Here and There – Vietnam
Despite the fact I have met and run courses with many groups from Vietnam, my visits there have been few, and I’ve seen very little of the country. Let me explain. When I was working at a Melbourne university, we would receive groups from Vietnam. Not in large numbers like those from China, and Tianjin in particular. However, some came, and the participants were always friendly, the courses enjoyable. The university had a campus in Ho Chi Minh City, so the fact we had staff there reduced my opportunities to travel to Vietnam. However, it is a country that had fascinated me for years, and this blog is going to be about one part of that history. It’s not about my visits, but it’s about the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in particular.
My interest in the country had begun when I was a university student. One of the people I knew was a historian, who had written extensively on Vietnam, and was the source of key information as events in the 1960s heated up. I’m sure you know the background. The history of European empire building in the East had followed a rather predictable pattern, one that began with merchants travelling to new parts of the world. First, they had been to Africa and South America, next to the East for spices and silk, to India and the Moluccas, and finally moving on to what is now Cambodia and Vietnam. Missionaries followed merchants, seeking to convert ‘savages’; trade was subordinated to acquisition; maps were redrawn; an administration was imposed; and the process ended with a slew of new colonies established.
So it was in the second half of the 19th Century, when, using the usual excuse of the persecution of missionaries, the French Navy intervened in the trade with Vietnam. With assistance from the Spanish, the French brought together Cochinchina (southern Vietnam and part of Cambodia), Annam, the central part of the country, and Tonkin (the northern part of modern Vietnam, which also embraced parts of Laos) to create Indochina. It didn’t take long for the French colonists to settle down, happily overseeing the growth and export of tobacco, tea, coffee and indigo. The natives might have been restless, but the French kept overall control of the country, right up until the Japanese invaded in 1940, conquering the whole of Indochina by early 1945.
However, a few months later WW2 was over, with the Japanese defeated. In the ensuing chaotic mess, the Việt Minh occupied Hanoi, and declared a new national government. Their claims were ignored. The Allies had wanted to divide Indochina at the 16th parallel, to allow the Republic of China to receive the Japanese surrender in the north, and the British in the south. Confusion continued, with tensions growing between the north and the south. Eventually, the Allies agreed that Indochina was still a French colony and helped them re-establish control of the South during the short 1945-1946 War against the Việt Minh.
Following this, the leader of the Việt Minh, Hồ Chí Minh, initially took a moderate stance to avoid any further military conflict with France, but his requests for independence were ignored. The Việt Minh launched a guerrilla campaign against the French in late 1946, and so began the First Indochina War. It reached its climax with the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, which took place between 13 March and 7 May 1954, fought between the French Far East Expeditionary Force and the Việt Minh communist revolutionaries. The battle proved to be a textbook example of warfare, offering a contrast between traditional big army strategy and guerilla tactics, while combined with brilliant thinking. It also marked a turning point, a key step in Vietnam’s emergence from colonial dominance.
The story of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ is an account of tactics, rethinking, and determination, a classic battle that will remain in the history books for years. I suppose you could say that the antecedents of the battle were hubris: after nearly eight years of fighting, the French were determined to crush the Việt Minh. They began a major tactical operation, placing and then supporting their soldiers at Điện Biên Phủ, deep in the hills of northwestern Vietnam. The operation’s purpose was to cut off the Việt Minh supply lines which extended into the neighbouring Kingdom of Laos. Laos was a French ally, and it needed defending. At the same time, their plan had a second objective, it was intended to draw the Việt Minh into a major confrontation in order to cripple them.
It was a massive operation. French military forces had committed 10,800 troops, including elite paratrooper units and artillery units, together with reinforcements comprising colonial troops from North Africa and local soldiers recruited in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, a total of nearly 16,000 men, all to the defence of a monsoon-affected valley surrounded by heavily wooded hills, a terrain which meant they could leave the largely impenetrable high ground unsecured. Artillery as well light tanks were moved to the garrison. The French plans included resupplying the military position by air, based on their reassuring assessment the Việt Minh had no effective anti-aircraft capability. The French had set their trap.
