Embers of War (33 page)

Already in 1945, in a remarkable report he titled “Note sur la crise morale franco-indochinoise,” Mus emphasized the profound sense of patriotism and national identity animating the Vietnamese. This moral fervor, he plainly implied, was as deep as that felt by Frenchmen living under the yoke of the Nazi occupation, and it had moved Vietnamese to resist foreign occupation throughout their history. “In short, what the Vietnamese have preserved, through all the vicissitudes of their history, is a community of blood, of language, of sentiment,” Mus wrote. “One can say that this is their essential milieu and one from which the Annamite never willingly distances himself for any length of time. For anyone who is familiar with this people, the background to this state of things, the model that is more or less unconscious, yet a concrete manifestation of this communitarian ideal, is the village. This is the form in which the Annamite lives as a social being, and the basis of his patriotism.”
⁵

For Mus, it was no longer possible by war’s end to hold easy assumptions concerning the French Empire and its legitimacy. How, he wondered, could one justify a colonial system that placed some men above others, particularly when those others resisted it? More specifically, how could one support a French effort to reclaim control over Indochina—by force if necessary—in view of the nationalist fervor sweeping the land? The questions gnawed at Mus’s sensibility. Though he was not yet prepared to advocate an immediate and unilateral French withdrawal from Indochina, he began to imagine a new, postcolonial order, in which all men would have to be seen as equals, in which the Vietnamese demand for independence would be met.

By early 1947, when Mus agreed to become Bollaert’s political adviser, he hoped there might yet be time to avert an all-out war. But even before he set out for Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters in the second week of May—as in March 1945, he traveled on foot, this time some forty miles over narrow paths and through Viet Minh–controlled territory—that hope must have been largely dashed, in view of the talking points he had been given. He was to inform Ho that France would agree to a cease-fire if the Viet Minh laid down their weapons, allowed French troops to circulate freely in areas they presently held, and arranged for the handover of numerous Foreign Legion deserters.

Mus had ample time to contemplate these terms on his trek and also to decide how he should begin the encounter. He opted to greet Ho with a simple “
Comment allez-vous?
” (How are you?) and to see how the Viet Minh leader answered. At three
A.M
. on May 12, he was brought into Ho Chi Minh’s presence and offered his greeting. “
Suffisament bien
” (Well enough) came the reply, which Mus thought was hardly the word choice of a man inclined to bow to a French ultimatum. Sure enough, as Mus laid out the specifics of the French proposal, he could see he was getting nowhere. “In the French Union there is no place for cowards,” Ho said after he had finished. “If I accepted these conditions I would be one.” Mus did not disagree. When Ho asked if Mus would accept the terms if the positions were reversed, he could only answer no. And with that, the session ended. The champagne bottle that Ho Chi Minh had set aside in the event of a successful meeting remained unopened, and Mus soon set off on the long walk back to Hanoi. He was despondent but could not help but admire the veteran revolutionary’s unshakable determination. The mission, he later recalled, taught him “more than in thirty years elsewhere about what a people could wish for and accomplish.”
⁶

After Paul Mus’s visit, no non-Communist Westerner is believed to have seen Ho Chi Minh in the jungle until midway through 1954. By then the French war had ended in defeat and Paul Mus had published a classic study of contemporary Vietnam, a dense, convoluted, mesmerizing work titled
Viêt-Nam: sociologie d’une guerre
(1952).
⁷
His stature in Vietnamese studies would be enormous, perhaps unmatched anywhere in the Western world, and he would hold joint professorial appointments at the Collège de France and Yale University (alternating semesters between the two institutions). But long before that, indeed already now in the spring of 1947, Mus had drawn three major conclusions: that Ho was the undisputed leader of the Viet Minh; that Ho had an almost serene confidence in the Viet Minh’s revolutionary program; and that this program had already accomplished an enormous amount in the countryside through which Mus was passing. French forces might be able to reoccupy these regions, the Frenchman reasoned, but they could never achieve lasting control over them. Why? Because France had already lost the battle that counted most: the battle for the support of the local population. Peasants by the tens of thousands were innocently working their fields by day, then turning into guerrillas after dark, engaging in sabotage and bolstering the fortunes of Viet Minh regular forces. How could France prevail in such a struggle? She could not. Already in 1947, Mus believed that it would be a war for people rather than for territory, and that the Viet Minh would be supreme.
⁸

