vietnam.⁷⁹ In Dulles' ‘united action’ speech there was, however, more than an echo of ‘massive retaliation’ which was the prescribed principle of uncertainty that was now supposed to underlie US foreign policy: the times and places would be chosen by the US rather than by her enemies. Where and how could the US retaliate against communist aggression in Vietnam? And if there were to be insurmountable difficulties in using US divisions what would be the target for US naval and air power? At this point it is probably necessary to make an inductive leap but the logical answer would seem to be ‘China’, even if the fragments of evidence are by no means conclusive. Perhaps it is significant that before his ‘united action’ speech Dulles was worried about what he called ‘a landslide psychology in favor of appeasement of Communist China’: and felt that something strong needed to be said publicly to check it⁸⁰ and his attitude at the time, as well as his record at Geneva, shows that he was quite incapable even of considering the sort of accommodation with China that might have produced a settlement in Vietnam. Where it may have been more difficult to work up any strength of feeling over Ho Chi Minh and the lesser enemy there was, in the Republican administration, among men such as Senator Knowland, Congressman Walter Judd, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson and even Dulles himself, a passionate intensity of feeling directed against the communist régime in China. This would, simply because of the Sino-American experience over the previous five or ten years, account for the violence of their hostility and their willingness to make life as difficult for the Chinese régime as they could and might explain the comparative lack of restraint or caution which seemed to characterize their thinking about Chinese problems. Now, however, China was not just a problem in its own right but one that could be identified as the major cause of the Vietnamese problem as well.

American intervention in Vietnam can be seen, therefore, as something which not only involved China but, in the way in which the Administration presented the case, it gave enough indication that China was considered to be the sufficient cause of the Vietminh ‘rebellion’, which might therefore be dealt with at its source. Thus, in what is sometimes regarded as the critical meeting of Dulles and Admiral Radford with Congressional leaders on 3 April 1954 – ‘The Day We Didn't Go To War’ – the draft Joint Resolution which Dulles may have been carrying with him, but which he had certainly taken to the White House the day before for Eisenhower's approval, began ‘Whereas the Chinese Communist régime and its agents in Indo-China are engaging in armed attack against Vietnam and the duly constituted and friendly government of that country’, and went on to assert that they were committing aggression against the friendly states of Laos and Cambodia, threatened other friendly states, and had as their object the domination of all Southeast Asia.

If it had ever been presented to and approved by Congress, this was the resolution which would have given the President a blank cheque to intervene in Southeast Asia subject only, in effect, to three conditions: that the naval and air rather than ground forces of the US would be employed; that Congress would still have the authority to declare war; and that the President's executive powers would only last until the end of June 1955. Again, it is remarkable that the Vietminh are not identified as such, that is to say that they were not considered to be a power in their own right; and furthermore, they were only designated as the agents of Communist China who were engaged in an armed attack against Vietnam. In other words that it was China, once again, who was guilty of aggression. In the event it seems the draft resolution was never mentioned but the concept of aggression was something to which Dulles returned when, for example, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that what he claimed was Chinese participation in the Vietnam war came ‘awfully close’ to the type of overt aggression that he had referred to in earlier statements. The purpose of this statement, according to Dulles, was, amongst other things, to indicate to the Chinese communists that they were getting perilously close to the point of serious risk to themselves; but for all the implication that this would be a self-inflicted injury there was no doubt that, if it happened, the US would be the instrument of destruction.

The dangers of Chinese intervention were real enough, if only perhaps because of the Korean precedent, although once US forces were engaged in Vietnam they would pose less of a threat to China than they did when they arrived, briefly, on the banks of the Yalu in 1950; but while the US obviously wished to provide a deterrent against Chinese intervention it seems that, for Dulles at least, deterrence was an elastic-sided concept. That is to say, it might be stretched to include what the Chinese were already doing rather than what they might do in the future. The constant worry of the French, incidentally, was that the Chinese airforce would intervene and with their Soviet-supplied MIG fighters would simply shoot the French airforce, which had no jets, out of the sky. But so far, in any meaningful sense, or at least on the scale of Korea, the Chinese had not intervened although if Congress, the American people, or America's allies could perhaps be persuaded that they had, then this would prove to be a greater justification for whatever it was that the US was going to do.

And there was, perhaps, just a chance that the US would not have to do it. One of the ideas which, in print at least, one can see taking shape is that, if China was confronted with a de facto allied coalition in Vietnam, which included the US and its awesome nuclear threat, they would be induced to withdraw their support from the Vietminh. So, as Dulles told the British Ambassador, he had hoped that his ‘united action’ speech would have a deterrent effect on Chinese communists. If, Dulles said, they could be made to see that ‘stepped up activities’ on their part in Southeast Asia could lead to disastrous retaliation ‘on our part’ by sea and air, perhaps the Chinese could be persuaded to refrain from adventures in that area. If so, Southeast Asia could be saved from communism and probably a world-wide conflict avoided. But, in any case, said Dulles, they felt the risk was justified.⁸¹

Whether Dulles had in mind current or future Chinese adventures is by no means clear but whatever it was US policy was based on extraordinary optimism. As Dulles informed the US Embassies in Paris and London on 4 April the alternatives at Geneva could only be face-saving formulae to cover the surrender of one side or the other; ‘whereas if we [presumably the US and its allies] were strong and resolute enough to make the Chinese communists see clearly that their conquest of Southeast Asia would not be permitted without the danger of extending the war, they might desist and accept alternative b): that is, the surrender of the Vietminh.’⁸² In the letter which Dulles drafted for Eisenhower to send to Churchill, in what was designed to be ‘another act of fellowship in the face of peril’, the hope was that the Chinese could be brought to believe that their interests lay in the direction of a discreet disengagement⁸³ and talking to the Australian Ambassador on 10 April in support of the idea of a coalition Bedell Smith, the Under-Secretary of State, said it was intended not only to boost French morale but also to discourage Communist China: ‘It is not inconceivable, given the proper circumstances, that the Communist Chinese might be impelled to pull the rug out from Ho Chi Minh.’⁸⁴

