The End of the First Indochina War

A Global History

James Waite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415886840
• eBook ISBN: 9781136273346
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The French withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954 was the product of global pressures and triggered significant global consequences. By treating the war as an international issue, this book places Indochina at the center of the Cold War in the mid-1950s. Arguing that the Indochina War cannot be understood as a topic of Franco-US relations, but ought to be treated as international history, this volume brings in Vietnamese and other global agents, including New Zealand, Australia, and especially Britain, as well as China and the Soviet Union. Importantly, the book also argues that the successful French withdrawal from Vietnam – a political defeat for the Eisenhower administration – helped to avert outright warfare between the major powers, although with very mixed results for the inhabitants of Vietnam who faced partition and further bloodshed.

The End of the First Indochina War explores the complexities of intra-alliance competition over global strategy – especially between the United States and British Commonwealth – arguing that these rivalries are as important to understanding the Cold War as east-west confrontation. This is the first truly global interpretation of the French defeat in 1954, based on the author's research in five western countries and the latest scholarship from historians of Vietnam, China, and Russia. Readers will find much that is new both in terms of archival revelations and original interpretations.

Part I

Escalation and Negotiation,
March 1953–May 1954

1 “More Important than Korea”

Background to Negotiation

When Dwight Eisenhower took office at the beginning of 1953, he inherited a stalemated war in Korea and a US mission in Indochina, the cost of which had ballooned during the Korean War. The President quickly sought an end to the fighting on the Korean peninsula, but hoped that France could continue to prosecute the conflict in Indochina. Observers estimated that if the US government accepted negotiations in Korea, it could not oppose a similar arrangement in Vietnam. Politically, no French government could afford to ignore any opportunity to end a war that had blighted the Republic since November 1946. The issue of Indochina thus strained relations between France, the British Commonwealth, and the United States. Guided by differing attitudes towards the strategy of containment and usefulness of negotiation with communist states, each of these governments sought to persuade their allies to follow a different course.

After March 1953, the Cold War entered a new, uncertain phase. War still raged in Korea and Indochina. Malaya simmered as a small British force struggled to control the emergency on the peninsula. Filipino soldiers and their American advisors puzzled over the Hukbulahap phenomenon—a persistent communist insurgency in the Philippines. Nationalist and Communist Chinese forces eyed each other’s weaknesses across the Taiwan Straits. In Europe, Berlin remained a powder-keg. The NATO allies agonized over the status of their peculiar new neighbor—West Germany—whose rearmament provoked howls of protest in France. In East Germany, the Soviets helped their proxy government brutally contain a major insurrection. By the summer of 1953, despite a fragile armistice in Korea, the world appeared as dangerous as ever. The appearance of thermonuclear weapons created fresh strategic dilemmas, with considerable political consequences. As far as Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned, only a new era of summitry, and the moderating British influence, could save the world from destruction. The dangers of this new Cold War convinced the seventy-nine-year-old leader that he ought to linger on in office a little longer.¹ As Churchill sputtered on, Joseph Stalin died and a relatively youthful (at sixty-two) President Eisenhower took office in Washington.

The changes of leadership in the United States and Soviet Union, more than any other factor, changed the conduct of the Cold War in 1953. In Moscow, the new leaders hoped for a softening in relations with the west.² Stalin’s reckless support for confrontational policies in Germany and Korea had backfired. Now, the Soviet Union faced the prospect of a unified NATO and rearmed West Germany and Japan.³ Since 1951, the western allies had negotiated the rearmament of West Germany in order to harness that state’s considerable military potential for the purposes of containment. By 1953, the British, French and Americans had agreed upon a European force separate from but complementary to NATO. This European Defense Community (EDC) would comprise French, Benelux, Italian, and West German troops. Hotly opposed by the Soviet government, which faced its own internal power struggle, the EDC had only to pass through the various legislatures of the treaty signatories.⁴

Stalin’s death had not swept all of the old guard aside in Moscow. Vyacheslav Molotov remained Foreign Minister. Georgi Malenkov kept his post as Prime Minister until January 1955. The H-bomb’s advent, however, encouraged Soviet policymakers to reevaluate their methods of waging Cold War, convincing Soviet leaders that they could not survive a confrontation with the US Air Force. For the time being at least, the Soviet leadership favored cautious policies. At Stalin’s funeral Malenkov professed: “there are no contested issues in US-Soviet relations that cannot be resolved by peaceful means.” On the same day, Malenkov, Molotov, and Zhou Enlai discussed how they might end the Korean War. Stalin’s death freed the communist governments to look for new paths out of costly deadlocks.⁵