As the Việt Minh saw the French manoeuvres, they realised this was going to be a crucial battle. Initially General Võ Nguyên Giáp planned the Việt Minh response based on the Chinese ‘Fast Strike, Fast Victory’ model, using all the available soldiers to power through to the central command of the opposing force to secure victory. The battle plan was to start at 5pm on 25 January and finish three nights and two days later. However, on 21 January Việt Minh intelligence indicated that the French knew what they were intending. The assault was cancelled, and on 26 January Giáp began to design a new battle plan with a new start date. Looking at his approach, it seems he must have drawn from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Once the Việt Minh, under General Giáp, had decided on their new approach, they surrounded the French, ready to besiege them. They moved around 50,000 regular troops into the hills around the French-held valley, in five divisions, including an artillery division equipped with medium howitzers and heavier field-guns, as well as anti-aircraft artillery. They didn’t just bring in these vast quantities of heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns, but they were determined to move the bulky weapons through the difficult countryside up the rear slopes of the mountains. Once there, the Việt Minh set about digging tunnels through the mountains, and placing the artillery pieces so that they overlooked the French position. The French were completely surrounded. The trap had been turned around, and now it was the Việt Minh who were ready to spring it.
There are many books describing the ensuing battle, (especially Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, Random House, 1985; Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, Picador, 1989). Briefly, the Việt Minh assault began in earnest on 13 March 1954 with an attack on a French north-eastern outpost. By early the next morning, the outpost was crushed, with some 350 French soldiers killed, many wounded, and 600 Việt Minh dead. Much to French amazement, the Viet Minh had employed direct artillery fire, in which each gun crew did its own targeting (as opposed to the more traditional use of indirect fire, where the guns are out of direct line of sight and rely on a forward artillery spotter). Navarre wrote, “Under the influence of Chinese advisers, the Viet Minh commanders had used processes quite different from the classic methods. The artillery had been dug in by single pieces …They were installed in shellproof dugouts, and fired point-blank from portholes… This way of using artillery and AA guns was possible only with the expansive ant holes at the disposal of the Vietminh and was to make shambles of all the estimates of our own artillerymen”. (Agonie de l’Indochina 1958 Paris: Plon., page 225, cited in Wikipedia)
Massive bombardment by the Việt Minh continued. The scattered positioning of their heavy artillery made attempts to silence their guns almost impossible. Ground fighting was, according to reports, more like early 20th Century trench warfare. The French pushed back at times, but, as key positions were overrun, the perimeter contracted, and aerial resupply, on which the French had relied, soon became impossible as Việt Minh anti-aircraft fire took its toll. The garrison was overrun in May. Most of the French forces surrendered, although some escaped. The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ was a stunning victory. The French government resigned, agreeing to withdrawal from Indochina.
If you want to think about General Giáp’s thinking, you can turn to The Art of War, and review Sun Tzu’s comments in Chapters V and VI, on Strategic Advantage, and Strong Points and Weak Points, together with Chapter X on Terrain. So much is relevant. Perhaps this one quote from Chapter VI summarises it well: “One is weak because he makes preparations against others; he has strength because he makes others prepare against him”. You can almost see Giáp looking at the French planning for battle, as if he was observing pieces on a chessboard. He hid artillery in the hillsides, without any obvious concentrations of equipment and soldiers, “The ultimate skill in taking up a strategic position is to have no form. If your position is formless, the most carefully concealed spies will not be able to get a look at it, and the wisest counsellors will not be able to lay plans against it.”(quotes from the Ames translation of Sun Tzu, published by The Folio Society). Sun Tzu’s insights counteracted the more conventional French big battle tactics.
