Embers of War (58 page)

During lunch with Dillon on June 17, Mendès France elaborated his vision for a political resolution of the war, and his fears for what a stay-the-course policy would bring. France, he began, should guarantee immediate and full independence to the Indochinese states and should set a definite time schedule for the withdrawal of French forces. Together with the Indochinese states, France would then propose an armistice to Ho Chi Minh, subject to nationwide elections for a constituent assembly to establish a constitution for a free and independent Vietnam. The Communists would undoubtedly be the leading entity in that parliament, Mendès France acknowledged, and their subsequent actions would be impossible to know in advance, but those were risks worth taking. Moscow and Beijing, meanwhile, were benefiting from the continuation of the war, since it had the effect of weakening the West; this was added reason to bring it to a swift resolution. The Frenchman concluded with a warning: The only alternative to a policy of the type he had outlined was a political catastrophe in Indochina within the next year.
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One wonders: Would it all have been different had he won the vote and become premier? Would he have sought to terminate the war in short order? Probably yes and yes. With hindsight’s advantage—and arguably even in the context of the time—it’s hard to argue against his claim that the French negotiating position was more favorable in spring 1953 than it would likely be a year thence. Few doubted the depth of his conviction that the war was having a devastating impact on France’s financial, diplomatic, and military health. Then again, just what Mendès France would have done as prime minister in 1953—and when he would have done it—is not easy to gauge. To the surprise of many, in his investiture speech he had suddenly turned vague on the war, saying merely that the war was a “crushing burden, which is sapping the strength of France,” and promising a “precise plan” in due course.

This ambiguity, some analysts speculated, may have cost Mendès France the necessary votes; it may also have signified uncertainty in his mind about the proper course of action on Indochina. It would be no simple task to bring an end to a long and costly war, he perhaps realized; nor would it be easy to go against the new American administration’s aggressive advocacy. Eisenhower had made it unambiguously clear: France had to stay in the fight. Whatever the case, Mendès France had missed his best chance to date to take the reins of power and somehow ease the “crushing burden.” In late June, Joseph Laniel, a wealthy, rumpled, and little-known Independent from Normandy with vague foreign policy views, became prime minister, ending a thirty-six-day political crisis. It was the nineteenth French government in the past seven years. Pierre Mendès France was left to ponder what might have been and hope for another chance.

CHAPTER 15
NAVARRE’S AMERICAN PLAN

O
N INDOCHINA MATTERS, THE NEW FRENCH LEADER JOSEPH LANIEL
would rely heavily on Georges Bidault, who narrowly failed to become prime minister himself and who stayed on as foreign minister. Bidault’s personal stake in a successful outcome in Indochina went deeper than anyone else’s, since he had been right there at the center when the crucial early moves were made, first as foreign minister in de Gaulle’s Provisional Government in 1944–45, then as president in the summer and fall of 1946. As foreign minister and then prime minister again in 1947–50, he had been uncompromising on the war—in the parlance of the later American war, a hawk among hawks—and he did not waver as defense minister in 1951–52. It’s a remarkable thing, in view of the dizzying turnover of governments in the Fourth Republic, that Bidault was seemingly always there, putting his stamp on the policy, pushing forward, ruling out compromise. This was Bidault’s war if it was anyone’s.

Lately, though, the true believer had begun entertaining doubts, though he kept them mostly private. Still suspicious of negotiations, he felt pressure from the likes of former prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Edgar Faure to seek an early end to the war. Both men supported the proposed European Defense Community and were prepared to offer full and complete independence to the Indochinese states and leave them to their fates. France would then be free to concentrate on European issues, which ultimately mattered much more. Easy for them to say, Bidault thought; they weren’t responsible for policy, at least not as he was. (Reynaud was now minister for the Associated States.) Well aware that French options on Indochina ranged from poor to worse, and that the Eisenhower team was pushing hard—harder than its predecessor—for a more forceful prosecution of the war, he and Laniel moved cautiously at first, avoiding any commitment to direct diplomatic overtures to Ho Chi Minh and affirming their faith in the new commander in chief, Henri Navarre.

Navarre’s very lack of experience in Indochina was an asset, Paris leaders insisted. He could approach the issue, they told skeptical Americans, with “an absence of prejudice.” A veteran of both world wars and a graduate of Saint-Cyr, Navarre had also spent several years in pacification campaigns in Syria and Morocco and was considered an expert on intelligence matters. When U.S. forces landed in southern France in 1944, Navarre joined them. Later he led an armored regiment in de Lattre’s Armée Rhin et Danube. Seven times he was cited for bravery, and he received the Croix de Guerre. Cold and effete in personality, trim and elegant in appearance, Navarre was reputed to have a brilliant analytical mind, and he sought at all times to project an air of authority; in one author’s words, “He seemed to have both knowledge and truth, even when he was in doubt.”
¹
Navarre had not coveted the Indochina appointment, and he made a halfhearted effort to turn it down; once on the scene, however, he threw himself into his task with courage and dedication, ignoring as best he could grumbling from the French officer corps that he was an “arm-chair general” who didn’t know Indochina and whose senior appointments had all been in staff and intelligence work.
²

His task, he knew, was enormous: to lead a war theater larger than metropolitan France, located more than 8,500 miles from home, with a fighting force—approaching half a million men, including the VNA—as large as most combat armies of World War II.
³
Using that force, he had to salvage the war effort, turn things around, and justify the immense sacrifices the Expeditionary Corps had already made—to date, the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.
⁴

Publicly, Navarre exuded confidence from the start, insisting before all comers that victory would come in due course. “We will take the offensive,” the old cavalryman declared. “We shall give back to our troops the mobility and aggressiveness they have sometimes lacked.” If the Associated States applied themselves, he said on another occasion, “
la victoire est certaine
.”
⁵

