Embers of War (53 page)

Known as
Le Chinois
and
Le Mandarin
for his extensive service in the Far East and for his love of Indochinese artifacts and customs—or because of his fondness for smoking opium, which, it was believed, made your skin turn yellow—Salan was elegant, courteous, and reserved; he had about him an air of mystery. As de Gaulle said of him, “there was something slippery and inscrutable in the character of this capable, clever, and in some respects beguiling figure.” Others commented on the mournful, distant quality to his eyes, or his habit of speaking to reporters while caressing his talisman, a small carved ivory elephant. A tactician more than a strategist, Salan was content in his early weeks to order minor sweeps within the Red River Delta but otherwise to allow things to remain as they were. He looked forward to the rains to give him a period in which to plan, equip, and prepare.
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Vo Nguyen Giap likewise was content to lie low after Hoa Binh. He kept up guerrilla activity inside the northern delta, and Viet Minh units remained active in various areas of the center and the south of Vietnam. Terrorist attacks continued, none more brazen than one in late July on a group of French officers and their families at Cap St. Jacques, a resort town of palms and black sandy beaches at the mouth of the Saigon River. During dinner, while white-clad waiters served the main course, a group of Viet Minh soldiers in stolen Expeditionary Corps uniforms rushed in and hurled grenades and emptied Sten guns into the crowded room. When French soldiers arrived on the scene, they found eight officers, six children, two women, and four Vietnamese servants dead, along with twenty-three wounded. Only a lieutenant who played dead and a small boy who hid behind a chair remained unhurt.
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The Viet Minh commander’s main concern was the coming fall campaign. Having suffered bloody failures in the delta, he looked for more favorable terrain. He had his eye on the Tai highlands, an almost inaccessible area of mountain gorges, grass-cloaked plateaus, and dense jungle in northwestern Tonkin along the border with Laos. Although far from the delta, these uplands, covering an area the size of Vermont, were dotted with small French posts, and the Viet Minh had thus far failed to generate support for their cause among the roughly three hundred thousand Tai tribal inhabitants. Large-scale operations in this region could plant the necessary infrastructure for political action and moreover would force Salan to choose between abandoning the frontier and exposing northern Laos, or defending it. It would be an agonizing choice for the French, Giap knew: If Salan accepted battle in the northwest, he would draw crucial resources away from the delta to fight in an area desperately short of airfields and passable roads for his motorized troops.
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Giap’s Chinese advisers helped shape his planning for the Northwest Campaign. It could hardly be otherwise, given China’s crucial role in the military effort. Beijing’s military aid to the Viet Minh in 1952 increased over the previous year and included some 40,000 rifles, 4,000 submachine guns, 450 mortars, 120 recoilless guns, 45–50 antiaircraft guns, and 30–35 field guns, along with millions of rounds of ammunition and tens of thousands of grenades. The Chinese Military Assistance Group (CMAG), meanwhile, continued to assist Viet Minh generals in the field and to train Viet Minh NCOs and officers at centers in Yunnan province. It all added up to powerful Chinese influence. In early 1952, CMAG officials advocated a major autumn offensive in the northwest, and top Beijing leaders concurred. “It is very important to liberate Laos,” said Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao’s principal lieutenants.
²⁰