So, on the less familiar but more ambitious reading, united action was intended to assist the French by threatening the Chinese: but what form would it take and what was it supposed to do? Frighten China into cutting off support from the Vietminh? In that case what would constitute an effective threat? How long would it take? If that did not work was the US prepared to go to war with China? On its own? Was it really intended as any more than a threat and in the meantime what was going to be done to help the French? In the recorded turmoil of discussions, conditions and alternatives, in an atmosphere of crisis which became far more intense than the climax of Senator McCarthy's contemporary domestic drama, there is too much evidence to permit the more comfortable conclusion that it was only intended for effect. The Special Annexe (supra) with its Doomsday minus 1 scenario resurfaced and was put into circulation for the first time. Even General Ridgway, the Army Chief of Staff who in other respects showed commendable restraint, reckoned that if the US decided that the loss of Indo-China and the rest of Southeast Asia would be intolerable, and if China did not stop sending military aid to the Vietminh, the US should announce its intention ‘to destroy or to neutralise the sources of Vietminh military power’.⁸⁵ This reference could only have been to China: even though the memorandum itself is harder to evaluate. Should it be taken at face value, i.e. that the US should be prepared to go to war with China? Or was it designed principally to reinforce Ridgway's argument that the use of US armed forces in Indo-China, apart from any local successes they might achieve, would constitute a dangerous strategic diversion of limited military capabilities and would commit US armed forces ‘in a non-decisive theatre to the attainment of non-decisive local objectives’? With the experience of war that had only just stopped in Korea, the emphasis in America's ‘new look’ defence policy which favoured the Air Force and Navy at the expense of the Army, and the simple fact that, even if nuclear weapons had been used, the Army still did not have enough available divisions to engage in war in Vietnam, it might, ironically, and certainly from an Army point of view, have been easier for the US to attack China with naval and air forces than it would have been for the Army to repeat the Korean nightmare in Vietnam. And it might also have been more popular although, having said that, it is difficult to make out a case that ‘in certain circumstances’ too, the US could not have been involved in some sort of military intervention in Vietnam in 1954. In any case, the argument turns on the conditions for intervention. These seemed to change from time to time – what could be done to relieve Dien Bien Phu, what should be done to bolster the French before and after the Geneva Conference moved to its Indo-China phase – but the essential conditions were set out by Dulles to the National Security Council on 6 April. They were, first, that US intervention must be part of a coalition to include other free nations of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, as well as British and Commonwealth nations. Second, France must agree to accelerate the independence programme for the Associated States so that there could be no question of US support for French colonialism. Third, France must agree not to pull her forces out of the war if the US put her forces in. There was also, as far as the Administration was concerned, a prior condition: there would have to be Congressional support. And even though, when Dulles and Radford were unsuccessful in what seems to have been their attempt to persuade Congressional leaders, notably on 3 April, that they should give their unconditional support to executive action should it be required, the conditions that were set were by no means unattainable and for all the difficulties that each of them may have presented it can be argued that Dulles' attempted triple jump came very close to success.

THE BRITISH OBSTACLE

From the moment these conditions were set out, it was recognized that the British position was the one that was crucially important and the State Department (MacArthur) had already tried to carry it by storm. A curious if not deliberately misleading account of Dulles' meeting with Congressional leaders had been given to the British Ambassador who was told that if there were really united action … the US would be able to play its full part but, on the other hand, in a remarkably open threat he was told that if Britain, together with Australia and New Zealand, ‘simply sat on their hands’ it would virtually call into question the whole concept of alliances and, more specifically, would have the ‘most serious impact on support we were contributing to collective arrangements elsewhere’.⁸⁶ As a matter for internal discussion there was little doubt about the risks which Britain was expected to run if the US could get her to line up with them throughout Asia to resist communism. Although the NSC did not seem to be particularly well informed on what was happening in Malaya, and Vice-President Nixon in particular, on the basis of a recent visit to Southeast Asia, claimed that British colonialism was a mill-stone around America's neck, Dulles reckoned that it might still be possible to save Malaya if Britain was prepared to risk the loss of Hong Kong.⁸⁷ Whether this would have been the result of US attacks on China, or some sort of united action in Vietnam, was not made clear but to put these half-formed ideas, impetuous proposals and spasmodic reactions into some sort of sensible framework one can see that Dulles was attempting to produce an instant alliance. Having kicked off, publicly, with his ‘united action’ speech of 29 March 1954 he had given himself less than a month to go into the Geneva Conference ‘strong and united, with a good hope that we would come out of the conference with the communists backing down’.⁸⁸ Dulles' historical reminiscence was that it was the British who had let the US down in 1932 when she wanted to slow down the Japanese in Manchuria; but this time he thought they might follow the US lead.

Given the fact that an alliance already existed in Western Europe where America's historic decision and massive commitment was linking the destiny of the allied nations in the face of a perceived Soviet threat it was, from Dulles' point of view, not unreasonable to extend that alliance to Southeast Asia where, in Indo-China, France was already fighting for its existence against communist opponents whose major advantage lay in proximity to communist China. The immediate problem therefore was to persuade the UK to take up a similar position. And for a moment it seemed as if Dulles had succeeded.

