The Road to Dien Bien Phu

A History of the First War for Vietnam

Christopher Goscha

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691228655
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh's climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America's experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army.Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of "War Communism." Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians.Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.

1

The Rise of the Archipelago State

On 7 July 1949, a heated exchange occurred deep in the Mekong Delta between the Communist Party’s newly arrived delegate to the south, Le Duc Tho, and noncommunist members of the nationalist organization called the Lien Viet. Created in 1946, the Lien Viet regrouped noncommunist anticolonialists into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It served as an alternative to the Viet Minh front, created by Ho Chi Minh in 1941, but shunned by many patriots because of its communist core. Things became tense when Le Duc Tho told his audience that the time had come to combine the Viet Minh with the Lien Viet under the Communist Party’s guidance. One front was enough, he said. Not everyone in the room agreed, though. One brave soul suggested that Le Duc Tho close the Viet Minh instead and leave the Lien Viet to the noncommunist nationalists. This unexpected challenge to his party’s primacy from within the resistance blindsided Le Duc Tho. If we can believe an informant reporting to the French about what happened next, the party’s man became red with rage until he finally exploded: “To oppose communism is tantamount to opposing the resistance; it’s treason.” His words reportedly created an uproar in the audience. In the following days, the communists tried to downplay what had happened. But the damage had been done. Everyone in the room that day knew that Le Duc Tho had meant exactly what he had said—one party stood above the rest in the national coalition fighting the French: his.¹

For anticommunist nationalists, Le Duc Tho’s words only confirmed what they had always said—that the communists ran the show, the “resistance,” the state. Those who thought otherwise were naïve. Official historians in communist Vietnam today would agree, though for very different reasons: It was only because of the Communist Party and its farsighted control every step of the way that the Vietnamese were able to defeat the French and then the Americans during thirty years of war. The problem was that, at the time, on the ground, deep in the Mekong Delta in mid-1949, things were not so clear. That would start to change within a few months when the Chinese communists came to power and threw their weight behind Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. But until 1950, even later in many areas, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was not a single-party communist state. It was a compromise creation, a coalition state uniting communist and noncommunist anticolonialists. It was also a highly decentralized polity that was particularly weak in the south. Le Duc Tho knew this. That was why he was there.

The Compromise State

A Nation-State Is Born

The communists were not the first to try to stitch Vietnam together in a time of war. In 1802, the leader of the Nguyen dynasty, Gia Long, emerged victorious from a civil war that had divided the country for a good thirty years. For the first time in Vietnam’s history, this battle-hardened emperor had finally unified the country in its current shape, running from the border with China in the north to the tip of the Ca Mau peninsula in the far south (see maps 1 and 2). Over the next fifty years, he and his successors did their best to hold the country together by endowing it with a strong monarchy and accompanying bureaucracy. Gia Long’s son, Minh Mang, led the way with a number of administrative reforms in the 1820s and 1830s. He introduced a Chinese-inspired civil service based on merit, promulgated a state-sponsored ideology founded on Confucianism, and imposed tight royal control over competing ideas, religious groups, and diverse peoples.

Unfortunately, the Nguyen monarchs never had the time to realize their dream before the French moved in, looking to expand their empire into Asia and their trade into southern China. Starting in the late 1850s, they attacked the Empire of Vietnam in the south, the area over which the Nguyen had the least control, before moving northwards by force over the next two decades. Having conquered all of the country by 1885, the French divided it into two protectorates, one in the north, Tonkin, the other in the center, Annam, and a colony in the south they called Cochinchina. They shackled the monarchy all the while using its emperors, bureaucracy, and mandarins to rule indirectly. In 1888, together with Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam entered the Indochinese Union, better known as French Indochina. By the turn of the twentieth century, young French and Vietnamese schoolchildren could locate Indochina on the world maps hanging on their classroom walls, shaded in with the same color as Paris and France’s other colonial possessions in Asia and Africa. “Vietnam” was no more. (See Map 3.)

It was an idea, to be sure, and an increasingly powerful one by the early 1930s. However, Vietnam did not reemerge as a possible political reality until the Second World War radically changed the balance of power inside Indochina. Three specific events deserve mention: firstly, the Japanese occupation of Vietnam after the fall of France to the Germans in mid-1940 left no doubt that the French were no longer in full control of their colony. The leaders of the new French government that had collaborated with the Axis powers during the war, better known as Vichy, understood this. Secondly, the Japanese decision to overthrow their Vichy partner on 9 March 1945 put an end to almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina. Lastly, the Japanese capitulation to the Allies on 15 August 1945 after the American nuclear blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki left the Indochinese political field wide open.

