Embers of War (69 page)

Those twenty-four hours would prove critical. Giap was under pressure from his Chinese advisers, from some of his senior commanders, and from his frontline troops to attack with full force, and to do it quickly. These advocates insisted that everything was ready and that a further postponement would create dissension in the ranks and among the tens of thousands of porters who had given their absolute all to prepare the ground. But Giap was worried. He was not sure all the elements were in place for a successful attack. On the night of the twenty-fifth he was anxious, returning again and again to the question, could his troops prevail? Several things troubled him, starting with the size of the battlefield. Dien Bien Phu was three times larger than Na San, and Viet Minh units were not trained to operate on such a large expanse, against a formidable foe possessing tanks, heavy artillery, and airpower. His own force was huge, at more than five divisions, but were the units capable of the necessary discipline and control? Could his artillery, not used to working on such a major scale, execute coordinated calibration from protected but suboptimal sites? It worried Giap that one artillery regiment commander had recently disclosed that he did not know how to operate his cannon. Finally, there was the question of time. Up to now, battles had seldom lasted longer than twenty hours. Most began at twilight and ended in the early morning. Would the troops be able to handle a drawn-out battle, involving much fighting during daylight hours?
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More basically, Giap sensed that the situation had changed. Tactics approved in December no longer made as much sense in January, for the French were now much stronger. They had doubled in overall strength, and their fortifications were much improved, with barbed wire and artillery. Meanwhile the People’s Army did not yet have all its artillery in place. An attack now, Giap concluded, would be “an adventure.”

“I couldn’t close my eyes,” Giap recalled of that night, spent in his one-room hillside hut with its small cot and bamboo table overlaid with maps of the valley. “I had a terrible headache. Thuy, a medic, wrapped a mugwort compress around my forehead.”

The next morning Giap summoned Wei Guoqing, who was surprised to see the compress. “The battle is about to begin,” the Chinese adviser remarked; how did Giap think it would likely unfold? “That’s the issue I’d like to discuss,” came the reply. “From observing the situation, I believe the enemy has moved from a temporary to a solid defense. For that reason, I think we must not follow our agreed plan. If we fight, we lose.”

“How should we solve this?” Wei Guoqing responded.

“My thought is immediately this afternoon to order a delay in the offensive, withdraw our soldiers to their training positions, and prepare again under the directive, ‘Steady Attack, Steady Advance.’ ”
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Wei Guoqing, depending on which source one consults, either supported the delay or grumbled that Giap lacked “Bolshevik spirit.” Perhaps he did both. Regardless, that afternoon a contentious meeting at the Viet Minh commander’s post—during which several subordinate Viet Minh commanders pressed for going ahead with the attack that evening—ended with a postponement of the operation and a switch to the “steady” directive.
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Several more weeks would be taken to get everything into place, to study the French defenses more thoroughly, and to make sure not a single ingredient for victory had been left out. Nothing would be left to chance. The orange would be peeled by hand, slowly.
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“In taking this correct decision,” Giap later wrote, echoing Ho Chi Minh’s words to him in December 1953, “we strictly followed [the] fundamental principle of the conduct of a revolutionary war; strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if it is not, then don’t strike.”
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What if he had chosen differently? What if he had bowed to the pressure and launched the attack? It’s a tantalizing counterfactual question. No one can know the answer with any degree of certainty, of course, but it seems impossible in hindsight to argue against the veteran commander’s reasoning. The fact is that Giap’s forces were not yet prepared for the immense task at hand; an attack on January 25 or 26 could easily have ended in disaster. From this perspective, neither Navarre’s original conception regarding Operation Castor nor de Castries’s and Piroth’s confidence before Jacquet and Dejean on the twenty-fifth seems so absurd. The People’s Army came much closer to military failure at Dien Bien Phu than is generally believed.

CHAPTER 18
“VIETNAM IS A PART OF THE WORLD”

B
EYOND THE VARIOUS MILITARY CONSIDERATIONS, ONE OTHER
factor may have contributed to Vo Nguyen Giap’s decision to call off the January 25 attack. The Berlin conference of foreign ministers was scheduled to open at this very time, and Indochina would certainly come up for consideration. An unsuccessful attack upon the French garrison could have an enormous impact on the tenor of that discussion, and on any decisions reached by the four powers (France, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) regarding Indochina’s future. At this stage of the game, General Giap and Ho Chi Minh knew, all military plans had to be considered in light of their international diplomatic ramifications, and vice versa. As Ho had put it in his report to the DRV National Assembly a month earlier, in December 1953, Vietnam had become “a part of the world.”
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Ho Chi Minh remained suspicious of great-power negotiations concerning Indochina, as did his top lieutenants. The timing was not yet right. If there were to be talks, Ho wanted them to be bilateral discussions between the DRV and France. Even these should be entered carefully, and there should be no letup in military pressure. But Viet Minh officials also understood that they might be powerless to stop the convening of a five-power conference of the type Moscow proposed and to which Paris and Beijing seemed receptive. If the other leading powers, and especially the United States, agreed to such a meeting, it would be held, whatever the Vietnamese might have to say about it.

And on this point, available DRV internal sources are clear: At the start of 1954, it was American policy more than French policy that was of chief concern to Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo. The United States was now the principal enemy, not France.
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Should President Dwight Eisenhower choose to further increase his involvement in the French cause, perhaps by sending ground troops to the war theater, or by ordering air strikes on Viet Minh positions, it would have enormous implications for the balance of military forces. Conversely, should the American president alter his hostile attitude toward diplomacy and come out in favor of a negotiated settlement, that too would change the dynamics in a fundamental way.

Yet again the question loomed, for Viet Minh leaders and for their counterparts in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, and London:
What will the Americans do?

