Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 by Ronald Spector. This is the first in a series by the United States Army’s Center of Military History regarding the Vietnam War. This publication provides a critical appraisal of America’s initial steps across Indochina.
In the early 1950s most Americans could not find Vietnam on a map. Ronald documents how lacking any plan for Indochina would eventually draw America into a generational confrontation.
However, The Early Years clearly provides an understanding of events pushing America towards Indochina prior to World War II.
Churchill’s March 1946 famous “Iron Curtain” speech (Full PDF) at Westminister College in Truman’s home state of Missouri set the stage. On April 24, 1950 NSC memorandum 64 identifies a new US position to contain communism across Indochina.
This US position was further solidified by President Eisenhower in 1953 with NSC 162/2. These efforts document well known mistakes and large policy shifts that resulted in our long war in Vietnam. The lessons certainly remain important to this day.
I can quote many sections of this book at length. Yes, this book is that well written. Stumbling right out of the gate, Truman viewed Indochina in an emerging Cold War confrontation.
A deeper view of Indochina in the 1930s
A very important element is the strategic view by the US of Southeast Asia prior to World War II. Changes occurring in Indochina reveal a growing strain between FDR and Imperial Japan:
France’s defeat and partial occupation by Germany in the spring of 1940 had a profound influence upon developments in Indochina. Having been at war with China since 1937, the Japanese moved swiftly to take advantage of France’s distress. They demanded that the French cease to allow war materials to be sent to China from Tonkin, grant Japan free access to the raw materials of Indochina, and allow the Japanese to use Indochina as a staging area for operations against China. Washington viewed this development with alarm.
As a strong supporter of China and the only remaining power strong enough to challenge Japan in the Pacific, the United States felt obliged to try to prevent what appeared to be but a first step in new Japanese aggressive moves against Southeast Asia. America, however, had few options. It urged the French to resist the Japanese demands but had to admit that it could not offer military or naval aid for the defense of Indochina.
p. 17
In July 1941 the Japanese occupied the southern half of Vietnam without resistance. The French flag still flew over Vietnam and French officials still governed, but 50,000 Japanese garrisoned the country. The Japanese used airfields in the south and naval bases at Cam Ranh Bay. The Japanese move into southern Vietnam triggered the final crisis in Japanese-American relations which precipitated the Pearl Harbor attack. It also left a legacy of anger and bad feeling on the part of both the French and the Americans. American officials saw France’s actions as a supine capitulation to Japanese imperialism that opened the door for a Japanese attack on the Philippines and the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia.
p. 18
From Pearl Harbor to the Japanese Coup
Truman reversed FDR’s policy that Vietnam would be an independent:
For a time, in early 1943, Allied planners considered the possibility that Indochina, or at least a deep water anchorage known as Cam Ranh Bay along the central coast of Vietnam, might be seized by British forces for use as an alternate route into China. But as the war progressed and as the Central Pacific and South Pacific emerged as the most promising approaches to victory, American interest in an offensive from Southeast Asia or China gradually faded. Probably for that reason the United States never developed a coherent political policy toward Indochina during the war years.
p. 21
President Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed strong, if somewhat vague, views about the future of Indochina. The president firmly believed that Indochina should not be returned to France at the end of the war but should be given trusteeship status, with China or perhaps Britain as the trustee. In conversations with advisers and foreign diplomats and at wartime conferences, Roosevelt made his position clear. “I saw Halifax [the British ambassador to the United States] last week,” he wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January 1944, “and told him that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France. It should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.
The president’s views on Indochina may have been strongly influenced by his attitude toward France. To Roosevelt the swift French defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940 was proof that France was no longer worthy of being considered a great power. He was convinced that only the complete collapse of French nerve, society, and government could have accounted for that debacle, In his view the French acquiescence to the Japanese occupation of Indochina was only of a piece with France’s earlier collapse before the German assault? Given Roosevelt’s views, it might appear surprising that the United States at first opted to maintain friendly-or at least correct- ties with the quasi-independent French government of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, established at Vichy after the French surrender.
The French Fleet and the French Colonial Empire, however, were under Vichy control, and American leaders believed that diplomatic ties with the Vichy government were essential for the time being . At the same time, General Charles de Gaulle, who headed the Free French movement in London, was viewed with suspicion and dislike by both the president and Secretary of State Hull, w ho considered him arrogant, untrustworthy, and authoritarian. They doubted that de Gaulle spoke for the majority of Frenchmen, as he claimed, and they only reluctantly consented in late “1944 to recognize his government.
pp. 22-23
The United States in August 1943 agreed with Britain to establish a new Anglo-American command to control operations in South-east Asia, specifically in Burma, Ceylon, Sumatra, and Malaya. Many Americans viewed this new Southeast Asia Command, under Vice-Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, with considerable suspicion. Some facetiously suggested that the command’s acronym- SEAC- stood for “Save England’s Asiatic Colonies.” The fact that the precise boundaries between the Southeast Asia Command and the neighboring China theater, under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, were never clearly defined later proved a source of considerable controversy.