This bullishness put Navarre somewhat at odds with his primary mission in Indochina, which was not to destroy the Viet Minh or win an outright victory but merely to create the conditions for an “honorable” exit from the struggle.
⁶
Nor did it align with some of the reports he received upon arriving in Saigon, such as the one from a Saint-Cyr classmate who greeted him by saying, “Henri, old boy, what have you come to this shithole for? I’m clearing out.” Raoul Salan, the outgoing commander, likewise gave him a grim assessment of the prospects in the fighting—General Giap, Salan warned, was organizing his big units effectively and giving them a European character—but Navarre shook it off. Later, he spoke to his staff with macho swagger: “Victory is a woman who gives herself to those who know how to take her.”
⁷

The remark may help explain why Navarre formed a close working relationship with General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, a gruff, cigar-chomping American officer prone to his own rhetorical bluster who had been sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assess French strategy in the war and to dispel any idea of seeking an early diplomatic settlement with Ho Chi Minh. O’Daniel, a veteran of both world wars and Korea, where he had been a corps commander, now served as commander of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, based at Pearl Harbor. He arrived in Saigon on June 20, 1953, one month after Navarre had assumed command.

Initially, the two men did not see eye to eye. In several early sessions, O’Daniel pressed Navarre—or “Navarrie,” as he insisted on calling him—for a plan to win the war, and each time the Frenchman insisted he could not comply. It was for the Paris leadership to make policy, he said; his job as theater commander was merely to execute the mission set for him by the government. Currently, that mission involved maintaining a position of strength from which negotiations could be undertaken at some point in the future. The emphasis would be on holding existing territory and avoiding high-risk operations, of securing, in the first instance, a
coup nul
(a tied game). Frustrated, O’Daniel asked his own subordinates in Bangkok to draw up a plan, one building on the Letourneau Plan from earlier in the spring but offering a speeded-up timetable: There would be immediate small operations and raids followed by a large-scale offensive in September. Rear-area units in static defensive positions would be consolidated into
groupes mobiles
, and the VNA would be trained and equipped at an accelerated pace and given expanded responsibilities in the field. Reinforcements would be sought from France, including officers who would be used as cadres to build up the VNA. As in the Letourneau Plan, a final offensive in 1955 would destroy the enemy’s
masse de maneuvre
and force him to sue for peace.
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French sources do not support this contention that the “Navarre Plan” was entirely American in conception and structure; they see the French commander as shaping the basic contours on his own. But there is no doubt that U.S. pressure for a more vigorous application of military power lay behind the scheme. That’s clear from the documentary record, and Navarre himself would later lament the degree to which Washington’s influence dictated French policy.
⁹
Whatever his exact role in the planning, Navarre pronounced himself pleased with the particulars, and O’Daniel returned triumphantly to Washington, confident he had a road map for victory in Vietnam. He claimed to detect an “increased aggressiveness in attitude” on the part of the French High Command and a greater openness to American ideas and recommendations. Navarre, he enthused, possessed “a new aggressive psychology to the war” and seemed determined “to see this war through to success at an early date.”
¹⁰

Others were doubtful, believing that O’Daniel’s close personal rapport with Navarre caused him to exaggerate by a considerable margin the French commander’s commitment to offensive action. The raw numbers remained a problem: Even though Navarre had a basic numerical superiority in terms of men under arms, for offensive operations he could muster the equivalent of only about three combat divisions as against the enemy’s six, due to the French commitment to provide all major cities and hundreds of villages and posts with an increasingly flimsy measure of security.
¹¹
These U.S. skeptics also found little to cheer in French counterinsurgency efforts, whether through the oil-spot method (occupying a central point in a given area and pushing outward from it) or the opposing “gridding” (
quadrillage
) approach, whereby one divided a territory into grids and occupied progressively the outside areas and worked
inward
. Both methods required a degree of manpower saturation that the French simply did not have available in Vietnam.

But the bigger problem, as far as some American analysts were concerned, was the growing evidence of disillusion in Paris. On July 3, Laniel pledged publicly that France would “perfect” the independence of the Indochinese states. Washington officials took this as a positive step—recall that Eisenhower had pressed for such a pledge in the spring—but only if it did not signal an intention to bug out of Indochina entirely. Laniel, they noted, had given scant evidence that he intended to fight the war vigorously come the end of the monsoon season. As always, Americans had a hard time grasping the crux of the problem: While granting full independence to Vietnam might be necessary to undermine Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist appeal, it also risked making the war irrelevant to French interests.

Nor did Bidault offer more assurances during three days of talks in Washington in July. In the first session, a lengthy affair at Dulles’s Georgetown home, he bluntly remarked that French public opinion had turned against the war and that there was broad support in the Assembly for direct talks with Ho Chi Minh. Talk of peace in Korea had a contagious effect in France, and as a result Paris would be forced to seek an early end to the war, by negotiations if necessary. Dulles countered that in Korea the United States had fought her way to a strong bargaining position and that France needed to do the same; only after the military outlook improved should she enter talks with Ho. Bidault nodded in seeming agreement but offered no assurances, beyond the murky promise that France would “liquidate the war with honor.”
¹²

Privately, most French leaders had given up entirely on the idea of victory but were unwilling to admit it to the Americans. Former prime minister René Mayer was blunt: “It seems evident that among French businessmen and civil servants who know Indochina well, nobody believes any more that it is possible to beat the Viet Minh militarily. Nevertheless, in order to induce Washington to grant France sizable direct assistance, the notion has been propagated that additional efforts might yield decisive results.”
¹³