The essential difficulty lay in convincing the British that events in Indo-China constituted such a threat to the rest of Asia as to necessitate ‘allied action’ and justify the risk of war with China and, not inconceivably, the third world war. Dulles had not liked Eden's attitude from the start: it was, as Dulles described it, a problem between the US and France with the UK standing on the side-lines as an uninterested party: a situation which, according to Dulles, actively encouraged the French to seek a negotiated settlement.⁸⁹Nevertheless, the same argument that Dulles used against the French might have to be applied to the British: it might be necessary to beat them into line. MacArthur's exchange with the British Ambassador (supra) seems to be evidence of this but in several conversations which Dulles had with Sir Roger Makins there was less threat and more persuasion. Incidentally, on one occasion, according to the British account, Dulles argued that the USSR would use their influence in persuading China to discontinue its aid to the Vietminh; but this point is not to be found in the US record.⁹⁰ However, with Eisenhower's message to Churchill on 5 April the scene was set for a monumental misunderstanding. When Dulles arrived in London a week later, intent upon alliance, it was with a draft declaration of policy which looked more like a multilateralized Monroe doctrine for Southeast Asia than the sort of organization which would have been comparable to that of the North Atlantic Treaty. Indeed, on an historical parallel, it was not that different from the Holy Alliance with its transposed fear of ‘International Communism’, whose forces were now said to be subjecting the Associated states of Indo-China to armed attack and invasion and whose domination of any part of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific would be a threat to the peace and security of them all.⁹¹ Eden's reaction was much the same as that of Castlereagh in 1820: ‘We shall be found in our place when actual danger menaces the System of Europe but the Country cannot, and will not, act upon abstract and speculative Principles of Precaution.’⁹² As it was, Eden's familiar but unconscious endearments and Dulles' chronic halitosis would help to produce a notable non-congruence over the next few weeks when, as one observer recalls, they seemed simply to talk past each other but whereas, when the American draft was ‘informally’ produced, the Foreign Office (Dennis Allen) ‘expressed great reserve’ because ‘definitive action before the conference began might foreclose the possibility of successful negotiation’,⁹³ Dulles emerged from this encounter without the draft declaration but with Eden's signature on what could be argued was a contract: a joint statement which said, ‘We are ready to take part, with the other countries principally concerned in an examination of the possibility of establishing a system of collective defence …’⁹⁴ As Dulles, overlooking the setback to his draft declaration, told the French it was a communiqué which fully satisfied the purposes he had in mind in coming to Britain.

Certainly it might be seen as the basis for some sort of united action. The only matters it had not settled were what, and more important, when. Taken in the context of what can be seen were British attitudes before the communiqué was issued (rather than after, when they could be regarded as excuses for escaping from unexpected or unwelcome commitments) it hardly looks as if Britain contemplated armed intervention of any kind before the Geneva Conference had had the opportunity of arriving at a diplomatic settlement. The communiqué could be understood to mean just that. It could equally well be understood to mean than an armed coalition would be formed before the conference began, so that the French would not only be supported but would even be able to call on power which they were manifestly unable to command on their own and from this position of strength negotiate a settlement which might be acceptable to the US. If, however, this proved for whatever reason to be impossible, their opponents would at least have to reckon with an alliance in being. Either course might have been tried; both were implied; but the US came away from their first British encounter believing, or claiming to believe, that they had secured UK approval for the creation, announcement and even deployment of the forces of an armed alliance.⁹⁵

As soon as he returned to Washington Dulles once more set about the task of creating a framework for united action first, by putting the fear of God, or rather, Godless communism, into the Ambassadors of Australia and New Zealand and then announcing that talks would begin on 20 April 1954 with the Ambassadors of other participant states – Thailand, the Philippines, the Indo-China states – as well as France. Eden had apparently agreed that an informal working group should be set up in Washington to consider ‘how best we might proceed in organizing united will to resist aggression in South-East Asia’⁹⁶ but seems to have thought that this action either jumped the gun or exceeded the limits of its agreed competence. The British, or at least Eden, understood that ‘The whole question of membership was a matter for further consideration’ and that it might involve India and Burma as well as Pakistan.⁹⁷ Eden, considerably irritated, told the British Ambassador in Washington not to attend and the meeting was hastily converted into a more innocuous briefing for foreign ambassadors on the eve of Dulles' second departure for Europe, this time via Paris en route to Geneva. On the same day as the briefing Dulles had another, unrecorded, meeting with Congressional leaders in an atmosphere of mounting crisis after Vice-President Nixon's unscheduled and unattributed comments had become headline news: that if the French pulled out of Indo-China the US might have to send in its own troops.