Although the president approved establishing the Southeast Asia Command, the United States was careful to dissociate itself politically from the colonial concerns of its Allies. The United States refused to assign any diplomatic representatives to the command, and when the Free French sent a military mission to the headquarters of the Southeast Asia Command to plan for the liberation of Indochina, the president directed the State Department to inform “our British friends that Mr. Churchill and I did not officially recognize” the French presence at Mountbatten’s headquarters. Roosevelt Similarly opposed any plans to use French troops in liberating Indochina.
p. 23
The Road to Dien Bien Phu
Dean Acheson helped author the Truman Doctrine, The Marshall Plan, and The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Yet John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen serving in Eisenhower’s cabinet made more drastic changes.
Their influence certainly drove the US regarding Eisenhower’s position regarding Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference. They would carve out the US military escalation across Indochina for a generation:
26 light bombers, and 28 C-47 transports plus 155 aircraft engines and 93,000 bombs. Despite such massive assistance American leaders were still largely ignorant of future French plans and programs for Indochina. Washington was receiving a considerable amount of tactical intelligence on the military situation in Vietnam, but there was still no exchange of views with Paris on military strategy, no sharing of plans or evaluations.
pg. 167-168
To provide the advisory group with a tactical intelligence capability to compensate for what the Americans considered unreliable French intelligence, Navarre allowed the group to bring in a combat intelligence detachment, a step for which General Trapnell had been seeking approval for several months Detachment P, 8533d Army Attache Unit (Special Foreign Assignment), arrived in Hanoi in December 1953. The unit consisted of 4 officers and 9 enlisted men, employed 7 Vietnamese, and operated directly under the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Washington. Its mission was to obtain such data on Viet Minh forces as unit histories, prisoner of war interrogation reports, and logistical capabilities estimates, as well as information on any Chinese units or individuals operating with the Viet Minh.
pg. 180
On 20 November 1953, 3,000 French paratroopers descended upon a broad valley in the Tai country close to the Laotian frontier near a village called Dien Bien Phu. The precise reasons behind the French decision to occupy and hold Dien Bien Phu remain obscure.
Gen. Rene Cogny considered Dien Bien Phu useful only as a guerrilla base for Tai partisans operating against the Viet Minh in northwestern Tonkin and Laos69 French leaders sometimes spoke of Dien Bien Phu as bait to lure the Viet Minh into a costly confrontation like the one at Na San in November 1952. General O’Daniel later observed that Navarre might have been influenced by the example of American “killer” operations in Korea, in which a unit would be purposely exposed to attack in order to draw the enemy into the range of American artillery. In the case of Dien Bien Phu, however, O’Daniel saw the idea as entirely inappropriate.
The French consulted neither General Trapnell nor any other member of the American advisory group before the operation. Nor was there at first any particular American concern about the action- no one saw it as the beginning of the decisive phase of the French struggle for Vietnam.
pg. 182
Yet by January 1954 the Military Assistance Advisory Group was becoming concerned. General Trapnell warned that the French at Dien Bien Phu were in serious danger. Since the French forces were “operating from an inferior defensive position, facing an enemy battle corps stronger by at least one division,” and depending entirely upon “overtaxed air facilities” for resupply, he gave them only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving
pp. 183-184
Such skepticism about France’s chances of success was not yet evident in Washington. NSC policy paper 177, United States Objectives and Courses of Action With Respect to Southeast Asia, which President Eisenhower approved on 16 January 1954, still reflected an essentia lly optimistic assessment of the overall military situation. “With continued U.S. economic and material assis-tance,” the paper stated, “the Franco-Vietnamese forces are not in danger of being militarily defeated by the Viet Minh. “
Eisenhower nevertheless remained markedly concerned about the situation in Vietnam. He told officials of the State and Defense Departments on 16 January 1954 that he saw no alternative to continued support for the Navarre plan; at the same time he emphasized the need to do everything possible to improve the French effort. The president ventured the opinion that if a distinguished American officer, such as General James A. Van Fleet, former United Nations commander in South Korea, could be sent to Vietnam in some capacity, it might enable the United States to exert more influence on French operations.
In the end he appointed a Special Committee on Indochina, composed of CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger M. Kyes, Admiral Radford, and SpeCial Assistant for National Security Charles D. Jackson. Beginning deliberations at the end of January, the Special Committee produced a number of recommendations. It suggested forming a volunteer American air group to operate in Vietnam much as the “Flying Tigers” had served Chiang Kai-shek’s government early in World War II, assigning more CIA operatives to Vietnam, and providing aid to the Associated States to help them develop an unconventional warfare capability.
