So full-scale decolonial war has broken out in Vietnam. I mentioned in Part 1 the three sects in South Vietnam that at the end of WW2 began organising private armies to protect their adherents—the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, the Binh Xuyen.
The Cao Dai were a 5-year-old religious sect with 20,000 followers when in 1926 its two dozen visionaries presented a declaration of their new religion to the colonial authorities. That religion is still today, in three words, strange and colourful. From 1943 their militia collaborated with the Japanese in fighting the French but when the Viet Minh tried to eliminate them they signed a collaboration treaty with France in exchange for arms, training, and subsidies.
The Hoa Hao sect was started by a kind of Buddhist protestant prophet—a performer of miracles, ascetic, philosopher named Huynh Phu So. The French committed him as insane but he converted his own psychiatrist and was released. When the Japanese left, So’s militia fought both the French and the Viet Minh—often tying Viet Minh sympathisers together and throwing them in bundles into rivers. In April 1947 the Viet Minh invited So to a conciliation meeting and on his way there ambushed him and hacked him to pieces—scattered his remains so his followers couldn’t turn them into a point of veneration. Immediately the Hoa Hao signed an agreement with France but with their leader dead they splintered into further warlord sects—who began fighting each other as well as the Viet Minh and the French. So by the summer of 1947 a civil war was being fought inside a nationalist war in southern Vietnam, between the Viet Minh and the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, and between France and the Viet Minh.
Containment.
In July 1947 the American National Security Act legalised covert operations on foreign soil then in September the Central Intelligence Agency came into being—tasked with collecting intelligence, interpreting that ‘intelligence’, and determining American intelligence objectives. In January 1948 the US military government in Japan announced it would rebuild the country’s starving economy rather than exacting reparations from it. Two months later Congress approved the economic aid program known as the Marshall Plan—loaning Western Europe money for imports of machinery, transport equipment, fertiliser and food—so that it too could rebuild itself after the most destructive war in human history. Two weeks after that, in April 1948 came the CIA’s first covert operation on foreign soil: election meddling.
To ensure that Italy’s first post-war election did not go to a coalition of socialists and communists, the CIA delivered cash—half of it captured Nazi money—to Christian Democrat candidates. In June the National Security Council issued a directive calling for covert action against the Soviet Union, and granted the CIA authority to carry out such operations—operations whose existence had to be deniable by the government.
Meanwhile the French tried to transform their colonial war into a civil war by reconstituting the southern quarter of Vietnam as an ‘associated state’ within the Union Française. The new ‘Republic of Vietnam’ was given nominal independence with Bao Dai as head of state, and was to be supported by the French and the Americans—while Ho Chi Minh was backed by the communist insurgency in China. A colonial conflict was invisibly and ineluctably transforming into a global war between ‘freedom’ and ‘communism’.
Then in late August the Soviets exploded their own atomic bomb, which they were able to develop because of communist spies planted in America’s Manhattan Project. In October the Chinese Red Army forced the Chinese Nationalist Party to retreat to Taiwan and China became communist. Arthur Miller wrote that these two events sent America’s moral compass spinning:
The inner coherence of the American world view was quickly infested with phantoms; the only solvent nation in the world was unhinged by fear.
1949 was, Miller said, the year it all fell apart.
In January 1950 the ‘People’s Republic of China’ formally recognised the ‘Democratic Republic of Vietnam’ and two weeks later Moscow recognised Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh as the official rulers of all of Vietnam. Ho visited Moscow in early February, where Mao Zedong promised the military assistance he needed in his struggle against France. Vo Nguyen Giap had already taken from Mao his three-stage process of war: Defence, Equilibrium, General Counter-offensive—which his Viet Minh were following to a tee against France. Now as China’s newly communist troops amassed at their southern border, the Viet Minh could be trained and refitted without interference. They would be undefeatable.