Whether or not then, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff internal history put it, Dulles had begun to prepare the American people and world opinion for possible US intervention in Indo-China and whether or not these were contingent plans the question was certainly wide open when Dulles arrived at Paris to be told that nothing could save the situation at Dien Bien Phu except perhaps massive US air-strikes. Bidault waved aside the idea of a defence coalition: the French would regard it simply as a device to keep them fighting whereas, if Dien Bien Phu fell, France would want to get out altogether.⁹⁸

As the agony of Dien Bien Phu reached its peak so did France's desperate hopes of US intervention. On 23 April, General Ely said if the US would intervene with 200–300 carrier aircraft he was convinced Dien Bien Phu could be saved: but hours were of the utmost importance and in three or four days such intervention would be meaningless. That afternoon, in the middle of a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Bidault gave Dulles Navarre's signal to Laniel. The situation at Dien Bien Phu was desperate. The only alternatives were Operation Vulture – a massive attack by B29s – or a request for a ceasefire.⁹⁹ Dulles described Bidault as a man close to breaking point, particularly in the afternoon session of the Council, and this may account for Bidault's somewhat offhand assertion that Dulles had asked him whether they would like the US to give them two atomic bombs.¹⁰⁰

Dulles reported to Washington that night Eden's ‘grave doubts’ whether Britain would co-operate in any active fighting to save Indo-China and his fear that US intervention might initiate world war three.¹⁰¹ On 24 April, intervention seemed that much nearer. In the morning Dulles and Robertson, plus Ambassador Heath from Saigon, saw Emperor Bao Dai and received his assurances that, even if the French stopped fighting, Vietnam would fight on, provided their ‘friends’ would help them. On the matter of independence Dulles understood that Vietnam and France had practically reached agreement and so once again, if it was still Congressional approval that was required, the last remaining condition was UK participation. That afternoon Dulles and Admiral Radford, who had now arrived in Paris, did their best to persuade Eden. There appeared, said Dulles, to be no chance of keeping the French fighting in Indo-China unless they knew that the UK and the US were going to be in there with them. Under existing circumstances constitutional restraints made it impossible for the US to respond to the French request for massive air intervention at Dien Bien Phu. However, (and whichever way one looks at it, it was an unequivocal statement):

If the British would go along with us the President was then prepared to seek Congressional approval for intervention by the US with its Armed Forces in Indo-China, but that an essential element in securing such approval would be the fact that it was firmly based on joint action.¹⁰²

Eden asked exactly what it was they had in mind that the British should do. Radford replied: some prompt military contribution. And when Eden asked if this meant troops Radford's response was RAF squadrons from Malaya or Hong Kong where at the moment he understood, and Eden confirmed, there was a British aircraft carrier.

A few minutes later, when they were joined by Bidault, Eden said he wanted to make it quite clear that the UK was not committed by the London communiqué to action in Indo-China: a point on which, according to the UK account, he was supported by Bidault: and Mr Dulles did not dissent. The UK account continued:

Mr Dulles also produced the draft of a letter which he proposed to address to M. Bidault, if it would be thought helpful. The substance of it was that the US government would be prepared, if the French government and their Allies wished, to take the necessary steps to obtain special powers from the President to move armed forces into Indo-China and thus to internationalise the struggle against communism in Indo-China and protect South-East Asia as a whole. There was no reference in this letter to the UK, although Mr Dulles had said more than once in our earlier conversations that if the UK was not prepared to take part he didn't think a majority would be found in Congress to give the President his special powers.

M. Bidault, after some hesitation, finally said that he was prepared for Mr Dulles to address the letter to him.¹⁰³

It had by then, as Eden said, become very clear that Her Majesty's Government would have to take a decision of the utmost importance. That night Dulles told Laniel that, on two conditions, the US would seek Congressional approval for direct acts of belligerency. First, that the UK would agree to join in the military defence of Indo-China. Second, that the Associated States had achieved real and complete independence: and he added that from what he had heard since he had been in Paris the second condition seemed to have been substantially met and should present no difficulty. As for the UK, he could not foretell their attitude but he was prepared to do everything in his power to make them see the seriousness of the situation and the necessity of joining in the defence of Indo-China. Dulles said he realized the effect the fall of Dien Bien Phu would have on French and Vietnamese morale, but he hoped it could be countered ‘by the formation of an alliance that would bring to France's aid within the next few weeks the military forces of the US and the UK’. France would have to hold firm and in the meantime Dulles implied that Eden, who said he was ‘undetermined in his own mind’, would respond if the French were to ask for UK help.¹⁰⁴

The UK Cabinet met in emergency session on Sunday 25 April. At six o'clock that morning the US Embassy in Paris had received a message from Bidault which said that French military experts confirmed that a massive intervention of US aviation would still be able to save the garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

It is also the opinion of our command that the Vietminh has effected for the attack of the fortress an exceptional concentration of forces and material engaging there the essential of his battle corps. This accumulation of means accomplished for the first time by the Vietminh provides an occasion which will likely not be found again to destroy by air action a large part of the enemy forces. Finally taking place when the rainy season begins, this action could interrupt the supply of the Vietminh under conditions that would put in danger the remainder of its forces. It is not excluded that the situation presently difficult be thus transformed into perhaps a decisive blow against the Vietminh.¹⁰⁵

This message, with its desperate hope of victory at the eleventh hour, was matched in London by another, equally urgent, which the French Ambassador handed to Eden at the end of the first of the day's emergency Cabinet meetings. It was, mysteriously, based on a verbal and unattributed message on behalf of the US government to the French Ambassador in Washington suggesting an immediate declaration of common will on the part of the US, UK, France, Philippines and the Associated States, the eventual use of military means, and on an all-out effort on the part of the French government to persuade the British government to join in.