The committee also recommended modifying and expanding the duties of the Military Assistance Advisory Group to include at least some involvement in training the Vietnamese and advising the French, and stationing General O’Daniel, then on a third inspection visit to Vietnam, in Saigon as a kind of informal strategic adviser to Navarre on matters of operations and training.
pg. 184
Meanwhile, General O’Daniel, on his third visit to Vietnam, had received little information about Washington’s plans and unsuccessful efforts to install him as a special adviser in Vietnam. When O’Daniel met with Navarre at his Saigon headquarters on 28 January, Navarre was cordial and apologetic about the delays in arranging the meeting. He explained that having O’Daniel in Saigon except as chief of the advisory group would be too awkward politically, but he would be agreeable to having O’ Daniel visit Saigon regularly, perhaps every four to six weeks.
On the afternoon of 3 February, General O’Daniel visited Dien Bien Phu for a briefing by Colonel de Castries and his staff. O’Daniel accepted Navarre’s explanation that Dien Bien Phu was a blocking base astride the main invasion route to Laos and that French forces in the base could maneuver at will to attack the invading forces. In fact, the French were by that time completely surrounded and unable to move more than a few thousand yards from their base and surrounding strongpoints. Unknown to O’Daniel, two hours before his arrival the Viet Minh had fired 103 rounds at the base with 75-mm. guns they had captured from the French the year before at Hoa Binh. Although the French had replied with counterbattery fire, fighter planes, and light bombers, they had failed to hit anything. Several aspects of the French position did disturb O’Daniel.
The French dugouts and bunkers did not appear particularly strong, and he was especially troubled by the fact that the French had failed to occupy the high ground around the Dien Bien Phu valley. ‘A force with two or three battalions of medium artillery’ he warned, “could make the area untenable”.
pp. 186-187
Despite those reservations, the general impression conveyed in O’Daniel’s report to Washington was that there was no serious danger to Dien Bien Phu. O’Daniel believed the base could “withstand any kind of attack the Viet Minh are capable of launching” and summarized the military situation as one where “the French are in no danger of suffering a major military reverse. On the contrary they are gaining strength and confidence in their ability to fight the war to a successful conclusion.”94 General Trapnell and his staff were disturbed by what they considered to be an excessively optimistic, even misleading, tone in O’Daniel’s report.
With Trapnell’s encouragement, the acting U.S. Army attache, Lt. Col. Robert C. Taber, paid a number of visits to Dien Bien Phu. What he saw there con-firmed the serious misgivings he already held about French conduct of the war. Early in February Taber reported to General Ridgway that Navarre was in reality conducting a “minimum casualty holding action in Indochina … with a view to eventual negotiations.
pg. 187
Reaching Washington around the same time as O’Daniel’s report, Taber’s analysis created a considerable stir96 The unmistakable contrast in tone and substance between the reports prompted Secretary of State Dulles to ask the Defense Department to obtain General Trapnell’s views on the conflict-ing analyses. Trapnell was pleased finally to have an opportunity to pre-sent his evaluation of the military situation to American policymakers. In blunt language Trapnell emphasized that “despite the confidence reposed in Navarre and the French forces by visiting U.S. political notables and military missions, the current campaign season has been dominated by the Viet Minh.“ He endorsed Taber’s conclusions in general and repeated criticisms of French strategy and techniques that he had outlined in previous reports.
pp. 187-188
Taber’s and Trapnell’s warnings nevertheless failed to create any real sense of urgency at top levels in Washington. When questions were raised about the contrasts between O’Daniel’s report and the reports from the attache and the advisory group, Admiral Radford explained that “our attaches tend to become frustrated as a result of continuously being on the scene. They tend to look at the situation from strictly a service point of view.”
In testimony before the House and Senate on 16 and 18 February, both Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith and Admiral Radford discounted “alarmist interpretations of recent military operations” in Vietnam. Colonel Taber was summoned by Ambassador Heath and asked to stop sending messages questioning the French ability to win the war, a request he politely declined.
