Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (9 page)

Congress was the president’s first target. On April 3 he had Dulles and Radford try to sell the idea to a congressional delegation that included Senators William Knowland and Lyndon Johnson and Congressmen Joseph Martin and John McCormack.

Eisenhower was not asking for an immediate air strike. He was more cautious than that. What he wanted to know was whether the delegation would give him the discretionary authority to use American forces if a Vietminh victory at Dienbienphu would lead to the fall of Indochina. The legislators were skeptical. They worried about what would happen if the bombing failed. Would ground troops be committed? They also were concerned about Washington’s taking unilateral action. Why not coordinate an international effort to save Dienbienphu? The legislators did have one unequivocal answer for Ike: no more Koreas, where the United States had supplied 90 percent of the combat troops. John F. Kennedy added on the floor of the Senate: “No amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of the people' which at the same time has the support of the people”

The debate in the administration and the reservations within Congress persuaded Eisenhower that American intervention would have to be contingent on securing cooperation from other North Atlantic Treaty Organization powers, and getting France to make plans for granting independence for its Indochinese colonies. That was going to take some time, time Dienbienphu did not have. Convinced that Operation Vulture was the only way of saving Dienbienphu, the French asked Eisenhower for an immediate air strike, leaving the question of joint allied military operations for later discussions. He summarily rejected the request, chastising Radford for misleading the French but agreeing to explore the possibility of subsequent American intervention if European allies would cooperate. Eisenhower asked Dulles to go to Europe and secure NATO support. Dulles set out to achieve what he called “United Action”

Dulles and Eisenhower made an odd couple. Compared to the warm, friendly president, the secretary of state seemed cold and distant. In fact, compared to almost anyone Dulles was cold and distant. The nation called Eisenhower “Ike,” but no one called Dulles “Jack” The historian Townsend Hoopes describes Dulles as a “solid tree trunk of a man gnarled and durable . . . a rectangular brow and aquiline nose, a thin and drooping mouth, a strong jaw, the whole creating an effect of ultimate seriousness and at the same time of ultimate plainness” Proud of the history of foreign service in his family—a grandfather as secretary of state for Benjamin Harrison and an uncle in the same position for Woodrow Wilson—Dulles had been part of the Versailles peace mission in 1919, a Wall Street lawyer with clients across the globe, a delegate to the United Nations, and a lifelong student of foreign relations. As Eisenhower told reporters, there is “only one man I know who has seen
more
of the world and talked with more people and
knows
more than Dulles does—and that’s me” Dulles, described as a “card carrying Christian,” equated communism with all the sins of atheism. Once on hearing Jiang Jieshi and Syngman Rhee spoken of in unflattering terms, Dulles responded heatedly, “No matter what you say about them, those two gentlemen are modern-day equivalents of the founders of the church. They are Christian gentlemen who have suffered for their faith”

Travel was as much a part of John Foster Dulles’s life as diplomacy and breathing. He used airplanes as other men used cabs. Now he began a dizzying round of shuttle diplomacy, traveling back and forth between Europe and the United States trying to line up allies. Back home the president tried to drum up public support for intervention, using the domino theory in an April 7 press conference: “You have a row of dominoes set up and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly . . . . The loss of Indochina will cause the fall of Southeast Asia like a set of dominoes” But while Eisenhower and Dulles were trying to line up the allies, General Ridgway torpedoed the idea. He was furious with Radford. Ridgway was convinced that Ike would not use atomic weapons; in 1945 he had advised Truman against employing them on the Japanese. Ridgway was right. At a meeting of the National Security Council in late April, when the issue came up again, the president finally interrupted a discussion with a frustrated outburst: “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God!” Ridgway also believed that conventional air strikes would not lift the siege. Intervention with ground troops would be inevitable. In a memo to President Eisenhower, Ridgway shared his misgivings: “How deep was the water over the bar at Saigon? What are the harbor and dock facilities? Where could we store the . . . supplies we would need? How good was the road network—how could supplies be transported as the fighting forces moved inland, and in what tonnages? What of the climate? The rainfall? What tropical diseases would attack the combat soldier?” Eisenhower understood. The next day Dulles informed Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador to the United States, that American intervention might not be forthcoming.

