Embers of War (81 page)

Moreover, Bidault’s contention that Washington might offer atom bombs to his government had an inherent plausibility. At several points that spring, U.S. strategists had considered the possible use of the bomb, and according to one interpretation, Operation Vulture had always, from its inception, had an atomic dimension. In early April, a study group in the Pentagon examined the possibility of using atomic weapons at Dien Bien Phu and concluded that three tactical A-bombs, properly employed, would be sufficient to obliterate the Viet Minh effort there.
⁴¹
Admiral Radford used this finding to suggest the use of the A-bomb to the NSC on April 7. And on April 29, mere days after this supposed Bidault-Dulles encounter, the use of “new weapons” in Indochina was raised for discussion in a meeting of the NSC Planning Board. Some participants in that meeting argued that using atomic power in Vietnam could deter China from retaliating in response to expanded conventional attacks, while failure to employ it would lead Mao and his government to conclude that the United States lacked the will to take advantage of its technological might. National Security Adviser Robert Cutler raised the matter with Eisenhower and Nixon the next morning, and they replied that atomic weapons would likely not be effective at Dien Bien Phu. But they agreed, according to the meeting note taker, that “we might
consider
saying to the French that we had never yet given them any ‘new weapons’ and if they wanted some
now
for possible use, we might give them a few.”
⁴²

Dulles himself, at this very Paris meeting, formally raised the matter of atomic weapons and their possible use, though without explicit reference to Indochina. In a speech to the NATO Council on the evening of April 23, he declared that Soviet advantages in manpower were too great—in military, political, or economic terms—for the West to overcome. Therefore, nuclear weapons must be considered part of NATO’s “conventional” arsenal. The secretary went on to assert that it must be “our agreed policy,” in the case of either general or
local
war, to use atomic weapons “whenever or wherever it would be of advantage to do so, taking account of all relevant factors.”
⁴³
Dulles sought here to speak to the furor in Europe resulting from the recent H-bomb tests, and he may also have been wanting to keep Moscow and Beijing guessing as to what the West might resort to in Indochina; but his language is a further indication that the use of the bomb in the jungles of Tonkin in the spring of 1954 was, from the administration’s perspective, decidedly within the realm of possibility.

Much of the discussion on April 23 was taken up by NATO business, but Indochina remained on everyone’s minds. A night’s sleep had done Bidault good—he was sharper in the morning session, and he looked better. But the arrival of a letter from General Navarre sent him into despair again, and in the afternoon he took Dulles aside, letter in hand. Dien Bien Phu would fall very soon, he told the American. De Castries’s combat-worthy force was down by two-thirds, to a mere three thousand men; no more reserves remained. Air-dropped supplies continued to land behind Viet Minh lines. After the garrison’s fall, General Giap would move his forces to the Red River Delta and launch an offensive against Hanoi—before the rainy season got fully under way. In such a situation, Bidault continued, Paris would have no choice but to seek a full ceasefire by the quickest possible means. Only one thing could forestall this calamitous sequence of events: immediate and massive air support for the besieged garrison by American B-29s. Would the United States, he asked, reconsider her rejection of Operation Vulture?

Dulles listened intently and said he would have an answer by the following day, after conferring with Eisenhower and with Admiral Radford, who was en route from Washington. This reply gave Bidault hope, even as time was running out at Dien Bien Phu (Giap had commenced his third phase), and other French officials that day also thought Operation Vulture might still happen. General Ely, for example, considered making an appeal to the Viet Minh for a cease-fire in order to collect the wounded from Dien Bien Phu. He added in his diary: “After refusal, get U.S. intervention.”
⁴⁴

Dulles now in fact was inclined to accept the French version of events, at least to a degree. Still dubious that air strikes at Dien Bien Phu would be militarily effective, much less that they would save the garrison, he nevertheless saw them as the only ready means to bolster France’s will to resist. His conviction on this point deepened over dinner as Defense Minister René Pleven disabused him of the hope that any cease-fire would be limited to Dien Bien Phu. It would apply to the whole of Indochina, Pleven insisted. The West’s bargaining power at Geneva would be effectively nil, and the Communists would secure a resounding victory. Dulles knew what he must do: He must gain British support for United Action—the sine qua non of congressional assent to military intervention—and he must do it fast. Eden, bracing himself for what lay ahead, cabled Churchill that Dulles seemed to want air strikes, then went to bed, he recalled later, “a deeply troubled man.” His private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh, took a sleeping pill but still managed only four hours.
⁴⁵