They (the French government) had been informed that, once he was assured that the UK government would associate themselves with such a declaration, President Eisenhower would be prepared to seek Congressional approval for military intervention in Indo-China, and that it was possible that US naval aircraft might be able to launch an attack by 28 April on the forces now besieging Dien Bien Phu. M. Massigli had strongly urged that the UK government should at once indicate their willingness to join in making a declaration on the lines proposed.¹⁰⁶

This alarming message precipitated a second emergency Cabinet meeting in London at the end of which ‘The Prime Minister said that what we were being asked to do was in effect aid in misleading Congress into approving a military operation which would itself be ineffective and might well bring the world to the verge of a major war. He had no doubt that this request must be rejected’.¹⁰⁷ Flying that afternoon to Geneva for the beginning of the conference Eden was unexpectedly met at Orly airport by Bidault who said he thought Dien Bien Phu could be held for a little while longer if help were in prospect: which was why the French government were asking for an air strike that Admiral Radford had told them would be of the order of 450 tons per sortie.¹⁰⁸ When Eden arrived at Geneva Dulles produced what may have been the source of Massigli's mysterious reference the day before. It was a telegram of Bedell Smith's conversation with Bonnet in Washington. It said ‘The President could obtain authority to take action in Indo-China only on the basis of a joint Allied declaration. He [Bedell Smith?] hoped that a declaration could be obtained’. But now it was obvious, at least in the UK record, that there was an almost hopeless divergence in UK and US assessments and attitudes. According to Eden the US Government thought there was no reason why the Vietnamese, with proper training and support, could not effectively match the Vietminh.¹⁰⁹ And Dulles apparently made it quite clear at an off-the-record press conference that the US would intervene in the Indo-China fighting if HMG would do the same, to which message Eden added: ‘I am beginning to think Americans are quite ready to supplant French and see themselves in the role of liberators of Vietnamese patriotism and expulsors or redeemers of communist insurgence in Indo-China. If so, they are in for a painful awakening.’¹¹⁰

As the Indo-China part of the Geneva Conference was about to begin another major effort was made by the US to secure UK approval for military intervention. This time it was Admiral Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who did his best to convince his UK opposite numbers and, eventually, the Prime Minister himself. Radford's authority, as well as his position, is sometimes called in question – the impression of a rather punch-drunk Admiral who came out fighting whenever he heard the bell, not even representing the Joint Chiefs over intervention in Indo-China, someone who really should not be taken too seriously. In which case what should one make of his London proposals – and the authority he had to make them? From the account Radford gave of his meeting with the UK Chiefs of Staff on 26 April he seems to have found them very narrow-minded, both in regard to UK interests in the Far East as well as in Europe, minimizing ‘our collective strength’ while maximizing the risks and potential requirements. According to the UK record he asked for immediate intervention coupled with rapid formation of a coalition as the only way to prevent complete French collapse; and while he agreed intervention would involve not only air support but the build up of substantial land forces he said he did not see that the latter would be provided by the US. Instead, the greater part would come from Asian countries ‘who had plenty of manpower’. He did not think there was much chance of active Chinese intervention but in any case, as he thought the USSR and the communist bloc were going to get relatively stronger, ‘it was in our interests to take a risk now’.¹¹¹

That night, at dinner with Churchill, Radford returned to the attack and portrayed the awful consequences of the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the failure of the US and the UK to take appropriate action.

This was the critical moment at which to make a stand against China and he did not think that the Russians, who were frightened of war, would go openly to the aid of the Chinese. The situation would however be much worse in five years and indeed every day that passed meant a proportionate gain for the communist powers at our expense. He said that if we co-operated over this the US would be willing to help us in other spheres and that he thought that there would be no difficulty in revoking the present American policy of aloofness with regard to our difficulties in Egypt.¹¹²

Churchill's response was to contrast the difficulty in influencing the British people by what happened in the distant jungles of Southeast Asia with the knowledge that there was a powerful US airbase in East Anglia and that war with China, who would invoke the Sino-Russian pact, might mean an assault by hydrogen bombs on these islands. According to Radford ‘the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to the loss of India to the Empire … since the British people were willing to let India go, they would not be interested in holding Indo-China for France’. We could not, said Churchill, commit ourselves at this moment, when all these matters were about to be discussed at Geneva, to a policy which might lead by slow stages to catastrophe. No doubt, as far as Radford was concerned, it was a faint-hearted reply but on the British side one can understand how Radford gave the impression that the time had come for a showdown with China. Presumably this was not part of his remit. At the same time, his was not exactly a free-fall descent on Churchill and the UK Chiefs of Staff. It was, in fact, Eisenhower himself who had told Radford to stop over in Britain ‘to consult with the British Staff and to ask them baldly why they would prefer to fight after they have lost two hundred thousand French’.¹¹³ This might, of course, have been an academic question, and Radford might have been too enthusiastic in the way in which he put his case, but unless it was intended as a masterpiece of deception one must assume that intervention was still a live issue and that Britain had not yet managed to kill it off.

THE CASE FOR INTERVENTION

The issue was still very much alive in the National Security Council, too, even if, after the event, one may judge from the respective weight of the principal opponents that it was a no-contest. In a long and furious meeting on 29 April the unlikely challenge to US policy, which so far had meant, in effect (and because of executive conditions) non-intervention, was mounted by the Director of the Foreign Operations Administration, Harold Stassen.

Opening the meeting the CIA Director, Allen Dulles, said that everyone was getting a little panicky about Dien Bien Phu and what might happen when it fell; and with the understanding with the British having come unstuck Bedell Smith told the NSC that the US had gone to Geneva with less of an agreed position and common understanding with its allies than it had entered any previous international conference. Most of the blame was put on the UK. Dulles, reporting from Geneva, described their attitude as one of increasing weakness, badly frightened by the fear of atomic attack, while Nixon, unwilling, as he put it, to let Britain have a veto on America's freedom of action, described the close tie-up with them as a painful liability. Presumably it was a similar lack of moral fibre which had caused Australia and New Zealand to have second thoughts about Dulles' united action scheme – Eisenhower talked about an Australian ‘collapse’ – and if one may see this as the last hope of ‘respectable’ intervention it might indeed, as Stassen said, have been the moment for the Council to make its ultimate decision. If the French folded, he said, and even if the British refused to go along with us, the US should intervene alone in what he called the southern areas of Indo-China. It was the time and the place to take our stand.