Trying to cultivate an anti-communist leadership, Bao Dai decreed that all non-communist military forces in the country were independent armies within the national army. So the commanders of the sects were made officers in the South’s army, as the French government went on paying them to defend their territories against the Viet Minh. The United States, in turn, recognised Bao Dai’s government of the Republic of Vietnam.
In June of 1950 the Korean War began, with 900,000 South Korean and American soldiers soon facing a million-and-a-half Chinese communists. By September Viet Minh soldiers were as well equipped as French, for they were being supplied with American arms that the Chinese were capturing in Korea. So Giap attacked the chain of French fortresses running alongside the Chinese border on Route Coloniale 4. Surrounded, the French burned their trucks and supplies and 7000 soldiers retreated south through the jungle. Sleepless for four days, they walked up mountains and down ravines—into an ambush. It was precisely what Le Loi had done to the Mongols in the 15th century. As Ho Chi Minh watched from a nearby fortress with a Lucky Strike in hand, only 600 French soldiers escaped. Giap had removed the enemy from their last holdout in the far north, and at a celebratory feast with his Chinese advisors he got drunk for the first time in his life.
Gasoline, Tide, & Opium.
France now considered abandoning Hanoi. Every year in this First Indochina War the number of French officers killed was the equivalent of an entire class at Saint-Cyr, France’s West Point. French soldiers were hardly used in the conflict, mostly Foreign Legion and colonial troops were sent—and at home the conflict was being referred to as la sale guerre, the dirty war for imperialism. Then in December 1950 General Jean de Lattre was appointed both Governor-General of Indochina and Commander in Chief. The finest leader in the French army, de Lattre moved his own wife into the governor-general’s palace as a symbol, he said, that France would ‘never, never leave Hanoi.’
With 190,000 soldiers to fight Giap’s 50,000, de Lattre visited all operational areas, sacked defeatists, declared there would be no more retreats. From the 13th to the 17th of January 1951, he defeated Giap in the Battle of Vinh Yen after inflicting 6000 dead and 8000 wounded. De Lattre commanded the battle personally from its second day, and when Giap threw an entire division at him he called in the largest French airstrike of the war. It used, for the first time, napalm. Invented on Valentine’s Day in 1942 at a secret Harvard war-research laboratory, napalm is effectively jellied gasoline (and can be approximated by mixing gasoline with Tide.) It was being supplied to the French by the United States and at Vinh Yen canisters were pushed out the side doors of Nazi planes captured in Germany and transferred to Indochina. A Viet Minh officer provides an account of its Indochinese debut:
All of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes. Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third planes. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers.
Graham Greene arrived in Saigon on the 25th of January: ‘One lunches and dines behind iron grilles or wire netting.’ Viet Minh suicide bombers were killing sailors and generals alike and cafes in the South’s capital had put up nets to stop grenades from being thrown in. The roads leading to Saigon were guarded by watchtowers at 1-kilometre intervals and all traffic going in and out of the city stopped at 6pm; the Viet Minh, it was said, owned the night. Greene spent the next four winters in Vietnam, reporting on the war and observing the ‘slow approach of inevitable violence.’ There he took up and relished the ritual and calm of opium:
Of those four winters which I passed in Indo-China opium has left the happiest memory.
Here now enters the third sect, the Binh Xuyen. Without a religious foundation, the Binh Xuyen were a nationalist crime syndicate that had started out in river piracy. They served any power that granted them the right to manage Saigon’s brothels, casinos, and opium dens—and had just extorted Bao Dai for the privilege. The raw opium in which they dealt was bought from the Hmong in Northern Laos then flown by French military transport to Saigon, where the Binh Xuyen prepared and distributed it to dens and dealers. By 1954 their illiterate leader will be the richest man in Saigon, selling his surplus opium to Chinese and Corsican gangs and operating the largest brothel in Asia.
Greene was famously a Catholic convert and twice visited the province of Nam Dinh—home to Vietnam’s oldest Christian community (and 600 very surreal churches). In 1951 two bishops in Nam Dinh were the only churchmen outside the Vatican with their own private armies—and both were resisting Viet Minh rule. One had a following of 1700 soldiers, some barracked in his cathedral, where adjoining the priests’ quarters a small factory made mortars and grenade launchers.