Operation Vulture and the larger proposal for United Action were compromised also by French intransigence. During the discussions with the French, Eisenhower became more and more frustrated. He complained that the French “want us to come in as junior partners and provide materials, etc., while they themselves retain authority in that region” In the previous months they had balked at the notion of United Action, fearing that French power would be subordinated in a multinational force. Nor were the French willing even to talk of independence for Vietnam. That, too, bothered Eisenhower, who wrote to a friend that France had employed “weasel words in promising independence . . . and through this reason … have suffered reverses that have been inexcusable” The French would not even cooperate with the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, an American mission sent to Vietnam in 1950 to coordinate United States economic and military aid. France wanted American money, not American advice.

Britain as well doomed United Action. The British thought Ho Chi Minh was a highly independent communist who would not let the Chinese, any more than the French, take over his country. When Dulles predicted the apocalypse if Dienbienphu fell, the British calmly replied that the United States was viewing the situation through ideological blinders. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden predicted that India, Burma, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan would survive even if Ho Chi Minh took over Vietnam. Dulles left London empty-handed on April 14. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was relieved to see Dulles go. In his judgment, “Dulles is the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet around with him”

Everything also went wrong at Dienbienphu. Navarre’s plans to increase the size of the Vietnamese National Army failed miserably. The government of Bao Dai sent 94,000 draft orders late in 1953, but only 5,400 new soldiers reported for duty. The Vietnamese National Army never exceeded the 115,000 level, and by early 1954 the desertion rate reached nearly 4,000 men a month. In a country where nationalism, communist and noncommunist, ran very deep, the French plan to develop a highly effective army of colonial troops was incredibly naive. The idea of turning the war over to the Vietnamese was no closer to reality in 1954 than it had been in 1951 when General de Lattre created the Vietnamese National Army. Monsoon rains immobilized French tanks in the heavy mud and prevented resupply from Hanoi. French troops rationed food and water. The shovels Vietminh soldiers carried into Dienbienphu were as useful as their rifles. They dug trenches and tunnels. Twenty-four hours a day, day after day, antlike, tens of thousands of Vietminh extended the trenches, inching their way toward the French outpost, steadily reducing the French perimeter, eliminating the stretches of open space the French had relied on. By the end of April, the Viet-minh outnumbered the French ten to one, and the French perimeter, which once had a circumference of fifteen miles, was reduced to a thousand-yard square.

As Vo Nguyen Giap closed the circle on Dienbienphu, the Geneva Conference convened in Switzerland. Conflicts of interest and personality abounded. John Foster Dulles did not want to be there at all and was committed to making sure that the Geneva Accords resulting from the conference did “not give one inch of territory to the Communists” At Geneva he behaved badly, “like a puritan in a house of ill repute,” according to his biographer. Pham Van Dong, representing the Viet-minh, wanted a complete political settlement leading to the withdrawal of French forces and establishment of a new, independent government under Ho Chi Minh. France only wanted a military ceasefire. Georges Bidault, who headed the French delegation, recognized that the fall of Dienbienphu would banish the French from the north, but he hoped to regroup in Cochin China and maintain the empire. Laos and Cambodia sided with Bidault. They were already dealing with internal communist rebellions and assumed that French withdrawal, combined with a Viet-minh triumph, would destroy the French Union and condemn Indochina to communism. Zhou Enlai and the Chinese wanted to partition Vietnam. They did not want a united Vietnam—French or Vietnamese—to the south. The Soviet Union was conciliatory. Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 had removed the most militant voice in Moscow, and the new Soviet chieftains did not want a confrontation with the United States, not over a faraway place like Indochina. Only they and the British, represented by Anthony Eden as foreign secretary, came to Geneva without a firm political agenda. The two emerged as the leaders of the conference.