The Republican policymakers newly installed in the White House did not detect any major change in long-term Soviet objectives. Prudently, however, they left open the possibility that the Kremlin might modify its tactics and for the time being adopt a more peaceable approach to contested areas.⁶ Suspicious of the value of any agreements with the Soviet Union, Eisenhower initially feared “summitry,” which might provoke criticism from the Republican Old Guard. For the Administration’s first two years at least, summits carried the heavy stigma of Yalta—a Democratic disgrace in the eyes of self-respecting Republicans. US policymakers also feared the Soviet practice of turning such forums and peace offensives into propaganda campaigns which might erode solidarity within the western alliance.⁷

Yet Eisenhower and Dulles believed that the US government had to find new ways of waging Cold War. The President rejected containment as too costly and promoted economic solvency as a decisive element in national security. Truman-style containment, as defined by NSC-68, required an unsustainable investment in conventional forces. Eisenhower and Dulles’ answer, the New Look, written down in the document NSC 162/2, aimed to reduce US dependence on conventional military forces and cut defense spending. An increased reliance on nuclear weapons offset cuts in conventional forces. Dulles famously declared that the United States and its allies reserved the right “to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.” This would provide, Dulles declared, “maximum protection at bearable cost.”⁸ The New Look went beyond the simple concept of “more bang for the buck.” Strong alliances, Eisenhower and Dulles hoped, would make the cost of Cold War manageable. NSC 162/2 stated that the United States could “not meet its defense needs, even at exorbitant cost, without the support of its allies.” In an article for Foreign Affairs, Dulles described US alliances as “the cornerstone of security for the free nations.” According to this perspective, France, West Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and others might have to do more. Faced with French opposition to the European Defense Community, Dulles threatened an “agonizing reappraisal” in Europe if the NATO allies did not accept German rearmament.⁹

The New Look, however, eroded allies’ confidence in US-led collective security. By seeking to make the Cold War more affordable at home, Eisenhower ruled out the kind of conventional defense that America’s allies desired in Europe and the Pacific. The Eisenhower Administration’s reliance on nuclear weapons further unsettled Commonwealth and European allies. Australian Minister of External Affairs Richard Casey pondered massive retaliation’s implications in March 1954:

“We may assume that the United States intends that its defence policy be part of a collective policy. Obviously, the United States would need the military assistance of its allies. It seems to me that the United States has failed to make clear, however, that it will consult these allies before making decision that would lead them irrevocably to atomic warfare.”¹⁰

Allies hoped for US leadership and commitments but feared that an unrestrained US policy might lead to a nuclear disaster. They bridled against the Cold War’s basic bipolarity, which imposed their dependence upon the United States and threatened to erode their capacity for independent decision making.

Disagreements over policy towards China soon provoked serious tension within the western alliance. Thirteen days after his inauguration, Eisenhower announced that the US government no longer considered the Taiwan Straits a “neutralized water,” unsettling the Commonwealth governments. Commonwealth policymakers resented the new Administration’s failure to consult its allies over the declaration, as much as it feared conflict over Formosa, which might, through the ANZUS Treaty, have drawn Commonwealth countries into another war.¹¹

Yet there remained some cause for hope. Eisenhower’s stature as a military commander and record of sensitivity towards allies commanded great respect. The President jumped at the opportunity for peace in Korea after Stalin’s death. The Korean War had helped mobilize the western alliance on a global scale; but by July 1953 an armistice and the prospects for improved relations with Communist China was welcome in Europe and the Commonwealth.¹²

French politicians recognized the armistice at Panmunjom as the removal of an obstacle blocking the settlement of their own impasse in Indochina, but also feared that the end of one conflict might free the Chinese government to increase its role in Vietnam and Laos.¹³ France’s war in Vietnam and Laos also offered a potential crucible for allied cooperation. Domino logic, British policymakers hoped, would unite Commonwealth and American containment policies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Initially, the French predicament in Vietnam appeared as a tonic for allied relations over containment in Asia. Foreign Office officials advised their New Zealand counterparts that Southeast Asia could bring divergent US and British views on containment together:

“Of all the areas in East Asia, Indochina is probably that concerning which the greatest identities of views prevails between Britain and the United States. The measure of agreement and co-ordination thus obtained is additionally valuable as a balance to divergencies of views on China and Formosa.”¹⁴

At the height of the Indochina crisis in 1954, Australia’s Prime Minister Robert Menzies told the New Zealand cabinet that their two countries “must welcome … the increased interest of the United States in South East Asia which we have been endeavouring to cultivate for a long time.”¹⁵ Indochina appeared as a critical issue in its own right as the gateway into Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. Yet the problem of the war’s termination cut at the heart of alliance politics. Commonwealth policymakers hoped to foster cooperation with the US government in Southeast Asia because their vision of containment relied upon American military potential, but also because they feared the consequences of unilateral US action. Alone, the United States might completely renege on its commitments in Asia or, even worse, resort to the use of nuclear weapons against China.

The program of US military aid in Indochina created a curious mutual dependence between the French and American governments. The Eisenhower Administration linked its aid for France in Indochina to progress on the EDC. This aid, French policymakers acknowledged, preserved the Expeditionary Force’s security. Yet within the French National Assembly, no majority support for the EDC could be found. Much of the French left and right still sympathized with Soviet warnings that a revitalized Germany could once again threaten its neighbors. Nobody could predict the effect of a settlement in Indochina on the EDC with certainty. Freed from dependence on US aid in Indochina, a French government might feel free to repudiate the EDC. Much depended on the circumstances of any settlement. Radical Deputy Pierre Mendès-France appealed for direct negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, removing Vietnam from its larger Cold War context. Conservative French observers and US officials worried that if majority opinion swung in support of this policy, France might also retreat from its role as an anchor for the western alliance, with certain failure for the EDC.

Soviet and Chinese leaders also recognized these global dimensions and the new importance of Indochina in 1953. They could gain from an armistice, but also feared the consequences of escalation. PRC leaders believed that US entry into the war would be a disaster, bringing a hostile superpower onto their southern border. The Soviet leadership hoped to prevent German rearmament but also avoid any major confrontation in 1953 and 1954. With Soviet agreement, the PRC thus increased its material assistance to the Vietminh and began to consider international negotiations that would terminate conflict between France and the Vietminh. Having fought against France for eight years, the Vietminh were now dependent on Chinese material assistance for major combat operations. While Ho Chi Minh accepted the logic of Chinese policy—that the time was coming to use diplomacy to consolidate Vietminh gains and thereby also forestall direct US intervention in Indochina—he was also in no position to oppose Chinese and Soviet aspirations for a new approach. In contemplating an end to the war against France, both DRV and PRC leaders accepted a high level of risk. The PRC gambled that escalations in combat prior to negotiations could be achieved without provoking the United States into entering the conflict or retaliating directly against mainland China. DRV leaders recognized that in acquiescing to international negotiations, they would be forced into some form of compromise—possibly territorial—that would offer less than a complete military victory.

* * *

Since the late 1940s, Australia, British, New Zealand, and French policymakers had tried to increase the US interest in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. They enjoyed some success. The US government modified its indifference to the French project in Indochina after 1945. By 1950, the Truman Administration regarded France’s war against the Vietminh as an important front in the Cold War. In 1951, the United States entered into a mutual security pact (ANZUS) with Australia and New Zealand.¹⁶ Yet real doubt persisted among French and Commonwealth policymakers as to whether the United States could be relied on in Southeast Asia. Eisenhower’s New Look exacerbated these fears. The Administration’s reliance on nuclear weapons and hope to cut conventional forces suggested to allied policymakers that the US government would not be making any new commitments in Asia or Europe. The threat to use nuclear weapons ruled out the kind of alliance consultation and shared decision-making that the allies hoped for.

Contingency plans for Chinese intervention in the Indochina War exposed this dilemma. The French government was naturally concerned about the consequences, should China expand its role in Vietnam. French leaders hoped for some kind of guarantee from the US government and received assurances that the United States would not tolerate Chinese intervention.¹⁷ Unfortunately, as far as Commonwealth policymakers were concerned, the Eisenhower Administration endorsed Pentagon plans to meet any Chinese aggression against Indochina or Taiwan with “general [nuclear] action a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Escalation and Negotiation, March 1953–May 1954
• Part II: The Geneva Conference on Indochina, May–July 1954
• Part III: The Global Legacy, July 1954–July 1956
• Epilogue: “Our Off spring”
• Notes
• Sources
• Index