In September, following the Lao Dong Politburo’s decision to formally approve the Northwest Campaign, Ho Chi Minh secretly visited Beijing. He and Mao agreed on a two-stage strategy, whereby Viet Minh forces would focus first on the border region and the “liberation” of Laos, then on moving southward to increase pressure on the Red River Delta. They further agreed that the operation would begin with an attack on the Nghia Lo ridge, a watershed between the Red and Black rivers, along which the French had several small garrisons. Clearing this area would put the Viet Minh a giant step closer to the Laotian border to the west. Whether Giap had objections to this initial concentration is not clear—certainly he too saw Nghia Lo’s importance—but he went along with it.
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That same month Giap concentrated the 308th, 312th, and 316th Divisions (at least thirty thousand men) on the east bank of the Red River, between Phu Tho and Yen Bai. The French did not yet know it, but his mission was to take Nghia Lo. As in previous operations, the troops had moved mostly by night and—in view of the French mastery of the air—had put tremendous emphasis on camouflage. In addition to wearing palm-leaf helmets with camouflage nets on them, Viet Minh soldiers carried disks of wire netting on their backs, adorned with the foliage of the terrain through which they passed. When the terrain changed, each soldier had the responsibility of changing the camouflage of the man directly ahead of him. The result: French air reconnaissance failed to pick up more than vague signs of activity. Occasionally, a small group of men advancing single file through the high grass would be identified by French pilots, but by the time the plane made a second sweep, they would be gone, swallowed up by the surrounding foliage. “I just
know
the little bastards are somewhere around here,” said one reconnaissance pilot, in a standard gripe. “But go and find them in that mess.”
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Still, French commanders had the uneasy feeling that something was afoot. The rainy season was ending, and Giap was certain to move. But where? Intelligence reports suggested it would be somewhere west of the Red River, but both the strength and direction of his thrust remained frustratingly unclear. That is, until October 15, when a regiment of the 312th Division surrounded the small French garrison at Gia Hoi, twenty-five miles southeast of Nghia Lo. The French command saw the danger to the posts along the ridgeline and on the following day dropped Major Marcel Bigeard’s Sixth Colonial Parachute Battalion into Tu Le, located roughly at the midpoint between Gia Hoi and Nghia Lo. Its mission was to cover the retreat of French forces to forts on the west bank of the Black River.

The following day, October 17, at five
P.M.
, two regiments of the 308th Division attacked Nghia Lo with heavy mortar support. Within an hour, the post fell, as thick cloud cover kept French aircraft away. Sporadic fighting continued through the night, but by sunlight the result was clear: The French had lost seven hundred men, as well as the anchor of their ridgeline. The entire line now collapsed, as other, smaller posts on either side of it gave way or were abandoned. Covered by the Sixth Parachute Battalion, which fought a furious rearguard action, each French detachment fled for the safety of the Black River forts. Most units made it and were lucky that Giap’s logistical difficulties kept him from pressing home his advantage. Low on ammunition and rice, his troops exhausted, he bypassed the fortified French posts and instead sent a force to the northwest, toward the small French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. (It would be overrun in November.)
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As for the paratroop battalion, it was given up for lost. Miraculously, though, some members, including Bigeard, survived and were much celebrated when they straggled back behind French lines. They had started out carrying their wounded on bamboo stretchers, but when the litter carriers had grown too exhausted, the wounded were left to their fate. Pro-French partisans who followed the trail of the battalion and its pursuers reported seeing it lined at intervals with the severed heads of paratroopers on bamboo stakes.
²⁴

In Paris, while the press fumed, Defense Minister René Pleven acknowledged before the National Assembly that the fall of Nghia Lo was “painful for our prestige,” but he insisted that neither France’s “means to fight” nor her “ability to maneuver” had been lost.
²⁵
Not lost, perhaps, but severely impaired. For the French High Command, the result was reminiscent of the border defeats of October 1950, even if this time the French human and territorial losses were lower. A dispirited French reserve officer summed up the feeling of many: “It looks as though from now on the Indo-Chinese war is to be a permanent nightmare.”
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In order to reclaim the initiative, or at least divert the Viet Minh from the Black River, Salan launched an offensive along the line of the Red and Clear rivers, northwest of Hanoi. By attacking the enemy base areas around Phu Tho, Phu Doan, and Tuyen Quang, he hoped to cut Giap’s lines of supply and communication and destroy his stores, and thereby compel him to draw back from the Tai highlands. Operation Lorraine, launched on October 29, was the largest offensive France ever attempted in Vietnam, involving some thirty thousand men and as many planes, tanks, and artillery as could be scraped together from around the delta. The operation began well, as the French quickly seized Phu Doan and Phu Yen Binh and found sizable stocks of weapons and ammunition. (They also found proof of Soviet aid, in the form of four Molotova trucks and several Russian-made antiaircraft guns.) But Giap refused to engage. He did not turn his main force back from the Tai country, instead sending mostly regional units to harass the road-bound French. He was convinced that the French would be hampered by their long supply lines, and that Salan would be forced to order a withdrawal.
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He was right. On November 14, the French commander, realizing that his salient was too narrow to hold, called a halt to Lorraine. The withdrawal was a precarious operation—as withdrawals typically are—for the Viet Minh now sensed an opportunity. Salan had to rely on his greater speed to carry out the retreat, but he was utterly dependent on a single road, the RC2, parts of which ran through forested country and dangerous defiles vulnerable to ambush. Sure enough, on the seventeenth, a Viet Minh regiment sprang a major ambush on
groupes mobiles
1 and 4 at the Chan Munong Pass. The column was trapped all day and suffered three hundred casualties. Further fighting ensued at various points along the road, until the column finally hacked its way back into the delta. Operation Lorraine was a miserable failure, costing some 1,200 Expeditionary Corps casualties altogether and failing to draw Giap into major combat. What’s more, the Viet Minh commander had taken advantage of the French diversion of resources to the operation to increase infiltration behind the De Lattre Line.
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IV