VI

SATURDAY, APRIL 24, DAWNED SUNNY AND WARM, A GLORIOUS PARIS
spring day. Overnight Dulles had cabled the president, who was spending the weekend in Augusta, Georgia, informing him of the Bidault request for intervention at Dien Bien Phu. “The situation here is tragic,” Dulles wrote. “France is almost visibly collapsing under our eyes.” Dien Bien Phu had achieved symbolic importance all out of proportion to its military significance, and if the fortress fell, most likely “the government will be taken over by defeatists.”
⁴⁶

The message alarmed Eisenhower, and he gave serious thought to returning to Washington to monitor the crisis. He opted to stay put for now, but the matter consumed his attention on the Saturday. That morning he called acting secretary of state (in Dulles’s absence) Walter Bedell Smith, who told him the situation was evolving so rapidly—in both Paris and Vietnam—that making considered appraisals was almost impossible. The president nevertheless offered a couple: The French were contemptible for constantly seeking U.S. aid while insisting on Washington remaining a junior partner; and Eden and the British were foolish for failing to see that it was preferable to fight the Communists in Indochina, where hundreds of thousands of French Union troops were engaged, rather than in some other country lacking such a force. Admiral Radford should be urged, Eisenhower continued, to stop in London on his return from Paris and ask the British military chiefs baldly why they’d rather fight “after they’ve lost 200,000 French.”
⁴⁷
A subsequent presidential cable to Dulles lauded the secretary for his efforts thus far and suggested he hand Premier Laniel a message from Eisenhower urging France to commit to staying in the fight, “regardless of the possibility of the physical over-running of the gallant outpost” of Dien Bien Phu.
⁴⁸

The message could hardly be clearer: In the president’s mind that final weekend in April 1954, military intervention in Indochina was a very live possibility.

Eisenhower’s cable arrived in Paris in midafternoon, local time, by which point the climactic Dulles-Eden encounter was about to begin. The setting was Ambassador Dillon’s residence on Avenue d’Iéna. The British suspected what was coming, and any doubt was removed by what they saw on arrival: There to greet them in the garden were not only Dulles and his wife and the ambassador and his, but a phalanx of senior U.S. army and navy officers, including Radford. Dulles immediately guided the guests into the study and, after acknowledging that Dien Bien Phu might now be beyond saving, made the case for joint Anglo-American intervention in Indochina. Only such a commitment would keep the French in the war, Dulles declared, and thus would be highly beneficial even if it failed in its immediate objective of preventing the fall of the fortress in remote Tonkin. Radford, who seemed to the Britons present to be yearning for war, said that the impending fall of Dien Bien Phu would leave no option but for the United States and Great Britain to more or less take over the fighting, pushing the French into the background and hoping by these actions to so inspire the Vietnamese that they would rally against the Viet Minh—and also prevent a massacre of French troops by disaffected VNA units. If Her Majesty’s government would participate nominally in an air bombardment (Radford suggested the contribution of RAF squadrons in Malaya and Hong Kong), the administration was prepared to seek congressional support for American intervention, Dulles said. But it would never happen absent allied (read: British) involvement.

