In November 1946, following the breakdown of negotiations, the French launched a brutal naval and air bombardment of the Vietminh’s alleged strongholds in and around the port of Haiphong. Several thousand people perished, and only the city’s European quarter escaped devastation. On 19 December d’Argenlieu issued an ultimatum calling on the Vietminh to quit, to which they responded by staging an armed insurrection in Hanoi, sustained for sixty days. When at last they were expelled amid widespread destruction, the French deluded themselves that they had regained control of Tonkin.
Foreign observers were sceptical, however. A correspondent of The Times of London wrote in December: ‘Any colonial power which puts itself in the position of meeting terrorism with terrorism might as well wash its hands of the whole business. We are about to see the French army reconquer the greater part of Indochina only to make it impossible for any French merchant or planter to live there outside a barbed-wire perimeter.’ Ho and Giap, preparing for a long campaign, needed bases beyond range of France’s airfields and heavy guns. Thus, their main army, some thirty thousand strong, abandoned towns and cities and marched away to Viet Bac, the remote north-western region.
The Vietminh leaders, who became cave- or hut-dwellers, never deluded themselves that they could achieve absolute military victory. Instead, they sought merely to make French rule prohibitively costly. To this end, covert local groups waged guerrilla war, while regular forces launched setpiece operations where conditions appeared favourable. They relied chiefly on captured weapons, but also began to manufacture their own, assisted by some three thousand Japanese deserters. With boundless ingenuity, they scavenged French cartridge cases for reloading, made mines from captured shells and mortar bombs. At the outset, they exercised overt or secret control of around ten million people, most of whom paid taxes to them, and performed labour or military service. Though the Vietminh denounced opium trafficking as a manifestation of colonial exploitation, Ho boosted the movement’s revenues by the same means.
Families are almost sacred hubs of Vietnamese society, yet in those days many became riven. Ten-year-old Tran Hoi’s father was a Hanoi small businessman who continued to acquiesce in French rule. He said: ‘If we have to choose between colonial domination and communism, I will take colonialism, because it means access to Western civilisation.’ There was a bitter row when Hoi’s uncle, a doctor, announced his own determination to join Ho Chi Minh. The clan’s divisions, like those of many others, remained unhealed through decades of strife that now began to unfold.
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1 STEAMROLLER TYPES
In the early months of 1947 Charles Trenet crooned irresistibly, reminding the world of the glory of the French language: ‘La mer, qu’on voit danser la long des golfes claires’, words rendered banal in English: ‘The sea, that we see dancing the length of the bright bays’. Christian Dior seized the imagination of fashionable womankind with his New Look, unfolding swathes of fabric beneath a tight waist and bodice, putting to flight years of austerity. French culture, style, beauty both natural and man-made, were once more ascendant. From Paris the writer Nancy Mitford tirelessly mocked her English compatriots for their inability to match her hosts’ cuisine, wit, sophistication.
And yet these same clever, conceited, morbidly insecure people chose to immerse themselves in a brutal colonial war eight thousand miles from home, which eventually cost their own side more than ninety thousand dead, and the Vietnamese people far more. Most of the inhabitants of metropolitan France regarded the struggle to preserve their overseas empire – la sale guerre, ‘the dirty war’ – with indifference, if not outright cynicism. De Gaulle, now in political exile, displayed belated doubts, which soon became certainty, that France had no vital interest in Indochina, and could not prevail there. Yet a vocal minority cared passionately, and promoted a fabulously expensive military commitment.
George Orwell observed that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it, whereas it was France’s misfortune to take almost a decade to achieve this. The struggle for Indochina took different forms, according to the regions of the country. In the north, large forces manoeuvred and fought against communist formations that eventually mustered sixty thousand men, supported by a revolving cast of peasant porters. A Vietminh document declared the dry season between October and April ‘most propitious for fighting’, while the rainiest months from May to October, when movement became difficult, were for rest, training, redeployment, planning. Meanwhile in towns and cities, the French strove to combat terror attacks – bombs thrown into crowded cafés, shootings of officials. Such incidents became part of a new normality: at a mayoral reception in Haiphong, guests were momentarily alarmed by a nearby explosion and gunshots, but cocktails and conversation resumed when it was learned that a Vietminh had merely been shot dead after tossing a grenade at a police station. In one unusually successful and cruel attack, guerrillas burst in upon a dinner party held at a French home at Cap St Jacques, near the mouth of the Saigon River. They killed with grenades and old British sten guns eight officers, two women, six children and four Vietnamese servants.
Across the countryside, a network of almost a thousand forts and miradors – watchtowers skirted with mines, concertina wire, logs, sandbags, corrugated iron and trenches prickling with sharpened bamboo stakes – was created to protect villages and roads. These had indifferent success in containing the Vietminh, who lifted the mines for their own use, and could usually overrun a local post if they set their minds to it. French small craft fought fierce battles on the Black River against guerrillas firing from the shore.
Meanwhile, high in the mountains and deep in the jungle, French special forces of the GCMA – Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés – led tribesmen who hated the communists for their own reasons. Since insertion and extraction were dependent upon airstrips, some GCMA men went native because they had no choice; more than a few never returned to civilisation. This became the last conflict in which paratroops made repeated operational jumps, some as often as once a week. For most French units, however, this was a road-dominated war, in which helicopters played only a marginal role: even in the struggle’s last days, the colonial power owned just twenty-three. Infantry conducted an interminable succession of sweeps across the countryside, with such lyrical code names as Citron, Mandarine, Mercure, Artois, Mouette and Nice I & II. These killed some Vietminh, but only in return for a terrific expenditure of effort and intensification of peasant grievances.
Giap had attended no war college, yet read voraciously: he became obsessed with Napoleon, Clausewitz and the guerrilla tactics of Mao. His forces achieved one of their first high-profile successes on 27 January 1947, ambushing a convoy carrying Vietnamese politicians in French service on an inspection tour of the north. Fourteen vehicles were destroyed, the education minister and a French engineer killed. The attack impressed the authorities by its boldness and efficiency, and more of the same followed. Route 5 from Hanoi to Haiphong became known as ‘the road of blood’. A village on the north–south Route 1 was so notorious an ambush site that the French bulldozed it.
The two sides competed in ruthlessness. The Vietminh executed village chiefs who declined to bow to their will, often by live burial before peasant audiences, after subjecting them to tortures of medieval ingenuity. When the Vietminh killed one Vietnamese soldier captured in French service,