The Vietnamese lost no time in making their moves in this fluid situation. Two days after the 9 March coup, backed by the Japanese, Emperor Bao Dai declared the independence of Vietnam in the form of a resurrected “Empire of Vietnam” and abrogated the treaties binding it to France. The emperor named a respected educator and nationalist, Tran Trong Kim, to form a government and to serve as prime minister. For the first time in over eighty years, the Vietnamese operated their institutions free of the French. It was a liberating experience, although the Japanese were still there. The new government unified the country territorially by combining the Cochinchinese colony with the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin and started crafting a Vietnamese national identity to accompany it. Tran Trong Kim’s cabinet introduced a national anthem and flag, began reappropriating the country’s history, and renamed colonial streets after patriotic heroes.

However, the Japanese capitulation in mid-August opened up at the same time the real possibility that the French would try to retake their lost colony. The Vietnamese emperor immediately fired off letters to the Allies and France’s new leaders urging them to respect the country’s newly recovered independence. In one to Charles de Gaulle, Bao Dai implored the man who had just liberated the French from Germany’s imperial hold to refrain from reimposing a colonial order on the Vietnamese with the Japanese now defeated: “I would ask that you understand that the only way to maintain French interests and spiritual influence in Indochina is to recognize Vietnamese independence openly and to renounce all thoughts of re-establishing French sovereignty or an administration of any kind or form here.” De Gaulle never responded. He searched instead for a more pliant royal and ordered his officers leaving for Indochina to retake the former colony by force, if need be, in order to restore French sovereignty.²

The Empire of Vietnam led by the Emperor Bao Dai could have survived the fall of the Japanese and reconfigured itself in national ways. After all, Cambodia’s king, Norodom Sihanouk, would consolidate his power after the Second World War and lead a famous Royalist Independence Crusade against the French in 1953. The monarchy exists in Cambodia to this day. But Bao Dai saw things differently at the time: on 25 August 1945, he formally abdicated his throne without naming a successor. He abandoned his dynastic name, Bao Dai, the “Great Protector,” to become a simple “citizen.” French colonial administrators looking on from Japanese internment camps were shocked: How could the docile emperor they had programmed so carefully in their colonial thinking do away with the very monarchy they had used to rule the country for so long? But he did.

Vietnamese nationalists coalescing around Ho Chi Minh were just as incredulous, but did not ask questions. With the stroke of a pen, Bao Dai had eliminated what could have been a serious royalist challenge to the embryonic nation-state Ho was nurturing in the wings since his nationalist front, the Viet Minh had taken power in Hanoi on 19 August. Moving fast, on 27 August, Ho and his inner circle presided over the birth of a provisional government that would take over from the vanishing monarchy as if it were in line with the natural order of things. The transfer officially occurred three days later, when Bao Dai relinquished his family’s dynastic seal in a solemn ceremony and turned it over to the delegate Ho had rushed to the imperial capital of Hue to receive it. As an eyewitness to the abdication ceremony in Hue later remembered this historic event: “The members of the Royal Family were weeping. The people cried out and applauded. Then the emperor could be seen picking up the royal seal, which was wrapped in a yellow brocade, and also his huge sword to display to the crowd for the last time before handing them over to the Viet Minh functionaries.”³

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of what had happened that day in Hue. Bao Dai had effectively thrown his political weight and symbolism behind the fledgling national government. When some mandarins tried to stop the Viet Minh’s officials from taking over in the provinces, their ruler ordered them to stand down. Bao Dai then traveled to Hanoi, the new national capital, where he joined President Ho Chi Minh as a “supreme adviser.” Although the emperor’s decision thrilled many, one does not have to be a monarchist to understand why some in the royal family cried bitter tears in late August. Without spilling a drop of blood, the emperor, acting of his own volition, had dealt the deathblow to a centuries-old monarchical regime from which it would never recover.⁴

The Japanese coup de force and Bao Dai’s coup de grâce provided Ho with the clean slate and political legitimacy he needed to create a new nation-state delinked from its colonial and monarchical molds. Ho seized the moment with arresting confidence. Nowhere was this on better display than in Ba Dinh Square on 2 September 1945 in downtown Hanoi, when he formally announced the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The scene was an impressive one on that sunny afternoon when this middle-aged man, who had spent thirty years abroad, mounted the stairs of the podium to read aloud the country’s formal declaration of independence. With his cabinet members standing solemnly behind him, he gazed upon the sea of people standing before him as they looked up at him. Unfurled before the balustrade were banners heralding Vietnam’s independence and the end of colonialism. The band played. Young scouts saluted the new president. Soldiers stood at attention.