II

IRONICALLY, MUS FELT MORE CONFIDENCE ON THESE POINTS THAN
did Ho Chi Minh himself. The onetime playwright had shown again that he was a pretty fair actor—but his steely determination in the Frenchman’s presence that night masked deep trepidations about the road ahead. No doubt Mus was right that politics would win out, that people mattered more than territory, and that the revolutionary forces had inherent advantages at the local level, where the mass of Vietnamese lived, that the colonials could never hope to match. But would it be enough? What about the colossal French superiority in military firepower, so transparent in the fighting to this point? To overcome this element, Ho Chi Minh believed he would need political strength of a very different kind. He would need support abroad, in France and among the great powers on the world stage.

Yet here too the enemy was stronger. Ever since 1940, France had shown remarkable diplomatic prowess amid geopolitical weakness, first by maintaining day-to-day sovereignty in Indochina and then, after Japan’s defeat, gaining broad international backing to reclaim full colonial control. Most recently, during the fall crisis and the outbreak of war, she had convinced the great powers to maintain a hands-off posture.

The revolutionary government, by stark contrast, had achieved precious little. It fought alone, militarily and politically, isolated from potential allies in the Communist and non-Communist world. In the late summer of 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, his movement had no substantial contact with the Communist parties in Europe and Moscow or even with Mao Zedong’s forces, then holed up in far-off Yan’an and Manchuria. The situation was much the same two years later. From time to time, the Soviet Union meekly advised Paris against reestablishing old-style colonialism in Indochina and urged the two sides to find “common ground,” but she would go no further. Stalin remained suspicious of Ho Chi Minh’s ideological bona fides—especially following Ho’s tactical decision in late 1945 to dissolve the Indochinese Communist Party—and he was in any event much more interested in Europe, the heart of the emerging Cold War, where he hoped to see the French Communist Party take power and help block American expansion. Stalin needed no convincing by PCF leaders that they had to tread carefully on the Indochinese war, lest they be accused of treason for undermining the army’s efforts to restore
La plus grande France
. Only with the PCF’s expulsion from the ruling coalition in the spring of 1947 did party leaders begin to hum a different tune; but even then they could offer little more than internal party resolutions in favor of early negotiations and the withdrawal of French troops. The Chinese Communists, meanwhile, were too busy fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s government forces in northern China and Manchuria in early 1947 to offer the DRV much tangible support.
⁹

Nor could Ho claim meaningful support from the non-Communist world. Nationalist leaders in India and Southeast Asia offered pledges of moral support, but these affirmations, though welcome, carried little practical import. Hardly anyone in the major world capitals paid attention in January 1947 when Pandit Nehru, then vice president of the self-declared Indian interim government and its minister for external affairs, publicly appealed to France to “revert to peaceful methods in Indo-China.” Fewer still took note of Burmese nationalist leader Aung San’s declaration, also in January, that it was “necessary for all the states of Asia to assist” the Vietnamese in their fight. In London, where officials
did
make note of these pronouncements by two colonial subjects, the response was distinctly cool. The new anticolonial agitation sweeping Asia had to be delicately handled, these planners agreed, and made impossible any large-scale British support for the French war effort. But their bedrock outlook had not changed: Britain still had a strong interest in propping up French rule in Indochina. Quietly, British authorities in Malaya squashed an attempt to organize a volunteer force to fight alongside the Viet Minh, while in India they successfully discouraged the dispatch of a joint Indo-Burmese force.

