The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam by Christopher Goscha. Christopher teaches History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. This is perhaps one of the new, most important books regarding France’s failure across Indochina.
In short, Christopher has written an amazing book addressing how the communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh established a long term strategy to defeat France. Ultimately, this reveals how America began our generational nightmare in southeast Asia. This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood battles that impacted America.
Christopher certainly is delivering new insights regarding the discovery of documents now available to western scholars. Yet, there must also be an accepted acknowledgement the folklore of Ho Chi Minh, easily nurtured by the victors, actually permits a more even and understood review of how France would collapse at the siege.
Perhaps these details reveal how the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu was a decade in the making. And for more than a generation, Americans and even French citizens would be amazed at the resilience of the Viet Minh. This was no rag-tag group of guerrillas in black pajamas. This was an effort led by Ho but driven by several key leaders with the assistance of China and the Soviet Union in that order.
So much of Christopher’s writings reveal over and over how poorly France understood their enemy. The French never stopped viewing their enemy as nothing more than a territory under revolt:
In 1949, to complicate matters further, a third political entity entered the picture when the French presided over the creation of the “Associated State of Vietnam” under the leadership of the ex-emperor Bao Dai. “Association” was the legally binding term that kept this new Vietnamese state (along with its Laotian and Cambodian counterparts) within the confines of an Indochinese colonial federation, itself part of a larger French Union directed from Paris.
Pg. 42
Leaving the infrastructure foundation behind
Newly released documents reveal a very sophisticated level of planning made by the Viet Minh against French infrastructure. This key infrastructure including radio lines literally was built across the entire countryside and abandoned by the French following the Japanese invasion of China.
Not only does Christopher reveal how various political groups collaborated with Ho Chi Minh, but also how French attitudes towards their former slaves never could acknowledge how sophisticated the Viet Minh operations developed:
Backed by the Chinese, Ho began transforming the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in communist ways. In 1951, for example, he presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Workers Party, replacing the one he had first established in Hong Kong two decades earlier. The Vietnamese communists aligned this new party ideologically with its bigger brothers in Moscow and Beijing.
Pgs. 48-49.
A prelude to My Lai
There are indeed parallel lines to the American tragedy at My Lai first attributed to French actions in the early 1950s. These horrific events remain not well known, especially in the immediate aftermath of the French defeat. Resistance to French troops via horrific events would turn the countryside towards the Viet Minh:
For it was also in these borderlands, where French military and political control was weakest, but the power of heavily armed local commanders greatest, that some of the darkest violence of the Indochina War occurred. Before Nguyen Cong Luan had even turned sixteen, he tells us in disturbing and often graphic detail, how he had somehow survived French arrest, ferocious beatings, and near execution as his village flipped from one side to the other—and then back again (the worst possible combination). Luan witnessed horrible civilian massacres, including torture, rape, and summary executions. As he and others make clear, entire villages—hundreds of human beings—could get wiped out in a matter of minutes in these contested areas when French patrols moved in….But unknown to this day in France are the massacres its army committed in My Trach in 1947 (300 civilians, women and children—killed) and My Thuy a year later (over 500 civilians, young and old—all dead).
pg. 141
Life on the run
Ho Chi Minh was well known for traveling abroad, including extensive trips to Russia and China. He certainly understood the sacrifices that would be required to defeat an advanced enemy and launch his communist Vietnam. Perhaps Christopher’s insights to multiple famines, accelerated by French troops contributed to the French loss in Indochina.
Tell the hard truth first
In conclusion, Christopher answers deep questions regarding how the French defeat developed. From 1945 to 1953 this victory in the valley consumed a full decade of dedicated resistance.