No easy answer presented itself as the opening of the Berlin meeting drew near or in the early days after it commenced. On the one hand, Washington continued to maintain, publicly and privately, that the essentials for victory were in place and that a better French execution of existing strategy was the only thing required. The Navarre Plan had not yet delivered much, it was true, but neither had it failed, and significant operational results were not expected for several more months. On January 16, Eisenhower approved NSC-177 (later NSC-5405), a policy paper that affirmed Indochina’s critical importance to American security and adhered to an essentially optimistic assessment of the overall military situation. “With continued U.S. economic and material assistance,” the paper stated, “the Franco-Vietnamese forces are not in danger of being militarily defeated by the Viet Minh.”
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On the other hand, senior officials gave close and unprecedented consideration to what to do if the battlefield situation deteriorated, or if the French suddenly called it quits. Sending U.S. ground forces seemed out of the question, at least in the president’s mind; he told an NSC meeting on January 8 that he could not imagine putting American troops anywhere in Southeast Asia, except perhaps in Malaya, in his mind a crucial link in America’s defensive perimeter. Vietnam would swallow U.S. divisions whole, he said. But Eisenhower in the same meeting showed markedly more interest in other forms of intervention. When Treasury Secretary George Humphrey expressed opposition to the suggestion by Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the use of U.S. air strikes to assist the French at Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower interjected that it might be necessary to “put a finger in the dike” to protect vital interests in the region. To NSC adviser Robert Cutler’s suggestion that it could be a French finger, Eisenhower and Radford chorused in unison that France had been the problem all these years. It might take American airpower, both men agreed. With no consensus in the group, and no danger of imminent French collapse, the NSC left the question of air strikes open and agreed in the meantime to meet a request from Paris for additional B-26 bombers, needed, the French claimed, to counter an improvement in the enemy’s antiaircraft capability.
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Eisenhower also created a high-level, ad hoc working group representing the State and Defense departments, the CIA, and the NSC staff to undertake an analysis of the Southeast Asian situation and produce an action plan for the region. The group’s charge included consideration of committing U.S. ground forces or airpower to Indochina, and it was instructed to proceed from the assumption that a defeat in Indochina would be a major blow to American national security. As a third step, the president ordered the creation of a smaller, top-secret Special Committee on Indochina, chaired by Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, whose task was to “come up with a plan in specific terms, covering who does what and which and to whom” in Indochina and the surrounding region.
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Late in the month the Smith committee recommended, and Eisenhower approved, the dispatch of two hundred uniformed U.S. Air Force mechanics to Indochina to service American-supplied aircraft, including the new B-26s, on the understanding that “they would be used at bases where they would be secure from capture and would not be exposed to combat.” The president also agreed to send U.S. civilian pilots hired by the CIA, using planes from the agency’s proprietary airline, the Civilian Air Transport (CAT), to assist the French with air transport. Within a few weeks, a squadron of C-119 transports based in Formosa, painted gray and manned by two dozen CAT pilots, began flying supplies into Dien Bien Phu. Their contribution would be crucial, for these “Flying Boxcars” had a six-ton capacity, as compared to the two-and-a-half-ton capacity of the French-piloted Dakotas. The supply of Dien Bien Phu would have been impossible without them.
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“Don’t think I like to send them there,” Eisenhower said in front of Press Secretary James Hagerty, with reference to the technicians. “But we can’t get anywhere in Asia by just sitting here in Washington doing nothing. My God, we must not lose Asia. We’ve got to look this thing in the face.”
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Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not involve himself directly in these decisions, having meanwhile departed for Berlin. European security issues were at the top of the agenda for the meeting, but Dulles knew that the Soviets intended also to table a formal proposal for a five-power conference—that is, including Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China—to deal with Asian issues, among them Indochina. He was determined to resist. In its first year, the Eisenhower administration had steadfastly rejected negotiations on Indochina, and it remained committed to that position. With equal vehemence, the White House had refused to countenance any action that might be construed as even tacit recognition of the PRC’s legitimacy, let alone as signifying its membership in the great-power club; neither Dulles nor the president had any intention of changing that posture now. As Ike had put it in Bermuda, a five-power conference was a “bad word for the United States.”

In phrasing it that way, Eisenhower may have been suggesting he was hemmed in by partisan politics. If so, he himself was partly to blame. His own Republican Party, as we have seen, had made China the partisan shibboleth of American politics with its attacks four years earlier on Truman and Acheson for allegedly “losing” the country to Mao and his Communists. “Red China,” it was thenceforth branded, to distinguish it from the Republic of China in Taiwan, and it generated in American political discourse—notably in the 1952 election campaign, with Eisenhower’s tacit consent—an intensity almost religious in nature. U.S. officials, Britain’s foreign secretary Anthony Eden lamented in late November 1953, “find it difficult to pursue a realistic policy towards China.” The following day Eden returned to the theme in a personal communication to Winston Churchill: “In the existing state of American opinion, the US administration would find it politically impossible to sit down with a high level meeting of the big Five.”
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Or as Selwyn Lloyd, minister of state in the British Foreign Office, put it: “There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China and to a lesser extent Russia which borders on hysteria.”
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It was the great difference between the United States and her main transatlantic partner, Britain: the degree to which fear of the Communist world conspiracy permeated political and popular discourse. Eden and Churchill and other British Conservatives were mystified by the seeming support in Middle America for extreme Red-baiters such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who applied constant pressure on the White House to live up to their rigid standards of anti-Communist purity. No less than their Labour counterparts, these Tories shook their heads at the brutal antics of Scott McLeod, a McCarthy acolyte appointed by Dulles who (as head of the Bureau of Security and Personnel) was conducting an anti-Communist witch hunt in the State Department that, by the time it finished, ruined the careers of scores if not hundreds of officers and other staff. Among them were a number of China specialists.
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