That left the United States. No nation mattered more in the international arena, in Ho Chi Minh’s eyes; none had more power to thwart French designs and to facilitate a settlement leading to Vietnamese independence. For that matter, his government probably had more anti-colonialist sympathy in American circles than elsewhere, at least among the big players. But sympathy gets you only so far. What matters in the end is active support, and here Washington had offered almost nothing since those heady days in Pac Bo in the summer of 1945, when Americans and Vietnamese seemed to be in full accord, marching together for the cause of Vietnamese independence. Back then Franklin Roosevelt’s anticolonial fervor, and in particular his aversion to any French attempt to reclaim Indochina, still seemed to animate U.S. policy. No longer.

But perhaps there was still hope. The French were plainly still nervous about the depth and extent of America’s support, and maybe with good reason: Americans still seemed to adhere, on some level, to a reflexive egalitarianism in world affairs, to an opposition to imperialism. Perhaps this could be exploited, Ho and his lieutenants believed. In the spring of 1947, while Paul Mus readied to make his trek to Ho’s headquarters, the Viet Minh leader sent his personal envoy, Pham Ngoc Thach, a physician who would later serve as Ho’s personal doctor, to Bangkok to stress to American diplomats stationed there the moderate nature of the Vietnamese revolution and the opportunities that would be available to U.S. investors following independence. Vietnam would not be Communist for decades, Thach assured these men, and even then the government would be a moderate, inclusive, nationally oriented one. Communism in Vietnam, as it had existed since the early 1930s, he even said at one point, “is nothing more than a means of arriving at independence.” And Americans could feel confident about the DRV’s economic program: “The communist ministers … favor the development of capitalist autonomy and call on foreign capital for the reconstruction of the country.” U.S. firms could expect to get special privileges, Thach went on, including tax and other concessions, and American tourists would find postcolonial Vietnam “an ideal place” to visit.
¹⁰

In July, having failed to elicit the desired American response, Thach turned still more pragmatic. “We recognize the world-politics of the U.S. at this time does not permit taking a position against the French,” he now acknowledged. But the Truman administration could nevertheless help by providing economic and cultural assistance to Vietnam, and by endeavoring to mediate the conflict either through tripartite discussions or through having the newly independent Philippines take the Vietnamese case before the United Nations. That same month Ho Chi Minh made a further gesture designed partly to conciliate Americans and other non-Communist observers abroad: He reshuffled his government, replacing three Communist ministers (including Giap as defense minister, though he remained battlefield commander) with non-Communists who supported his policies.
¹¹

The efforts were for naught—once again. What for Ho constituted an urgent need ranked far down on the list of priorities for an American administration confronting a deepening Cold War in Europe. The top foreign policy minds in Washington that summer were focused on winning congressional approval for and then implementing the Marshall Plan (formally the European Recovery Program), a massive loan program designed to help resuscitate the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and thereby check Soviet expansion. France occupied a key place in the plan, and U.S. planners were as disinclined as ever to potentially destabilize French politics by taking an aggressively anticolonial position vis-à-vis Indochina. When Secretary of State George Marshall in July asked Vietnam- and France-based diplomats for an assessment of the DRV, should Paris be compelled to recognize Ho’s government as the legitimate ruling body in Vietnam, he got a range of appraisals. Some argued for taking Pham Ngoc Thach at his word and denied that the DRV was squarely in the Soviet camp. Others maintained just as strongly that Ho Chi Minh was wholly committed to the Kremlin’s cause and could not be trusted.

U.S. policy did not change. There would be no American-led mediation, no congressional aid package, no talks to discuss future trade concessions for American companies. As summer turned into fall, the Truman administration chose to remain where it had been when the fighting began: on the sidelines, torn between a desire to buck up a crucial ally in Europe and a conviction that it must not associate itself closely with that ally’s colonial war. Paris officials, eager as always to head off any American “meddling” on Indochina, breathed a sigh of relief.