Timing is everything. The victory at Điện Biên Phủ on 7 May 1954 was followed a day later with the first meeting on Vietnam at the Geneva Convention. There are several telling photographs you can find, showing the delegations sitting round an open square table. It was crowded. There were representatives of the British, French, USA, China (PRC), Việt Minh and Russia (USSR); in addition, the State of Vietnam took part, this representing the residual southern part of the French state of Indochina. The Việt Minh had a clear outcome in mind – independence. The UK favoured a negotiated settlement, while the French delegation sought to preserve France’s control of Indochina, to justify past war and losses, even as their military dominance had collapsed. The US was struggling with two issues, its role in supporting the French in Indochina for many years, and its fear of losing Indochina to the Communists.
Just prior to this Convention, an armistice had been signed to establish the Korean Demilitarized Zone, close to the 38thParallel, the de facto border between the North and South Korea. It was a bad omen for Vietnam. Despite the Korean plan, defeating the French had given the Việt Minh confidence, but they had under-estimated the concerns around the table. The French had lost the war, but surely not their colony, too. The Americans were obsessed by the advance of communism, to their alarm observing the Việt Minh with the Chinese delegation sitting next to them, and the Russians in support. To add to the problems, the U.S. did not recognize the PRC at the conference. Dulles, a rigid anti-communist, refused any contact with the Chinese delegation, not even to shake hands with Zhou Enlai, the leading Chinese negotiator. The discussions were hobbled from the start.
Today, the Geneva Conference reads like something from the 19th Century, with ‘great power’ negotiators deciding the fate of a colony, paying virtually no attention to the people under consideration, neither their aspirations, nor the fact they had won a major war. Yet again, it was racist and imperialistic men played chess: keep the communists out, give something to the French, and above all, control the natives. The eventual Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united Vietnam, but neither the United States nor the State of Vietnam signed anything. The non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected to any division of Vietnam but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of the Việt Minh delegation that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of ‘local commissions’. The United States responded with an ‘American Plan’, supported by South Vietnam and the UK, with unification elections to be held under the supervision of the UN, but that was rejected by the USSR. Ngô Đình Diệm, with American support, declare himself the president of the Republic of Vietnam. Việt Minh began fighting in the south, and events quickly escalated into a ‘second’ Vietnam War.
The consequences of the decisions taken at the Conference lingered on for 19 years, years that would see US troops killed and wounded in Vietnam, as they, like the French, lost to smart guerrilla tactics and huge numbers on the ground. The scale and cost of this second War were terrible, and the scale of the forces involved was staggering. By 1970, the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the south) was the world’s fourth largest army with approximately one million regular soldiers, and the PAVN (Peoples’ Army of Vietnam, which included the Viet Cong in the north), was not far behind. The figures for the nineteen years of conflict are still not fully known: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 1m to nearly 4m, together with around 300,000 Cambodians. 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, 304,000 were wounded; even today over 1,600 remain missing-in-action. In comparison, Australia got off lightly: 521 died in action, and 5,000 were wounded. After nearly two decades of a pointless war, the Americans withdrew in 1973.
Once the American troops had been withdrawn, North Vietnam began to work its way south, eventually capturing Saigon in 1975. For the next eight years South Vietnam was ruled by a provisional government, while under North Vietnamese military occupation. After 150 years of occupation and no longer divided, Vietnam was able to become an independent self-governing nation. Reform was slow and challenging. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, there were no mass executions of the South Vietnamese who had collaborated with the US or the defunct South Vietnamese government, confounding Western fears, but up to 300,000 South Vietnamese were sent to dismal re-education and hard labour camps. Slowly, reformist politicians replaced the “old guard” government with new leadership. They implemented a series of free-market reforms, the Đổi Mới, managing the transition from a ‘planned economy’ to a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. The authority of the state remained unchallenged under Đổi Mới, but the government encouraged private ownership of farms and factories, economic deregulation, and foreign investment, while maintaining control over strategic industries. Vietnam’s economy has grown ever since.
This was the country with which Australian universities sought to engage. There’s been strong growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction, exports, and foreign investment, although these reforms have been accompanied by a rise in income inequality and gender disparities. Have I been to this fascination country? Yes, I’ve been there for teaching. No, as in effect I have seen nothing more than hotels and university classrooms. Such a rich culture, so much history to be explored, but I didn’t have a chance to do so.
