Giap now deployed in northern Vietnam six ten-thousand-man divisions, well-armed with light weapons, though short of food, clothing and equipment. In the early years the Vietminh had no waterproof clothing or weather protection. Only in 1952 were there issues of flimsy coverings, which seemed miraculous to those simple peasants. In the words of a communist soldier, ‘We marvelled that mankind had produced a piece of paper that rain ran off.’
The French continued to have their successes: gunboats in the Red River delta choked rice shipments to communist forces further north. On 25 May 1950, after the enemy bombarded a French camp at Dong Khe, a few miles inside Vietnam’s border with China, parachute-landed reinforcements drove the attackers scuttling away into the jungle. Nonetheless, colonial garrisons in the mountainous far north, holding positions linked by ribbons of road strung along narrow valleys, remained vulnerable, especially when Giap’s regular units acquired mortars and artillery. The French had been rash enough to extend delicate tendrils – relatively small forces – into antheaps crawling with Vietminh. While the colonial power had far more soldiers countrywide, in the north-west Giap could sometimes outnumber his foes.
Early on 16 September, five Vietminh battalions, supported by artillery, once more attacked the French base at Dong Khe. The communists had spent weeks preparing and planning, a hallmark of all their important operations. Early in the battle, Giap’s headquarters was alarmed by reports that one regiment had lost its way, failing to reach the start line, and that initial casualties were heavy. But Ho Chi Minh, who had walked many miles to witness the assault, urged calm and perseverance. After fifty-two hours of fierce fighting, the attackers prevailed: Dong Khe fell at 1000 on the 18th. An officer and thirty-two Foreign Legionnaires escaped just before the end, emerging from the jungle to rejoin French forces after a terrible week-long march.
Giap now embarked upon a banquet at his enemy’s expense in the mountainous Chinese border region. The French resigned themselves to abandoning another camp at Cao Bang, twenty miles north of Dong Khe. On 3 October its foul-mouthed but popular commander Lt. Col. Pierre Charton led forth a truck column bearing 2,600 mainly Moroccan soldiers, five hundred civilians including the personnel of the town brothel, together with a tail of artillery and heavy equipment. Charton had ignored orders to abandon such baggage: he determined to retreat with dignity and honour, a gesture of stubbornness that cost hundreds of lives. In defiles nine miles south of Cao Bang his straggling caravan was checked by a succession of blown bridges and ambushes. Within twenty-four hours the retreat stalled, amid teeming enemy forces firing from dense vegetation on higher ground.
Charton’s predicament represented only one-half of a horror story, however. A second force, designated Task Force Bayard and composed of 3,500 mainly Moroccan troops stiffened by a crack paratroop battalion, was dispatched north to meet the Cao Bang column and support its passage to safety. Bayard left That Khe on 30 September, commanded by Col. Marcel Le Page. As the force approached Dong Khe it too was halted by Vietminh, raking and pounding the column with machine-gun and mortar fire. Higher headquarters ordered Le Page to adopt desperate measures: burn his vehicles, abandon his guns, take to the jungle, march his men around the Vietminh to meet Charton. The experience that followed was dreadful indeed. In accordance with his almost deranged instructions, Le Page led his men away from the French lines, ever deeper into a wilderness, to link hands with another doomed force.
Marchers soon began to fall out and vanish, never to be seen again: a man wounded was a man fated to die. Each climb and descent was agony for heavily-laden infantry, drenched by rain that also denied them air support. The Vietminh were weary too, after days of strife and pursuit, but they enjoyed the peerless thrill of winning: they knew the French were in desperate straits. Giap issued an exultant 6 October order of the day: ‘The enemy is hungrier and colder than you!’ Charton and Le Page met next day, their columns alike shrunken by losses, lacking water, food, ammunition. Then the Vietminh struck again – fifteen battalions pouring fire into their exhausted enemies. The Moroccans broke in panic. Their commanders ordered dispersal into small parties, what became almost literally a ‘Sauve qui peut!’ Charton was wounded and taken prisoner; most of the other fugitives were killed piecemeal. Just six hundred men eventually reached French positions further south; some 4,800 were listed as dead or missing, while material losses were immense: 450 trucks, eight thousand rifles, 950 automatic weapons and a hundred mortars. Giap celebrated by getting drunk with his Chinese advisers, for what he later claimed was the first time in his life.
On 18 October the French abandoned another northern camp at Lang Son, where huge stocks of munitions fell into communist hands. The cost of these battles was high for the Vietminh – an estimated nine thousand casualties. But whereas the world quickly discovered the scale of the French disaster, now as in the future the communists suppressed all tidings that might tarnish their triumphs, demoralise their supporters. Not all the fighting went one way: during the early months of 1951 Giap failed in a succession of large-scale assaults. In January when the Vietminh attacked a base thirty miles north-west of Hanoi, French air power and especially napalm inflicted crushing losses – six thousand dead, eight thousand wounded. The lesson for the communist commander was that he must still expect to be beaten when he committed large forces within reach of French air- and firepower.
A Western general who suffered such a succession of defeats as did Giap in the spring of 1951, creating such hecatombs of his own men’s corpses, would have faced a political and media storm, almost certainly been sacked. The Vietminh politburo, however, faced no public scrutiny. Ho Chi Minh, the only arbiter who mattered, kept faith in his general. Giap, like Marshal Zhukov in World War II, was never held to account for the shocking ‘butchers’ bills’ his victories imposed. This gave him an important edge over an enemy whose people were reading daily, in newspapers back home in France, about the anguish of their army in Indochina.
2 WASHINGTON PICKS UP THE TAB
Perhaps the most famous lines in Graham Greene’s novel set in Saigon during the late French era are delivered by his protagonist, the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who says of The Quiet American Alden Pyle: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused … impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.’ The most historically important trend in the war was that as the French reeled before its soaring cost, they turned to the Americans to pay the bills. Which, from 1950 onwards, they did. Far away in Washington, policy-makers became ever more alarmed by the notion that South-East Asia might follow China, submerged beneath a communist inundation. Moreover, the US sought leverage to reconcile a bitterly reluctant France to the rearmament of Germany. Dollars, not francs, soon paid for almost every bomb and bullet expended on the Vietnam battlefield.
American largesse was prompted by communist threats to the stability and democratic institutions of many nations, notably including Greece, Italy, France, Turkey. George Kennan, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and author of the famous 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow, characterised Soviet assertiveness as a ‘fluid stream’ that sought to fill ‘every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power’. Stalin and later Mao supported revolutionary movements wherever these seemed sustainable. On 12 March 1947 America’s president proclaimed before Congress what became known as