AN EXULTANT GIAP ARTICULATED WHAT HE IMAGINED TO BE SALAN’S
frustrations: “In such a war, where is the front?” He answered himself by quoting Pascal: “
L’ennemi est partout et nulle part
” (“The enemy is everywhere and nowhere”).
²⁹

That was indeed the feeling of the French Union commanders and the soldiers who fought under them. In the Tai highlands, as in so much of Vietnam, the terrain and vegetation gave the Viet Minh the choice of seeking or refusing combat, of quickly dispersing when danger arose and reassembling later. Masters of night movement and champions of concealment, they seemingly could spring on the French units at any time, in any place. It wasn’t true, of course—the highlands area was a vast expanse, and Giap’s forces occupied only a tiny fraction at any one time—but the basic uncertainty about the enemy’s precise whereabouts (radio intercepts provided general locations) was extremely stressful to Salan’s men. That the local tribal population here was much less pro–Viet Minh than elsewhere in Tonkin provided little comfort, for the locals hardly seemed all that pro-French either.

The terrain caused other problems for the Expeditionary Corps. There were few clear landmarks, and maps of the region were approximate, making navigation difficult at best. Usable roads were essentially nonexistent, and French units often found themselves wielding machetes to cut paths through the thick forest vegetation. In the valleys, the bamboo slowed movement, as did the tall elephant grass on the ridges. Although mules were sometimes available for heavy weapons and radios, troops generally had to lug their own food, water, and ammunition. Shortages abounded, not least with respect to rations.

“We lived on rubbish—fish heads and rice,” recalled one legionnaire. “We were parachuted in some food once, and we could see that the tins had been painted over. A friend got a hold of a tin and made a hole in it with his bayonet. A sort of green mist flew out. [I] scraped off this painted layer … [underneath] it said in French, ‘For Arab troops, 1928.’ ” Some patrols operating in the hills could go weeks without seeing their supplies replenished, during which time they had to worry not merely about the Viet Minh but about countless other enemies as well. There were the fearsome tigers of lore, often heard if not often encountered, and poisonous snakes and scorpions. Stinging insects of various kinds were a constant menace, as were bloodsucking leeches and burrowing ticks. And there were rats, big and savage, that could find their way even into a jungle fort’s bunkhouse to bite through a sleeping soldier’s boot into his foot. This is what the helplessly wounded and abandoned French soldier most dreaded: not that enemy troops would find him, but that he would be set upon by the rats.
³⁰

Or if not the rats, the ants. “If you were really wounded badly,” the legionnaire observed, “there was an old German saying, ‘Magen Schuss, Kopf Schuss—ist Spritzer’ (Belly shot, head shot—it’s an overdose job). They’d give you a shot of morphine—that was your lot.… We had these collapsible ampoules and we used to stick them in a chap’s cheek. You gave them an overdose if they’d got their legs blown off—you’re 300km from anywhere—what are you going to do? The chap would be covered in ants in a moment.”
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