In May 1951 Vo Nguyen Giap determined to break the resistance of these armed bishops. On the first day of the counter-operation de Lattre ordered his only child, Bernard, to hold a French fort situated on a crag overlooking Ninh Binh. During the night, Bernard took up a position on the crag’s summit and as Viet Minh troops advanced on the plain below they honed in mortar fire and killed him instantly. De Lattre was shattered. A few days later he flew back to France with the casket containing his only child. When he returned to Hanoi he asked a group of American military attachés:
If this constant sacrificing of our youths’ flower does not prove us sincere in our desire to give Vietnam independence, what further is necessary to drive the point home?
‘We have abandoned all our colonial positions completely,’ he told an American journalist later that year. ‘The work we are doing is for the salvation of the Vietnamese people.’
Becoming Colonialists.
In September de Lattre went to Washington to argue that France needed and deserved to have its risks shared. It was, after all, fighting an enemy that was supported by communist China. In Laos, France was paying loyal guerrilla armies with the proceeds of the opium trade but in Vietnam 30% of their war was already being paid for by the US. America agreed to cover an increasing share of French costs, and woud soon be paying 78% of them—$3 million a day. A French newspaper quipped that the war in Indochina was France’s highest dollar-earning export.
In the autumn of 1951, a 34-year-old congressman from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy—decorated World War II veteran and the son of a billionaire—visited France, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, Korea, and Japan, and French Indochina. It was a seven-week tour intended to bolster his foreign policy credentials before a Senate run the following year. Arriving in Saigon in October with his brother Robert and sister Patricia, Kennedy attended press briefings with the American ambassador and de Lattre, who formally complained to the ambassador after Kennedy asked him why the Vietnamese should be expected to fight to keep their country part of France. (de Lattre also put Graham Greene under surveillance, thinking him a spy.) Kennedy wrote in his trip diary:
We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people because everyone believes that we control the UN. And because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what the emerging nations want. The United States should avoid the path trod by the declining British and French empires and instead show that the enemy is not merely Communism but poverty and want; sickness and disease: and injustice and inequality: all of which are the daily lot of millions of Asians.
Not long after Kennedy left, de Lattre had to return to Paris for cancer treatment. He died in early January 1952, his last words: ‘Où est Bernard?’
The interim French commander François de Linares, spent 1952 constructing ‘protected villages’ in North Vietnam, which he termed agrovilles. They were designed to attract peasants away from their ancestral villages into developed and protected areas where they would be kept safe from the Viet Minh. It was a policy they called ‘pacification by prosperity.’ In January 1953 General Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as President of the United States, with Richard Nixon as his VP. In March an Air Force radio operator who would later go by the name of Johnny Cash received an encrypted transmission saying Josef Stalin was dead. He passed the message to his superiors, who passed it on to Eisenhower. The second-most prolific mass murderer in history was dead. The first-most prolific mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong, will now be increasingly concerned with becoming his successor in world communism.
In April the Viet Minh invaded Laos with the help of its communist Pathet Lao allies. So the Laotian Civil War began, and will continue for 22 years. On May 6th began Operation Squaw, in which a company called Civil Air Transport dropped supplies to besieged French troops in Laos. If you don’t know what Civil Air Transport is, I highly suggest watching the Mel Gibson film that features it. It was an airline bought secretly by the CIA in 1950. By the end of 1953 it will be flying planes with fake French markings to transport French troops for French operations. By 1971 it will be the largest airline in the world, rebranded as ‘Air America’.
Light at the End of the Tunnel.
By May of 1953 six French commanders had come and gone in Vietnam and the seventh, Navarre, now arrived with the task of creating military conditions for an ‘honourable political solution.’ Assuring France that victory was near, he broke off all contact with the enemy and began rebuilding his forces. The French cabinet refused to give him the $300 million that this rebuilding needed, and Eisenhower agreed to do so instead. In July came a ceasefire in Korea. The whole Asian communist war effort was transferred to Indochina as equipment and advisers now flowed even more plentifully to the Viet Minh.