There followed a remarkable debate.¹¹⁴ Confronting the President in effect with the implications of Republican policy in particular and ideas of containment in general Stassen said that if he made clear that direct intervention was needed to save Southeast Asia from communism, Congress and the US people would support the Commander-in-Chief. This, of course, is something that one can never know but what one can see is that where united action foundered on the rock (or was perhaps wrecked on the shifting sands) of UK objection so the momentum that might have carried America in alone failed to carry the President with it. In themselves, some of the close-quarter arguments were finely balanced. There was a danger, said Eisenhower, of replacing French with US colonialism. No, said Stassen, the obvious fact that the Vietnamese did not trust the French was no reason to argue that they did not trust us. If the US went in alone, said Eisenhower, it would mean a general war with China and perhaps with the USSR. Not if the US held the southern areas said Stassen, and did not attempt to roll back the Vietminh too far (he said ‘beyond’ but presumably meant up to the Chinese border). Ultimately, it seems to have been the weight of Eisenhower's experience and his all-round perception that carried the day against unilateral intervention. Presenting communism as if it were some global guerrilla movement that was trying everywhere to involve the US in indecisive engagements which would ultimately sap its strength, Eisenhower said that he was frightened to death of the prospect of US divisions scattered all over the world and now it was suggested that they should put six more into Indo-China. If that happened there would have to be general mobilization and, extending his argument, instead of becoming involved in brushfire wars ‘in Burma, Afghanistan and God knows where’ Eisenhower asked whether the right decision was not to launch a world war instead.

The apocalyptic choice was obviously unthinkable and so also, it seems, was the requirement of general mobilization to sustain intervention with US ground forces. It was precisely this term that had to be avoided. People, said Eisenhower, were frightened, and if they and Congress were to be won over to an understanding of their stake in Southeast Asia there should be no talk of ground forces. Which, presumably, left the possibilities of air and naval intervention open and here again, in spite of Nixon's support for the idea of US air-strikes because of the effect ‘on the climate of free-world public opinion’ and Bedell Smith's, who thought they would help the French to continue fighting, what is remarkable is that it seems to be on Eisenhower's authority that action was deferred.

As a professional soldier and former Supreme Allied Commander, the President obviously carried the heaviest guns in any dispute over intervention. For whatever reason Admiral Radford apparently chose not to speak in this debate so the interventionist case on this occasion rested on Stassen, Nixon and Bedell Smith. From earlier debates the Treasury and, variably, the Department of Defense emerged as critics of unilateral intervention and although it appeared, on 25 April, that Dulles was absolutely opposed, too, the representation of his views in the NSC meeting suggested that he had swung round to a more equivocal position while below him in the State Department, Bedell Smith, Robertson, Gullion and Bonsai, Ambassador Heath in Saigon and Ambassador Dillon in Paris, were all in favour of some sort of intervention. Had he, then, given the lead before Dien Bien Phu fell, one feels there was hardly anyone in the NSC who would not have followed Eisenhower over the precipice. As it was the US avoided all intervention because it looked as if the minor commitment (air and naval support) was likely to entail a major (US troops) and because the US was reluctant to join a war from which the French might decide to withdraw. For both countries war was an option but it remained an individual rather than an allied option and while ‘victory’ might have served the interests of both it would have been almost as difficult to define as to achieve. Intervention at that time, before the first Vietnam war was over, would therefore have involved the US in an entangling and uncertain alliance with France. It might still be necessary to strengthen French resolve so that she did not compromise vital interests at Geneva but as the US had chosen to define the retention of all Indo-China as vital to her interests, and as this was unlikely to be achieved at Geneva, it remained to be seen whether the commitment would lead to a different form of intervention or whether the definition itself would be changed.

For the moment, the US committed itself to continue its efforts to organize a regional grouping to defend Southeast Asia without waiting for the UK or for any developments at Geneva. When it was agreed that this meant communist efforts ‘by any means’ to gain control of countries in the area it was, if anything, expanding the range of circumstances in which it would be involved. Nor can there be much doubt that the US meant what it said about its vital interest in Southeast Asia and that it was also prepared to use any means to defend it even if, at this stage, it was apparently not prepared to tell ‘proposed associates in regional grouping’ that it might decide to use ‘new weapons’ on intervention for fear that it would frighten them off. Certainly this question was raised at the NSC Planning Board – the meeting which also considered lending the French an atomic bomb or two – and according to Vice-President Nixon ‘I said that whatever was decided about using the bomb, I did not think it was necessary to mention it to our allies before we got them to agree on united action.’¹¹⁵

