Japanese troops enter Saigon, 1941.
The revving engines of the cargo planes lined up on the airfield and taxiways were deafening. Across from them were rows and rows of tough-looking paratroopers in their camouflaged uniforms, waiting for the green light. Their faces were a mixture of apprehension, fear and excitement. For most this was not their first jump, but you just never knew what would happen when you hit a drop zone. There is a universal military saying that the plan never survives contact with the enemy. Once lumbering into the sky, each aircraft was packed with eighteen sweating men and all their combat kit, ready for the jump.
The men of the Viet Minh 148th Regiment were on exercise when they were alerted by the steady drone of engines overhead. Something big was about to happen. Their first thought was that bombs were about to fall, obliterating everything in their path. Even worse, it might be the terrible furnace-like fireballs created by exploding napalm. Instead, thousands of parachutes began to billow in the blue sky. They looked like the annual flower blossoms floating in the Perfume river that flows through the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue. Each flower, though, carried a deadly speck beneath it, an enemy soldier, a French soldier. Soon there was the sporadic sound of gun fire. The outnumbered Viet Minh were forced to withdraw – round one to the French.
This is the story of imperial hubris and a place called Dien Bien Phu. It was a village of no great consequence located in a valley in northwestern Vietnam, not far from the border with Laos. Thanks to the Nam Youm (Nam Rom) River, the broad and very flat flood plain surrounded by jungle-covered hills is very verdant. In this valley, the French convinced themselves they could triumph once and for all over Vietnam’s communist nationalists.
This is also the story of France’s generals: de Gaulle, Leclerc, de Lattre, Salan, Navarre and Cogny, who were committed to maintaining the ideal of the French Union at any cost. They were involved in a long and brutal war in French colonial Indochina that resulted in such a decisive battle that it led to the international humiliation of France and heralded the end of the French Union. It also sowed the deadly seeds of the subsequent Vietnam War.
French Indochina consisted of five separate kingdoms: Tonkin (northern Vietnam), Annam (central Vietnam), Cochinchina (southern Vietnam), Laos and Cambodia, that had been fused together as part of the vast French empire. It was the Japanese occupation of part of northern Indochina in 1940 that precipitated America’s entry into the Second World War the following year. However, the Japanese did not occupy all of Indochina until early 1945, by which time the war was coming to a close. It was the resumption of French colonial rule by force that sparked the First Indochina War, which culminated in France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
This colonial conflict was fought against the backdrop of the Cold War, an almost forgotten postscript to the Second World War. From 1945 until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, ideological and military tensions between East and West regularly threatened to drag the world into another catastrophic global conflict. This was narrowly avoided on numerous occasions, thanks only to the spectre of nuclear war. Instead, the Cold War became a series of widespread proxy conflicts that often had little to do with the initial armed stand-off in Europe.
Japanese troops enter Saigon, 1941.
Europe was in economic and political chaos after 1945 – the far left spearheaded by the communists and socialists thought it was their time to overturn the established order. However, the international community was so alarmed by such a prospect, especially in light of the perceived threat from the victorious Soviet Union, that it moved to contain communism wherever it should appear. For France, the Cold War actually commenced in the summer of 1944 when Charles de Gaulle’s Free French moved to head off French communists taking power in France’s major cities as the defeated Germans withdrew.
At the end of the Second World War in Eastern Europe, Stalin wanted to give mother Russia even greater strategic depth. Never again would Germany be permitted to launch a surprise attack. The Red Army stayed put in its new-found allies. An iron curtain was drawn across Europe and Germany, divided as the new frontline between East and West. Stalin permitted the charade of elections, but the outcome was the same: an armed Soviet bloc was created, hostile to the capitalist Western powers. When communist leaders Tito and Hoxha took power in Yugoslavia and Albania respectively, Britain intervened to save neighbouring Greece from communism as the country slipped into civil war.
Around the rest of the world, communism and nationalism became a heady mixture, no more so than in French Indochina. The catalyst for the expansion of the Cold War beyond Europe was the triumph of communism in China. The victorious Mao Zedong saw Burma, Korea, Malaya, Tibet and Vietnam as fertile ground for the spread of communist ideology. He gambled that with the support of Stalin, the Western powers, weakened by war, would never oppose his march into Asia. As a result, France found itself involved in a much wider conflict, in a type of warfare it was ill-equipped to fight. What followed was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. French imperial pride brought the communist world crashing down around it with far-reaching ramifications for America, China and the Soviet Union.