The Cold War (42 page)

Whatever chance the French had of pulling out a face-saving victory, or even of achieving a measure of stabilization, ended when the Chinese Communists arrived on the borders of Indochina in November 1949. Now Giap could train Viet Minh recruits in safe bases across the Chinese
border. By this time Viet Minh regulars and guerrillas numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The French might control an area by day; the Viet Minh, by night. In fact, the Viet Minh held about two thirds of the country. The French, meanwhile, were losing about a thousand men a month trying to win it back.

The Soviets recognized the Viet Minh at the end of January 1950. France may have been saved, but the U.S. was openly afraid that all of Southeast Asia was about to fall to the Communists, and pledged economic and military aid to the beleaguered French. (There was a quid pro quo: French support for the rearmament of West Germany.) In April 1950, two months before the invasion of South Korea, Truman's National Security Council cautioned that further “extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled.” A line was being drawn in the undergrowth; it may already have been too late.

On October l, Giap's troops attacked the French border forts strung out along the road called the Route Coloniale 4, just south of the border with China. The battles, which Douglas Porch recounts here, would last two weeks and would result in France's worst colonial disaster—ever. The loss of the R.C. 4 would happen within days of another Communist border triumph: the invasion of Korea by Chinese “volunteers.” The difference was that the French, unlike the Americans, never had the strength to bounce back. Nor did they possess a soldier of the stature of Matthew Ridgway.

DOUGLAS PORCH, one of America's most prominent military historians, is the author of such books as
The French Foreign Legion; The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War;
and
The Path to Victory: The Mediterrean Theater in World War II.
He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.

A
SMALL GLAZED TILE
inconspicuously set in a corner wall of the French Foreign Legion's retirement home at Puyloubier, in the South of France, bears the inscription “R.C. 4.” Hardly noticed by the old men who shuffle past it while conversing in most of the languages of Europe, it is a memorial that seems out of place among the umbrella pines and vineyards that crowd the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire. But it is a reminder of a forgotten battle that had repercussions undreamed of forty-five years ago.

In the long and bloody conflict that churned Indochina between 1946 and 1975, the struggle along the road known as the R.C. 4 was eclipsed in the public mind by later confrontations, such as those at Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh. However, the contest between the French and the Viet Minh to dominate the strategic highway—a contest that climaxed in October 1950 with what is often referred to as the Battle of Cao Bang—must count among that dreary war's most significant. For the first time, the Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap resoundingly demonstrated his ability to crush a large European force in a set-piece battle. On the R.C. 4, Giap grasped the strategic initiative in his war against the French, and he never relinquished it. The ghost of the R.C. 4 haunted subsequent French attempts to defeat Giap's main-force units in the highlands of Tonkin, Vietnam's northernmost province. Indeed, the climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was, in a very real sense, an attempt by the French to avenge their defeat on the R.C. 4. Unfortunately for them, the French demonstrated at Dien Bien Phu that they had done nothing to correct the serious shortcomings glaringly revealed in the savage battle on the Chinese frontier four years earlier.

Traveling northeast from Hanoi, the R.C. 4 stretches through a flat, cultivated land of rice paddies before it plunges into the mountains separating the
rich Tonkin Delta from the Chinese frontier near the border garrison of Lang Son. Lang Son straddles what in 1950 was one of the most important road junctions in Indochina. From the north, the old Mandarin Road, a traditional invasion route, ran from China's Kwangsi Province through the “Gates of China” to the Tonkin Delta beyond. This was intersected at Lang Son by the R.C. 4, which began at Mong Cai near the Gulf of Tonkin and paralleled the Chinese frontier.

From Lang Son, the R.C. 4 ran northwest, a ribbon of road that twisted, rose, and tumbled through a turmoil of jagged limestone ridges and high needles of jungle-covered rock, linking the delta with the strategic posts of That Khe, Dong Khe, and finally, Cao Bang some sixty miles distant. From Cao Bang, another road, the R.C. 3, curved south through Bac Kan and Thai Nguyen back to Hanoi. It was joined by the area's third major road, the R.C. 2, which ran northwest to the Chinese border at Lao Cai.

These villages were military camps, fortified citadels rising out of rural communities where the only permanent buildings were often churches. They had been inserted in narrow valleys carved out of the rock by rivers bloodred with the clay of the terraced rice fields on their banks. These remote approaches were traditionally utilized by brigands and opium smugglers who were willing to travel the miles of almost trackless jungle that stretched to the south toward the Tonkin Delta or west toward Laos.