The various delegations spent their first two weeks at Geneva on other questions before turning their attention to Indochina. On May 6, just when the talks began, Vo Nguyen Giap attacked the French fortress, hitting it with new Soviet Katyusha field rockets, which the French dubbed “Stalin’s organs” because of their roar, and sending thousands of Vietminh out of the trenches, through the exploding shells, and into the base. On the afternoon of May 7, after bitter, hand-to-hand combat, Vietminh entered the French headquarters and struck the flag. In a final radio message, Castries cried: “Our resistance is going to be overwhelmed. The Viets are within a few meters of the radio transmitter where I am speaking. I have given orders to carry out maximum destruction. We will not surrender. We will fight to the end. . . . Long live France!” The Vietminh seized Castries moments later, along with more than 10,000 of his comrades. The French prisoners spent the next ten weeks in horrible prison camps before their repatriation began on July 20.

Vo Nguyen Giap’s troops had sustained 22,900 casualties, 7,900 killed and 15,000 wounded, while the French buried 2,080 dead and treated 5,613 wounded. But Giap was the victor. He regrouped his four divisions at Dienbienphu and marched them east toward the Red River Delta and Hanoi. Certain that a general French defeat was near, General Navarre rearranged his troops in the Red River Delta and placed them around Hanoi and along Highways 5 and 18 between Hanoi and Haiphong, the last escape route out of Tonkin.

The defeat toppled the French government. Prime Minister Joseph Laniel resigned on June 12 and Pierre Mendes-France, a radical socialist, became prime minister. He stunned the French Chamber of Deputies announcing, “I promise to resign if, one month from now, on July 20, I have failed to obtain a cease-fire in Indochina” Mendes-France was committed to ending the war that had brought only humiliation to his country.

The Eisenhower administration realized that a settlement in Geneva was inevitable and that the communists would gain part of Indochina. On June 24 Dulles told congressional leaders that the United States would have to look beyond Geneva and try to salvage something in Southeast Asia. In particular, he talked of assuming the responsibility for making sure that not another domino fell in Indochina. In order to “keep freedom alive,” Dulles worked for a NATO-like regional alliance system in Southeast Asia. Nobody was farsighted enough to recognize that the United States was setting itself up for another Asian land war.

Mendes-France’s promise and the change in the American position breathed new life into the Geneva talks. Anthony Eden began assuming a central role in the conference, as did Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet representative. Along with Zhou Enlai, they persuaded Pham Van Dong and the Vietminh to accept a temporary partitioning of Vietnam to be followed by reunification elections. The French and the Vietminh hotly debated the question of where to divide Vietnam and when to hold the elections. Bidault wanted the dividing line as far north and the elections as far into the future as possible. Pham Van Dong wanted the dividing line as far south and the elections as soon as possible. Unlike Dienbien-phu, this battle went to the French. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel into North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The accords imposed a ceasefire and provided for the withdrawal of French forces from North Vietnam and Vietminh forces from South Vietnam within the next three hundred days. Both the French and the Vietminh were to withdraw their troops from Laos and Cambodia. The accords provided for free elections in 1956, with the goal of reunifying the two Vietnams. An International Control Commission composed of representatives from India, Canada, and Poland was established to monitor compliance with the accords.

Ho’s acquiescence in the partitioning of his country caught many Vietminh offguard. The victory at Dienbienphu should have let them dictate the diplomatic settlement at Geneva and secure outright independence. Ho Chi Minh, however, still hoped to work out a rapprochement with the United States, to restore some of the trust he had enjoyed during World War II. That the United States had granted the Philippines independence without a fight in 1946 left Ho with the conviction that many Americans must have been sympathetic with the aspirations of colonial peoples. He was also convinced that in 1956 he would win the election handily and see his country reunited without more bloodshed.