By that time, close to 35,000 Viet Minh troops were deployed on the high ground around Dien Bien Phu. About a hundred 105-mm. and 7s-mm. artillery pieces, together with another hundred heavy mortars and recoilless rifles, were sighted in on the French strong points in the valley below. (Map 5) At the beginning of February, Washington received the disquieting news from the U.S. Army attache that the French were doing no patrolling at Dien Bien Phu outside their perimeter and using no infrared equipment or scouting planes. 103 The French litany of assurances nevertheless continued. General Navarre confided to Ambassador Heath that he would be “disappointed” if a battle did not develop at Dien Bien Phu, because it was there that he saw the opportunity to “inflict a substantial, if not decisive, defeat.
pg. 189
On the night of 13 March Viet Minh infantry, supported by heavy and accurate artillery fire, overran French strongpoint Beatrice on the northeast edge of Dien Bien Phu. During four more days of heavy fighting, the other northern strongpoints, Gabrielle and Anne Marie, were also lost. On the second day of the attack the French artillery commander, Col. Charles Piroth, committed suicide, reportedly out of despair over his inability to silence the Viet Minh batteries. For the United States the “alarmist interpretation” of events in Vietnam had at last become inescapable reality.
pg. 190
The Dulles-led State Department also forced America to accept France’s desire to re-enslave Indochina. The Early Years continues shedding light regarding a failure of leadership across the Eisenhower Administration 1953-1961. Much of this will be replicating across the Kennedy Administration beginning in 1961.
Yet US Army Generals Trapnell and O’Daniel who were visiting Dien Bien Phu well understood the Vietminh’s dedication. Ronald certainly documents how General O’Daniel held a lack of imagination regarding the Vietminh’s strategy with Russian and Chinese armaments redirected from Korea.
The Eagle Weeps by US Army Lieutenant colonel Keith Honaker provides a first hand account of MACV operations and Dien Bien Phu. His book serves us well to understand how America completely misunderstood Vietnam and our support for the French 1947-1953.
Operation VAUTOUR (Vulture)
Operation Vulture, a planned nuclear bombing of Dien Bien Phu by the US Air Force is outlined:
France’s defeat and partial occupation by Germany in the spring of 1940 had a profound influence upon developments in Indochina. Having been at war with China since 1937, the Japanese moved swiftly to take advantage of France’s distress. They demanded that the French cease to allow war materials to be sent to China from Tonkin, grant Japan free access to the raw materials of Indochina, and allow the Japanese to use Indochina as a staging area for operations against China. Washington viewed this development with alarm.
As a strong supporter of China and the only remaining power strong enough to challenge Japan in the Pacific, the United States felt obliged to try to prevent what appeared to be but a first step in new Japanese aggressive moves
Meanwhile, in Paris General Ely was proceeding on the assumption that American intervention was virtually assured. Although Ely found the French cabinet generally disposed to accept his plan for a short and decisive American aerial bombardment in support of Dien Bien Phu, the government was unwilling to make a final decision on the matter without consulting General Navarre in Vietnam. General Ely’s aide, Col. Raymond Brohon, was dispatched to inform Navarre about the proposed American aerial intervention, code named VAUTOUR (VULTURE), and to solicit his opinion of its probable effectiveness.
pg. 66
As Colonel Brohon was meeting on 2 and 3 April with Navarre in Hanoi, the defenders of Dien Bien Phu were fighting desperately to repel massive Viet Minh attacks. Portions of both the northeastern strongpoints, Eliane and Dominique, had already fallen to the enemy. General Navarre apparently first disapproved the air strike lest it provoke Chinese intervention, but on 4 April he radioed Paris his approval.
A week later, when the commander of the Far East Air Force, General Earle E. Partridge, arrived in Vietnam on a routine liaison visit, General Navarre told him of the plan for Operation VAUTOUR, saying that the operation “had been cleared through diplomatic channels.,,68 Although Partridge had received no indication from Washington that any operation was in the offing, he felt it was important to begin planning for the possibility of a large air strike.
On the way home, Partridge radioed the commander of the Far East Air Force Bomber Command, Brig. Gen. Joseph D. C. Caldara, to meet him in Japan. Partridge briefed Caldara on his conversations with Navarre and, while making it plain that he had received no instructions from Washington, directed Caldara to confer with the French and prepare a contingency plan. Caldara had available about a hundred B-29 heavy bombers based in Japan and Okinawa. Partridge directed him to retain complete operational control over any aerial attack by the B-29’s and specified that “the bomber force would be employed as a unit under mass-strike conditions.
pg. 69
Ronald is very accurately documenting how France was failing in Indochina. Yet the US could do nothing to alter this outcome.
In conclusion The Early Years joins a selection of books to best address failures across Indochina. A continued painful series of missteps from Eisenhower to Ford would follow.
Ronald Spector holds a Ph.D. from Yale. He was the first civilian to become Director of Naval History and the head of the Naval Historical Center. From 1995-1996 Ronald was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Strategy at the National War College.
Download full PDF from the US Army Center of Military History
U.S. Army in Vietnam
CMH Pub 91-1, Cloth; CMH Pub 91-1-1, Paper 1983, 1985; 391 pages, illustrations, maps, tables, charts, bibliographical note, index