By 1950 this frontier region had become infested with another formidable enemy—the “Viet Minh,” short for the Vietnam Independence League founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941. During World War II, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had supplied Ho's movement with arms to use against Japanese troops who had established an uneasy joint rule with the Vichy French in Indochina. However, the Viet Minh carefully avoided tackling the Japanese, who, on March 9, 1945, launched surprise attacks on the unprepared French garrisons, capturing, butchering, or dispersing most of them. That the French could be defeated and driven out of Indochina did not escape the Viet Minh, and soon after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh emerged in Hanoi to proclaim the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

However, Ho's initial political victory rested upon foundations too narrow to maintain. The Viet Minh forces numbered perhaps thirty thousand men at the time, and though this figure doubled by the following year, they were poorly armed and trained. French forces began to disembark at Saigon as early as September 1945 and by February 1946 numbered fifty-six thousand men. Furthermore,
Ho Chi Minh found it expedient to invite the French to return to the northern part of the country to replace rapacious Chinese Nationalist troops assigned to occupy Tonkin under the Yalta Agreement. “It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives,” Ho replied to critics of his decision to allow 15,000 French troops north of the 16th Parallel in return for the departure of almost 180,000 Chinese Nationalist soldiers.

At the end of 1946, growing tensions between the Viet Minh and the French finally erupted into open conflict. On November 23, French warships opened fire on Haiphong, the port city of Hanoi, after the Viet Minh refused to relinquish control of it. On December 19 the Viet Minh rejected French demands that they disarm, instead withdrawing their forces to the mountains of Tonkin behind a barrage of diversionary attacks against French targets in Hanoi. The war was on.

In the early phase, the Viet Minh's greatest strength was patience. Ho and his military commander, Giap, plotted a war of
longue duree,
based on Mao Tse-tung's theories of revolutionary warfare. According to Mao, revolutionary war passes through three phases. In the first, the superior strength of the enemy force causes the revolutionaries to avoid decisive combat and to fall back on a strategy of small-scale raids and attacks. In the second phase, the guerrillas build their strength and achieve rough parity with the enemy; their commanders are able to mix conventional and guerrilla actions to keep the enemy off balance. The final phase occurs when the enemy—like a bull confused, badly bloodied, and exhausted by the matador—is forced onto the defensive. When this happens, the revolutionaries move to a general counteroffensive that culminates in victory.

For the first years of the war, Giap concentrated on small-unit operations. The logical French response was to strike at the Viet Minh while they were weak, in an attempt to “decapitate” the leadership and disorganize the fledgling army. But French operations, while enjoying some success, failed to inflict decisive damage on an elusive foe. Meanwhile, the 1949 Communist victory in China initiated a series of events that produced a decisive turn in the war, for China gave Giap a sanctuary in which to train brigade—and eventually division-size—forces. After the summer of 1950, these were well supplied largely with American arms collected on the battlefields of Korea.

The posts along the R.C. 4 were now on the front line of the conflict. Isolated and vulnerable, many of their satellites were little more than log bunkers that would not have looked out of place on the American frontier three quarters
of a century earlier. As early as 1948, Giap had begun to pressure the convoys that supplied the garrisons, and soon there was a murderous struggle to keep these posts alive.

A sergeant of the Third Regiment of the Foreign Legion later described one such attack to French journalist Lucien Bodard. It had occurred at a point where the road passed through a narrow gorge.

As the Viet Minh attacked, the legionnaires jumped from their trucks and climbed the embankment through a surging tide of Vietnamese. There the legionnaires grouped to defend themselves. “The Viets proceeded methodically,” the sergeant continued:

That night, upon reaching Cao Bang, they all drank themselves into oblivion.

As casualties mounted on the road that the legionnaires had already baptized the
route de sang
or the
route de la mort,
the French began to wonder if this string of isolated outposts was worth the blood and treasure required to secure them. In May 1949 the government dispatched the army chief of staff, General Georges Revers, to Indochina to report his opinion. Revers returned to recommend, among other things, that these posts be evacuated, a recommendation endorsed by the
Comite de defense nationale
on July 25. The commander in chief in Indochina, General Roger Blaizot, made preparations to withdraw from the R.C. 4 in September.

At this point two things occurred to postpone an evacuation order that was already dangerously overdue. The first was one of those bizarre scandals with which French politics appear to abound. On September 18 a fight broke out on a bus in Paris's Gare de Lyon between Thomas Perez, a former legionnaire, and two Indochinese students just back from the Communist-sponsored World Youth Congress in Budapest. The origins of the dispute are obscure, in part because Perez disappeared into the legion, which refused to identify him. But the fracas appears to have been manufactured by the colonial intelligence service, to call attention to a serious security leak: When the two students were arrested,
a copy of the Revers report was found in their possession. Subsequent police raids on the Vietnamese community in France turned up literally hundreds of copies of the Revers report held by both pro-French and pro–Viet Minh factions.

What became known as “the Generals' Plot” had important results, both in France and in Indochina. In France, the discredit heaped upon Revers and his report further obfuscated, if that was possible, an already hopelessly confused French policy in Indochina. It revealed an indecision and confusion that stretched from the highest echelons of the French Fourth Republic, a regime badly riven by ideological, party, and personal quarrels. This made it vulnerable to pressure by colonial and military interests hostile to Revers's recommendation that a greater degree of autonomy be accorded the French-sponsored Vietnamese government under Emperor Bao Dai. For these reasons, the Fourth Republic was not a government capable of setting a firm policy for the war, but one in which prevarication and unsatisfactory compromise were the order of the day. In Indochina, Giap was alerted that sooner or later, the French would pull out of their posts along the R.C. 4. And he would be waiting for them.