NO ACCEPTABLE SETTLEMENT

With time running out at Dien Bien Phu, and after what Eden described as a ‘prolonged, and at moments somewhat heated, onslaught upon our attitude’ by the US delegation at Geneva on 1 May 1954, Dulles went home just before the fall of Dien Bien Phu provided a stunning overture to the beginning of the Indo-China discussions at Geneva. On 7 May, after appalling casualties on both sides and with equally appalling casualties among their POWs yet to come, the last French defenders were overwhelmed and the battle was ended. Even if one only takes them as a back bearing, US fury and contempt for Britain reveal the depth of frustration. From Geneva the US delegation had reported that Britain was weak, scared, timid, badly frightened.¹¹⁶ Dulles, reporting to the President, said the British, and particularly Churchill, were scared to death by what Dulles called the spectre of nuclear bombs in the hands of the USSR and although Eden had never said a word in defence of the US at Geneva he had had the gall to come to the airport to say good-bye.¹¹⁷ With the fall of Dien Bien Phu the prospect of united action had faded, if only for the time being, and the French had now to be persuaded not to make a settlement of which the US disapproved. As there was, prima facie, no settlement in view which would not mean some loss of territory to communist control there was, by the same token, no possibility of an acceptable settlement. Thus, even though the US would be present at the negotiations, it would be essentially in the role of an associated power with no responsibility for upholding an agreement nor even for securing one in the first place. United action had so far failed on both levels, operational and prophylactic, and this would have enormous consequences for the diplomatic settlement. It had meant that the US was not accepted in the role of ally, in which it had offered itself, and that because there had been no engagement of her fighting forces to activate even a de facto alliance, there was thus no necessity on France's part or that of the other possible ally, Britain, to accept US objectives either. As much as anything it was the rift between America and Britain which helps to explain the disarray at Geneva. Dulles had, in effect, needed someone to sign his shotgun permit; and Eden had refused. Whether or not Dulles intended to use the gun, the fact that he had a permit, which could then be used as a threat, might have secured a better arrangement at Geneva but the question that would still have had to be answered was whether the arrangement would have stood by itself or whether it would need to be guaranteed and, if so, by whom. In spite of some further alarms and sombre contingency plans, Vietnam itself was moving into a situation of neither war nor peace; and, as the circumstances seemed somewhat less propitious for intervention, the indicator of US policy flickered for the moment towards that end of the Clausewitz continuum where peace was a continuation of policy with rather less of the other means.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. US Ambassador Heath in Saigon was immediately on guard against ‘possible Asian attempts to produce Asian Munich’ and said that ‘for obvious reasons’ the government-owned news service in Saigon had excised that item from its daily bulletin. FRUS, 1952–4, Vol. XIII, p. 13.

2. FRUS, 1952–4, Vol. XII. p. 9.

3. Ibid. p. 65.

4. Ibid. p. 62.

5. Ibid. p. 192.

6. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 32.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid. p. 119.

9. Ibid. p. 123.

10. Ibid. p. 114.

11. Ibid. p. 116.

12. Ibid. p. 129.

13. Ibid. p. 167.

14. The French in Indo-China said (and were reported to Washington) that Bao Dai must be about the wealthiest man in the world. $4Vi m. a year from government plus $¾ m. per month as rake-off from Cholon gambling. Vietnamese President Tarn offered a charmingly ingenuous excuse for his Emperor: his hunting and fishing expeditions were an attempt to forget the ‘moral distress’ he must feel over his extravagant way of life. FRUS. Vol. XIII, p. 281.

15. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 157.

16. FRUS, Vol. XII, p. 127–34. It is preceded by a note of the deliberations which produced it.

17. Ibid. Vol. XII, p. 132.

18. See Nitze's idea of ‘An Interpretive Minute’. Department of State-Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, 16 July. FRUS, Vol. XII, p. 150.

19. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 287–98.

20. Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, p. 519 quoted in FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 298–9.

21. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 316.

22. Steven E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, Vol. II The President (New York 1984), Chapter 9.

23. Pentagon Papers (Gravel) (Boston 1971), Vol. I, p. 427.

24. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 385.

25. Ibid. p. 516.

26. Ibid. p. 403.

27. Ibid. p. 382.

28. Ibid. p. 427.

29. Ibid. p. 417.

30. Ibid. p. 430.

31. Spector, op. cit. p. 170.

32. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 433.

33. Ibid. p. 435.

34. Ibid. p. 456.

35. He also claimed that Ho Chi Minh was ‘now not an important figure and it made little practical difference whether he was alive or dead’. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 458.

36. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 458.

37. Ibid. p. 474.

38. Ibid. p. 480.

39. Ibid. p. 502.

40. Ibid. p. 485.

41. Ibid. p. 544.

42. Ibid. p. 557.

43. Navarre got off to a rather unfortunate start by telling McClintock, the American chargé, that the only parallels in military history for Vietnam which came to mind were the French campaign in Mexico and Napoleon's Peninsular wars. McClintock noted ‘General refrained however, from drawing historical inferences’. (FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 604).

44. Spector, op. cit. p. 175. Irvine also describes the Navarre Plan as ‘American-inspired’, op. cit. p. 106. Navarre himself does not. Henri Navarre, Agonie de L'Indochine (Paris 1956).

45. United States – Vietnam Relations, Book 9, p. 69.

46. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 643. Pleven added: ‘We hope you can help me for after me comes Mendès France.’

47. Ibid. p. 649.

48. Ibid. p. 650.

49. Ibid. pp. 712–13.

50. Ibid. pp. 714–17.

51. Ibid. p. 553.

52. The US Government and the Vietnam War, prepared for the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate by the Congressional Research Service. Library of Congress (Washington 1984). Hereinafter cited as Gibbons.

53. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 553 (footnote).

54. Ibid. p. 785.

55. This is the persuasive argument advanced by Glenn H. Snyder ‘The “New Look” of 1953’ who points out that for planning purposes in the New Look anything larger than small brush fire wars or border incidents were to be considered ‘nuclear’. W. R. Schilling, et al. Strategy, Politics and Defense Budgets (New York 1962).