In August the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran—who two years previously had nationalised the country’s oil production—and handed the government to the country’s re-privatising king. In November Ramon Magsaysay was elected President of the Philippines, his candidacy supervised by an American named Edward Lansdale, who was running a covert military operation to defeat the communist insurgency there. To get Magsaysay elected Lansdale created a body called the National Movement for Free Elections—funded by the CIA. Magsaysay’s speeches as a candidate had been written for him by a CIA operative.
That month in Vietnam the French occupied Dien Bien Phu, a valley near the Laotian border stretching eight miles long and five miles wide. Bulldozers were dropped in by parachute to level the ground for a runway and in a matter of weeks the French razed a forest and destroyed a village as they built a fortified camp with which they could guard the road to Luang Prabang. Surrounded by mountains, Dien Bien Phu was extremely vulnerable to attack and difficult to resupply. Navarre’s plan was to use this vulnerability to lure the Viet Minh into attacking him, thus bringing Giap’s forces into open combat. Trenches were dug and barbed wire used in abundance—ten tanks parachuted in pieces then assembled in situ. In September Time magazine had run a cover story on General Navarre, in which one of his aides was quoted as saying:
A year ago none of us could see victory. There wasn’t a prayer. Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of a tunnel.
Dien Bien Phu was to be that light.
At the beginning of 1954, after seven years of fighting, France had spent twice as much on its dirty war than it had received from the Marshall Plan for its own rehabilitation. Bernard Fall was an Austrian Jew who had joined the French Resistance at 16 then gone onto postgraduate studies in Washington. One of his American professors encouraged him to focus on Indochina, and in 1953 he travelled to Vietnam to study the place up close. When a French commander told Bernard Fall that the French controlled most of the Red River Delta—and his Vietnamese friends laughed—Fall decided to study village tax rolls. He found that most of the villages had for years paid no taxes to the government and that those places were also not having teachers assigned to them by the government. In fact all the village chiefs between Hanoi and Haiphong were Viet Minh, whatever they told the French, and Fall concluded that the Viet Minh controlled 70% of the delta—the only part of northern Vietnam which France claimed it was in total control of.
Throughout February, Chinese-captured American long-range artillery was brought across to Dien Bien Phu, hauled up and down mountains by 250,000 civilians—as Giap fell happily into Navarre’s trap. By early March 50,000 Viet Minh soldiers and 200 artillery pieces had surrounded the French. Their assault began on March 13th, with 50 shells a minute pounding the encampment. The airstrip was knocked out in 24 hours; nobody could be evacuated. 11,000 soldiers of the French Empire were under siege as every day wave after wave of suicide bombers and kamikaze soldiers came down from the forested mountains.
As gradually Giap tightened the noose around Dien Bien Phu, the CIA’s secret airline signed a contract with France to put at her disposal 24 pilots and 12 aircraft for the parachuting of supplies to the besieged. At a news conference on April 7th Eisenhower was asked to comment on the importance of Indochina to the free world:
You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.
After a month of what Fall called ‘hell in a very small place’ the use of atomic bombs, probably two, was seriously considered to save Dien Bien Phu—as on April 26th a conference began in Geneva to resolve the problems of postwar Korea—after which Indochina was to be discussed as well. On May 4th Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, left the Geneva Conference before Indochina was turned to when he realised that Ho Chi Minh was going to be given half of Vietnam. He flew home and told his brother Allan, head of the CIA, to start a covert operation in Vietnam—to get rid of Ho Chi Minh and to impose American rule in Southeast Asia. Allan then hired Edward Lansdale to do in Vietnam what he had done in the Philippines.
As Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.—and 35 other American pilots—flew 682 sorties over Dien Bien Phu, two CAT pilots were shot down—the first American deaths in Vietnam. On the 6th of May the Viet Minh for the first time fired on the French with Soviet rockets and the following day, after a siege of eight weeks, the final assault was to begin.