It was a carefully choreographed event to be sure, complete with all the required pomp and circumstance. But there was nothing artificial about the pride and joy the Vietnamese felt that day. Rich and poor, young and old, men and women of all ages were there. The nationalism that had been in the making for decades now burst into the open for all to see. A young Ngo Van Chieu, who had just slipped on a new uniform to begin a career in the army, described it memorably: “On this occasion, the provisional government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam presented itself to the nation. A square grandstand, crowned with the new national flag (red with a yellow star on it), had been prepared. The rostrum itself was draped with an immense flag. The entire government was there, everyone.”⁵ And then silence as Ho approached the microphone and began to read the Declaration of Independence in his recognizable Nghe An accent. At one point, he paused and asked his fellow countrymen if they could hear him clearly. A roaring “Yes!” came thundering back in reply. Standing on the stage that day, Vo Nguyen Giap later wrote that it was at that moment that Ho and the people became one.⁶

Perhaps, but things were not quite as spontaneous or as natural as the future victor of Dien Bien Phu would have us believe. For one, Ho Chi Minh and his team knew how to use modern means of communication to spread the nationalist message faster and better than anyone else. They had been doing it since taking power in mid-August. Photos of Independence Day celebrations, the huge crowds, and President Ho appeared on the front pages of the country’s papers. He was everywhere: artists painted his portrait, the first national banknotes and stamps soon carried his determined face, and wall pictures of him were already on sale. The Voice of Vietnam rebroadcast his reading of the declaration of independence so that the whole country could share in the national moment. A total stranger upon arriving in Hanoi in mid-August 1945, Ho Chi Minh had rapidly become a remarkably familiar face. Even a future enemy of Ho’s Vietnam remembered how proud he was as a boy of his country’s first president:

In the beginning of September 1945, Ho Chi Minh’s portraits, printed in black-and-white and in various sizes, were sold everywhere. Each of us schoolboys tried to buy one to hang in the best places of our homes if the adults had not [already] done so. We were hungry to have a national hero to worship.⁷

Ho intentionally positioned himself at the center of this creative process. He carefully cast himself as the culturally familiar Confucian sage and benevolent ruler. He dressed and lived simply, let his beard grow to a silvery wisp, wore modest sandals, and made a point of speaking in plain, parable-like terms. Celibate, wise, and grandfatherly, he stressed virtuous action, moral cultivation, rectitude, and selflessness in his public pronouncements. He addressed the Vietnamese as his children and invited them to refer to him as Bac or “Uncle.” Until his death in 1969, he welcomed “brothers” and “sisters” from southern, central, and northern Vietnam into the same national family and embraced ethnic minorities as equal members in this new national community. His entourage carefully choreographed and photographed his visits to schools, hospitals, and state functions. He moved among “the people,” reached out to them and let them approach him, talk to him, and touch him. As president (Ho chu tich) and father figure (bac Ho), he not only aimed to set the new nationalist example; Ho simultaneously moved to embody the nation. Gone was any mention of Ho’s first wife, a Chinese woman from Guangzhou (formerly Canton). The Vietnamese nation was now his family, and Ho was its father.

Things were, again, more complicated than this rather official version would have it. Ho may have been casting himself as the “father of the Vietnamese nation” in 1945, but he was also the “father of Vietnamese communism.” Ho, more than anyone else in his entourage, had founded the party in Hong Kong in 1930 with the help of the Moscow-based “Communist International” or the “Comintern” in order to help diffuse communism across the globe. He had himself spread the communist word well beyond Vietnam’s borders during the interwar period. Working with Comintern agents and Chinese communists, he helped establish communist parties in Thailand and British Malaya. Like Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in Korea, Ho Chi Minh believed in the Marxist-Leninist creed, including its Stalinist and Maoist gospels, and the salvation it would one day bring to his country and others.

Vietnamese anticommunists knew much of this and did their best to paint Ho as red as possible. They warned that this man would one day sell out the nation to another set of imperialists based out of Moscow and Beijing as well as unleash Vietnamese classes against each other. And yet Ho’s detractors had little success in stopping him at the outset. Why? For one, Ho’s people controlled the press and the airwaves in the crucial early days. Outmaneuvered, the nationalists had little else to fall back on to spread their message except for two or three independent papers. The bigger problem, though, was that the noncommunist parties failed to offer up a charismatic man or woman of prowess capable of competing with Ho on the national stage at this crucial point in time. Shy and introverted, Bao Dai had already abdicated. So had Tran T...