56. For example Navarre's own account, op. cit. Bernard Fall, Hell In A Very Small Place (London 1967), and Jules Roy, The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, (London 1965).

57. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 801.

58. There are some interesting comparisons in Steven Ambrose, Ike's Spies (Garden City 1981).

59. An account of the Bermuda conference is given in FRUS, 1953, Vol. V.

60. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 929.

61. Ibid. pp. 1183–6.

62. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 150.

63. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 939–40.

64. Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vol. VI, p. 22. Speaking of Indo-China Dulles allowed himself a surprisingly imperialist sentiment. He was a great believer in the general idea of giving independence but ‘I am not sure that these people are qualified to be fully independent’. And he thought it had yet to be proven whether independence given prematurely to Indonesia was the proper thing, p. 23.

65. Pentagon Papers (Gravel), p. 89.

66. Ibid.

67. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 951.

68. Ibid. pp. 944–5.

69. Ibid. p. 937.

70. Gibbons, op. cit. pp. 157–8.

71. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1014.

72. For this last point see FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1271. Another possibility was that an atomic bomb could be ‘loaned’ to France to drop on Vietminh troop concentrations in reserve behind Dien Bien Phu although this prompted further questions in the NSC Planning Board whether the French were capable of doing it, operationally or politically. ‘Loan’ was a curious expression to use – one wonders how it would have been repaid – and as part of the domestication process one notes that the Planning Board ignored the Confucian precept about the naming of names and the string of misfortunes that would follow ‘if terms be incorrect’.

73. These examples, from the ‘Non-intervention’ thesis, are taken from Professor Stephen E. Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower, Vol. II, The President, Ch. 7.

74. Gibbons, op. cit. p. 168.

75. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1141.

76. Ibid. p. 1167.

77. Ibid. p. 1150.

78. Excerpts from this speech may be found in Cameron, op. cit. pp. 1231–6.

79. I was particularly indebted to Professor George Herring for a rough draft of the article which subsequently appeared as George C. Herring and Richard H. Immerman: ‘Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dien Bien Phu: “The Day We Didn't Go To War” Revisited’. Journal of American History, Vol. 71, no. 2, Sept. 1984. There is another detailed account of the crisis in Gibbons, op. cit. Chs 3 and 4 as well as acerbic observations in Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston 1973).

80. John Foster Dulles papers. White House memoranda. Meetings with the President, 1954, (4). Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.

81. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1217.

82. Ibid. p. 1226.

83. Ibid. p. 1239.

84. Ibid. p. 1305.

85. Ibid. p. 1270.

86. Ibid. p. 1244.

87. Ibid. p. 1256.

88. Ibid.

89 Ibid. p. 1202. Whereas, according to Dulles, ‘We clearly understood from Bidault at Berlin that our agreement to discuss Indo-China at Geneva was on condition France would not agree to any arrangement which would directly or indirectly result turn over area to communists’. Assuming this to be true it is hard to see what the basis of any negotiation would have been.

90. FO 371 112049 1071/121 Makins to FO April 3, 1954, Public Record Office, cf. FRUS.

91. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1314.

92. The State Paper of 5 May 1820 contained another appropriate observation: ‘In this Alliance as in all other human Arrangements, nothing is more likely to impair or even to destroy its real utility, than any attempt to push its duties and obligations beyond the Sphere which its Conception and understood Principles will warrant’.

93. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1311.

94. Ibid. p. 1321.

95. The French Ambassador in London had told the Foreign Office, according to the US Ambassador, that when Dulles had dinner with Churchill and Eden assurances had been given that Britain was willing to join in a military contribution in Indo-China. Eden denied that either he or the Prime Minister had said anything of the kind. FO 371 1071/302. Memo FO 15 April.

96. FRUS, Vol. XVI, p. 514.

97. Eden, Full Circle, p. 98.

98. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1361–2.

99. Ibid. p. 1374.

100. Georges Bidault, Resistance (London 1967), p. 196. In subsequent attempts to discover whether or not this offer was ever made, de Margerie who, to begin with, had seemed quite convinced that it had thereupon backed down almost completely and said it was obvious there had been a complete misunderstanding on Bidault's part. Dulles' implicit disavowal may be regarded as absolute honesty or a certain economy of truth. He did admit, however, that in the restricted NATO meeting that day he said American policy on the use of atomic weapons was that ‘Such weapons must now be treated as in fact having become conventional’. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1927–34.

101. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 75.

102. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1387.

103. CAB 129/68 pp. 164–74. Eden took the unusual step of enclosing a ten-page narrative ‘Discussions on the situation in South-East Asia – March 29 to May 22, 1954’ in the Cabinet Minutes.

104. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1395.

105. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1401.

106. CAB 129/68 C(54) 155, 27 April 1954, p. 5.

107. Ibid.

108. FO 371 112055, p. 308.

109. Ibid. p. 309.

110. Ibid. p. 319.

111. Ibid. p. 344.

112. FO 371 112057, p. 350. Sir John Colville's elegant memorandum of the conversation.

113. FRUS, Vol. XIII, p. 1382.

114. The memorandum of this NSC discussion is in FRUS Vol. XIII, pp. 1431–45.

115. The minute of the Planning Board discussion on 29 April is given in Vol. XIII, pp. 1446–8. Vice-President Nixon's account of the meeting is in his Memoirs (London 1978), p. 154.

116. FRUS, 1952–4, Vol. XVI, p. 619.

117. FRUS, Vol. XIII, pp. 1467–8. The fact that Eden was photographed with him seemed to have annoyed Dulles even more.