At 4am on the 7th there was a lull in the fighting. With one grenade and a machine gun between his 35 men, Captain Jean Pouget radioed for authorisation to leave his outpost. He was told: ‘You are paratroopers—you are there to die.’ The Viet Minh began playing through the airwaves Le Chant des Partisans, wartime anthem of the French Resistance:
Friend, do you hear the black flight of the crows on our plains?
Friend, do you hear the muffled cries of the country enchained?
Hey, partisans, workers and peasants, this is the alarm,
Tonight the enemy will know the price of blood and tears.
Pouget shot three bullets into his radio to shut it up. Hiding behind a wall of stacked dead bodies, shortly he was knocked out by a Vietnamese grenade and captured:
I had left the Greek Latin Judaeo-Christian world, and passed into the world of the red termites.
25,000 Viet Minh soldiers overran the central garrison of 3,000 and by nightfall on the 7th Dien Bien Phu had fallen. When a few hours later news reached France of the defeat live radio performances were replaced with recordings of Berlioz’s Requiem. 11,000 captured soldiers were marched out to prison camps—twelve miles a day for forty days during the rainy season. One soldier cut off his own gangrenous arm with a knife. Their Death March caused more French losses than any single battle of the whole Indochina War. Only 3,300 would survive imprisonment.
A Pig-headed Psychopath.
The following day, May 8th, the delegates at Geneva turned to the question of Indochina. After a meeting between China’s Premier and Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh agreed to accept partition into ‘temporary regroupment areas.’ Vietnam was to be divided again, into a communist northern half and a non-communist southern half under the leadership of one Ngo Dinh Diem—with a national referendum on reunification mandated for 1956.
Now in Paris, Ngo Dinh Diem had just spent two years in America in self-imposed monastic exile. The Viet Minh had arrested him in 1945 for collaborating with the Japanese and imprisoned him in the mountains in the north. They had buried his older brother alive for the same crime. Diem’s father was the chamberlain and eunuch-keeper mentioned in Part 1 and, six years old when his father refused to serve the French, Diem had since inflated preposterously his own mandarin lineage. The French considered him ‘extremely pig-headed’ but their government resigned after Dien Bien Phu. The new socialist government came to terms with the Viet Minh and the First Indochina War officially ended. The Viet Minh had lost 200,000 men—but now 30,000 of their victorious soldiers entered Hanoi, where Ho once again set up a communist government.
With America’s blessing Bao Dai offered the leadership of South Vietnam to Diem. Bao Dai spoke better French than Vietnamese and was spending most of his time on his tennis game on the French Riviera. He also thought that Diem was a psychopath. Proposed as Prime Minister of Buddhist South Vietnam, Diem was from the north and a Catholic. He was allergic to fish and celibate, and believed that ‘a sacred respect’ was due to the person of the sovereign, ‘the mediator between the people and heaven.’ In June he accepted Bao Dai’s offer on condition he be given both military and civilian control of South Vietnam. So on the 25th a pharaoh flew from Paris to Saigon to take control of a country that didn’t yet exist.
Land Reform began instantly in North Vietnam, and took the form of confiscations from landlords and rich peasants. A Vietnamese Politburo document dated May 4th 1953 said that executions were ‘fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population.’ Ah, you’d forgotten that communist reform always involves executions hadn’t you? This time, as in Russia in 1930, they were to be of so-called ‘landlords’—or—poor peasants who owned slightly more paddy than their neighbours. The stated ratio meant that 15,000 ‘reactionaries and evil landlords’ were to be executed. In fact thousands used Land Reform to pay off old scores and a ratio of 1 execution for every 160 village residents turned out to be the reality. 50,000 executions in the Red River Delta is the figure accepted by historians.
To Choose Freedom.