Once again Dulles had presented the British with a choice: Would it be joint action or appeasement?
⁴⁹
Eden refused to be drawn but restated his doubts that air strikes would do any good and his fear that the kind of intervention proposed could result in a dangerous Cold War conflagration. More and more skeptical of the domino theory, Eden doubted that defeat in Indochina would cause neighboring countries to fall one by one. Intervention would also be “hell at home,” he remarked, sure to inflame British public opinion. The Americans offered no sympathy. Dulles, the foreign secretary later remarked, seemed in a “fearfully excited state” during the exchange, and did not demur when Radford and the “even more vehement and emotional” Walter Robertson spoke of bombing China to teach her a lesson once and for all.
⁵⁰

When Bidault joined the discussion at four-thirty
P.M.
, the Americans continued the offensive. What would be the position of the French government, Dulles demanded to know, if Dien Bien Phu fell? Would it continue the war? Bidault equivocated. He and Laniel would want to pursue the struggle, he said, but would have to contend with a highly problematic military and psychological reaction. Dulles persisted: Would Paris, as René Pleven had asserted the night before, declare before Geneva a full cease-fire covering all of Indochina? No, the Frenchman replied, there would be no such declaration, and he would enter the negotiations with considerable freedom of maneuver. Thus reassured, Dulles produced a draft letter, addressed to Bidault, stating that while U.S. intervention at Dien Bien Phu was now impossible, Washington was nevertheless ready to move “armed forces” into Indochina, provided France and other allies so desired, for the purpose of defending Southeast Asia. The letter was handed to Eden, who skimmed it and passed it on to Bidault. Several minutes ticked by as he read it and considered his options. He was still primarily interested in Dien Bien Phu, and he remained leery of internationalization, but perhaps this was a way to salvage something out of the wreckage. He cleared his throat and said yes, he would be prepared to receive the letter formally.
⁵¹

Suddenly events stood at a new watershed: United Action was back with a bang, and the war seemed about to be internationalized. Eden quickly interjected that his government did not feel bound by the Dulles-Eden communiqué of April 14 to intervene in the Indochina War. He could promise no more, he said, than to return to London at once to consult with his cabinet colleagues. But the foreign secretary understood that the crucial moment had arrived; as he noted in a cable to the Foreign Office just before heading to the airport: “It is now quite clear that we shall have to take a decision of first-class importance, namely whether to tell the Americans that we are prepared to go along with their plan or not.” Just prior to departure, he received a call from Maurice Schumann, the French secretary of state for foreign affairs, advising him that both Laniel and Bidault hoped he would gain approval from his colleagues to proceed “on the lines desired by Mr. Dulles.”
⁵²

The dilemma was acute, as Shuckburgh observed in his diary that evening: “If we refuse to cooperate with the US plan, we strain the Alliance. If we do as Dulles asks, we certainly provoke the bitterest hostility of India and probably all other Asiatic states and destroy the Commonwealth. Also, a war for Indo-China would be about as difficult a thing to put across the British public as you could find.”
⁵³

Eden and his team landed at 10:20
P.M
., got into two waiting cars, and drove straight to Churchill’s country estate, Chequers, arriving shortly before midnight. There to greet them was the prime minister, wearing a silken two-piece suit covered by a dressing gown. Drinks were distributed, whereupon Eden laid out the essentials of the situation. Churchill heard him out, then ruminated on “our glorious Empire, our wonderful Indian Empire, we have cast it away”—the implication being, thought Shuckburgh, why should Britain fight for a decrepit French colonial effort after that? Then a cold supper, during which general agreement was reached that Britain should reject the American request. In London the following morning, the cabinet, in a rare Sunday meeting to which the chiefs of staff were also summoned, needed little persuasion to confirm the rejection. The chiefs of staff said the proposed action would be ineffective and added that even a total collapse in Indochina would not decisively affect the British position in Malaya. The domino theory did not hold.
⁵⁴

VII

BUT THE WEEKEND DRAMA WAS NOT OVER. THAT SAME MORNING
in Washington Walter Bedell Smith, having learned that the French cabinet had in fact
declined
late on Saturday night to accept Dulles’s letter and instead wanted simply an air bombardment at Dien Bien Phu, made a new offer to the French ambassador: If Paris could persuade the British to join even nominally a coalition dedicated to preventing Communist expansion in Southeast Asia, and if the Laniel government would agree to grant America strategic command in Indochina, then the administration could seek a congressional resolution that would allow a carrier-based strike force to go into action at Dien Bien Phu in three days’ time, or by April 27. The action might come too late to save the fortress, but it could stiffen French resistance elsewhere in Indochina.