No Westerner regarded Geneva as a success story, instead it was seen merely as an exercise in damage limitation, as is most Big Power diplomacy: its achievement was to extricate an exhausted colonial power from an unwinnable war. Yet what was extraordinary about the Accords was that the new Saigon government got so much, the triumphant Vietminh so little. This was because the Russians and Chinese were far less interested in the fate of Indochina, and explicitly of Vietnam, than Washington’s Cold Warriors supposed. Mao Zedong had no wish to see an over-mighty communist Vietnam on his doorstep, and appears to have been anxious to draw Laos and Cambodia into his own sphere of influence, rather than that of Ho Chi Minh.
A general ceasefire took effect on 27 July, pending the temporary partition of Vietnam. After years living at COSVN’s secret headquarters in the Mekong delta, COSVN secretary Le Duan emerged to start his travels across the South on a hand-pumped railway trolley. In the North the communists assumed control. On 9 October the French Army left Hanoi, marking the occasion with a series of defiant, vainglorious military ceremonies which caused an American spectator to think of Don Quixote. Amid a roll of drums, boomph of brass and clash of cymbals, Gen. René Cogny, ringmaster for Dienbienphu, saluted the flags of regiments that had fought – paras, Legionnaires, Marines, Senegalese, North African, together with armoured columns that chewed the soft tarmac of Hanoi’s streets. France’s departure was characterised not by nobility and generosity, but instead by a spiteful scorched-earth policy: the colonials removed or destroyed everything that might be of value to the victors.
Ten-year-old Doan Phuong Hai thought the trumpets of the French quitting Hanoi ‘so sad that they seemed to be sobbing’. Their flag was lowered for the last time over the citadel on a cold, blustery, wet afternoon. Two NCOs folded the sodden tricolor, then presented it to the presiding general, who in turn passed it to the garrison commander. Rain masked the tears of many officers and men as the band played the Marseillaise. Then the garrison boarded its trucks and drove away towards the coast. It was just seventy-five years since the colonial power had assumed governance of the city.
The departing French were first replaced by representatives of the International Control Commission, ‘Indian Army officers with swagger sticks and bristling Guards mustaches, pale-faced Poles in their odd triangular caps, and beer-drinking Canadians speaking their own puzzling brand of French’. They in turn were followed by the victors, the first elements of Giap’s army. In Howard Simpson’s words: ‘They came forward in two files, one on each side of the street, small men in drab uniforms wearing leaf-woven, cloth-covered helmets fitted with camouflage nets. Loaded down with weapons and equipment, the Bo Doi of the 308th Division were entering an environment totally unfamiliar. Their approach was heralded by the soft shuffle of hundreds of feet in cheap tennis shoes: the Vietminh entry into Hanoi thus proved one of the most silent victory marches in the history of the world.’ Peasant soldiers gawked in wonder at the grand buildings and broad avenues, booty of their struggle. They were watched by crowds who displayed an enthusiasm that was not entirely spontaneous: cadres had for days toured the city, persuading its hesitant citizens that it would be in their interests to cheer the victors.
Among the handful of Americans present was big, clunky Major Lucien Conein – ‘Black Luigi’, ‘Lou-Lou’ or ‘Three-Finger Lou’ – an American born in France who had returned to his birthplace in 1939 to share the French defeat, then served with the OSS in Europe and southern China. As leader of Col. Edward Lansdale’s US military advisory group in North Vietnam, he was now charged with organising stay-behind teams. Conein was a caricature of a semi-secret warrior – hard-drinking, tough, outspoken, often outrageous: he once expressed his exasperation with a stalled automobile engine by emptying a .45 pistol into it. Now, in the midst of the throng of Vietminh shuffling by, he suddenly punched the air and shouted in Vietnamese, ‘Long live Ho Chi Minh!’ This won him a cheer from surrounding communists, who failed to perceive that he was mocking them – as he would continue to do through the years that followed.
Before the end came for the French, Norman Lewis mused uncertainly about ‘whether it had all been worth it – the brief shotgun marriage with the West, now to be so relentlessly broken off. Had there been, after all, some mysterious historical necessity for all the bloodshed, the years of scorn, the servitude, the contempt? Would the free Nations of Indo-China, in their coming renascence, have gained in the long run from the enforced rupture with the old, unchanging way of life, now to be replaced, one presumed, by a materialist philosophy and the all-eclipsing ideal of the raised standard of living?’
An elderly peasant who lived beside Route 1 said: ‘The happiest day in my whole life was when I saw two truckloads of French soldiers leaving Hue for the last time. They drove by my house, and looked so sad.’ France left behind the graves of ninety-three thousand of its soldiers, who had died since 1945 in the futile struggle to cling to Indochina. Those men had no Kipling to weave for them shrouds of romance. A decade later in Saigon, however, a legend was spun that the fallen of Groupe Mobile 100 had been buried beside Route 19 in the Central Highlands where they perished, standing upright in the stiffness of death, facing towards France.
5
1 ‘A REGIME OF TERROR’
Northern and southern Vietnam have always been as different as are their regional counterparts in Britain, the US, Italy and many other nations, even employing slightly different obscenities: the common expletive ‘fuck mother’ translates as du me in Saigon, dit me in Hanoi. In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, both fell into the hands of oppressive authoritarian regimes. That of Ho Chi Minh, however, profited from some notable political advantages. While the North was devastated by the war, subjected to a destitution rapidly worsened by communist economic policies, it became far more efficiently disciplined. Ho had spent less of his own life in Vietnam than had Ngo Dinh Diem. As victor in the independence struggle, however, he commanded immense prestige, and deployed his charisma and charm to formidable effect on the international stage. Moreover, by exercising iron control over information and access, North Vietnam veiled from foreign eyes its uprisings, purges and killings. In the South, by contrast, the follies and cruelties of the Diem regime took place in plain view: many peasants found Vietnamese landlordism no more acceptable than the French variety, and learned nothing of the worse plight of their Northern brethren. Only much later would Southerners come to look back on ‘the six years’ – the period between 1954 and 1960 – as a lost idyll, because relatively few of their countrymen killed each other.
Following the 25 July 1954 ceasefire, a vast exodus from the North took place, as a million people who feared the new rulers – businessmen, servants of the French, landlords, anti-communists and above all Catholics – fled the country by land, sea and air. It was a time of turmoil, sunderings, fears and farewells. Vietminh cadres stopped buses carrying fugitives to the port of Haiphong down Route 1, urging and sometimes compelling passengers to remain. Nguyen Duong’s modestly prosperous family, small businesspeople, suffered a disaster: in the throng at an airfield outside Hanoi, his mother briefly set down the bag containing all their portable wealth in jewellery and gold. Within seconds it vanished, never to be seen again: they started a new life in Saigon almost penniless.
Even as the Northern government-in-waiting issued a Dienbienphu commemoration mug, pathetic scenes took place in Hanoi as its more prosperous citizens stacked possessions in the streets outside their homes, for disposal at firesale prices. Some families split. Nguyen Thi Chinh’s father Cuu, head of a once-rich landlord family, told the sixteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother Lan that they would go south – one daughter had already left, after marrying a French doctor. The night before they flew, he gave each teenager a belt containing a little money, some food and essentials. Very early next morning, however, Chinh was shaken awake by Lan, who whispered to her, ‘Come outside.’ On the road they found a friend of her brother’s holding two bicycles. Her brother said, ‘We’re going to join the revolution. Father