On July 7th 1954 Diem formed a cabinet of 18 people—overwhelmingly Catholics and his own friends and family, none experienced enough to perform their job. At the outset his power barely stretched beyond the walls of his palace, for roughly a third of South Vietnam, in territory and population, was under the authority of the sects—and the Binh Xuyen controlled Saigon. Nor did he have control over his own budget, for it was supplied by the United States. By the end of July the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission was in position under Edward Lansdale—there to assist the Vietnamese in unconventional warfare and to coach Diem toward popularity and eventual electoral victory over Ho Chi Minh. To achieve those aims he had a blank cheque from the CIA.
With the country now provisionally divided at the 17th parallel, the Geneva Accords allowed a 300-day grace period during which people could move freely between the two Vietnams before the border was sealed. Within a month 200,000 refugees swamped Haiphong to be taken south. The French were unable to transport so many people so the United States Navy joined in and named their action ‘Operation Passage to Freedom.’ With daily trips leaving for Saigon, up to 150,000 people left every month. By the end of the grace period half a million passengers had left on 500 sea trips, the majority on French ships. 4,000 flights carried a further 200,000 refugees south—as 900,000 people left the north, including half its Catholic population.
In October 1954 the French officially handed Hanoi to the communists and Diem installed his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, as his chief political advisor in the south—gave him control of the army’s Special Forces and the new secret police. The Cao Dai now had two million followers and the Hoa Hao 1.5 million—and in early February 1955 Diem was forced by the French secret service to accept some of their leaders into his cabinet. The leaders of neither sect wanted to participate in the already corrupt government, with one Cao Dai general protesting that:
by his errors Diem is leading the country inevitably into communist slavery.
Lansdale used the modern equivalent of 100 million CIA dollars to bribe some of them into cooperating but the French secret service unified the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao with the Binh Xuyen in opposing Diem. The unbribed sect leaders presented Diem with an ultimatum to broaden his government. He refused and they withdrew from his cabinet. After a meeting with two Cao Dai generals, Special Ambassador J. Lawton Collins told John Foster Dulles that negotiating with them was like trying to reason with stubborn four-year-old children. He also concluded to Dulles, and told Diem, that the US had to consider possible alternatives to supporting Diem, as on March 31st the presidential palace was shelled by mortar fire. The south’s battle for control of South Vietnam began.
Lansdale bribed the remaining Cao Dai leaders to back off and reintegrate their forces into the national army. With their help Diem burned the Binh Xuyen’s suburban stronghold to the ground and closed Saigon’s opium dens. In six days of house-to-house fighting the army defeated the Binh Xuyen and their Corsican allies and handed Diem control of the capital’s police force. In May Diem sent his forces against the Hoa Hao miniature kingdoms in the Mekong delta and by June all resistance from the sects had ceased. Diem was in control of South Vietnam and in July announced that Geneva-mandated elections would never take place there At the end of the year he deposed Bao Dai (still living in France) as head of state in a fraudulent referendum for a republic—in which he claimed 98.91% of the vote. After receiving 605,025 votes in Saigon (where 450,000 voters were registered) Diem declared himself the first president of the ‘Republic of Vietnam’.
So 1956 is the first year of Diem’s South Vietnam. It will also be the year in which Elvis Presley takes over American music with—from January through September—Heartbreak Hotel, Don’t Be Cruel, Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes, and Love me Tender. Rock n’ roll arrived as the French left Vietnam, in March—the only force that might have compelled Diem to hold a real election. With the French gone, it was with this Vietnam—still proud, still diverse, still exotic—that America was to become lethally involved.
The Vietnamese had spent 1000 years fighting the Chinese and a century fighting the French. They were now to spend 18 years fighting the latest invader—the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world. . It was to be their next protracted war, their third continuous offensive to topple foreign rule—against an enemy that from Day 1 until Day 6,000 will grossly misunderstand the Ascending Dragon.
This is Part 2 of my History of Vietnam.
Part 3, America in Vietnam, will be taught in October as part of The New Cavalier Reading Society’s History Of The World.
Coming up outside the world of Josh Write Essay…