Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975

The Austrian-born French writer and adventurer Bernard Fall’s books on his nation’s Indochina war are often cited as classics: they offer vivid anecdotage, some of it believable, and shrewd analysis of the difficulties of conducting counter-insurgency. Yet they embrace an essentially heroic vision of the French army, while remaining mute about the many atrocities its soldiers committed, of which Fall, as a contemporary witness, must have been aware. Vietnamese in French service showed little more sensitivity: American Howard Simpson watched exuberant parachutists tearing down a Saigon street in a jeep which crushed and scattered a row of bamboo panniers, filled with red peppers laid out to dry in the sun. After the vehicle passed, two old women set to work painstakingly to collect the debris and salvage what they could of their ravaged wares. Here was a minuscule event amid a vast tragedy, yet Simpson asked himself, how could it fail to influence the hearts and minds of its victims, those two elderly street-sellers?

Early in 1948 a half-hearted attempt was made to establish an anti-communist political front under the patronage of Bao Dai, who returned from exile shortly afterwards at the age of thirty-four. Yet the emperor, indolent and spoilt, was soon preoccupied with currency racketeering in partnership with French politicians. Bereft of both moral and political authority, his interests were girls, hunting and yachts. Thus France resolved to settle its difficulties by military means, and eventually deployed in Indochina sixty-two infantry battalions including thirteen North African, three paratroop, and six Foreign Legion. In addition several hundred thousand militiamen, of doubtful utility, guarded villages and roads.

Until the last stage of the war, the French never lacked for local volunteers, who needed the money. Some Vietnamese soldiers distinguished themselves in France’s service – brave, proficient, loyal to their salt. Many more, however, proved reluctant to fight with anything like the necessary determination. Moreover, French commanders never resolved a chronic dilemma: how to concentrate superior strength against Giap’s regular formations in the north, while protecting a thousand prospective targets elsewhere. Neither the French and their allies nor the communists had strength enough to dominate the whole country. In Christopher Goscha’s words: ‘Instead they all administered competing, archipelago-like states, whose sovereignties and control over people and territories could expand and shrink as armies moved in and out and the balance of power shifted.’ It seems to some historians strange that the French, who had so recently suffered a cruel occupation of their own homeland, should decline to recognise that atrocities alienate. Yet some Frenchmen derived a different message from their experience: that Nazi harshness had worked, until mid-1944 cowing an overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

In October 1949 the struggle intensified dramatically. China, Vietnam’s giant northern neighbour, acquired a communist government led by Mao Zedong, which set aside his nation’s historic animosity to back the Vietminh. Suddenly, Ho and Giap gained access to safe havens and American weapons captured from Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalists. Vietminh training schools were established behind Mao’s frontier. Hundreds of Chinese military advisers attached themselves to Giap’s troops. In the north-west of Vietnam, the French began to suffer calamitious attrition. They were striving to hold the country with forces largely confined to the roads, against an enemy of the jungle and mountains. One ambush on Route 4, which twisted through mountain defiles just below the Chinese border, cost a column of a hundred vehicles half that number, and most of the occupants were butchered. The French were obliged to relinquish swathes of territory.

One of the most extraordinary human stories of that period concerns Le Duan, who would later succeed Ho Chi Minh. Born in 1907 in central Vietnam, he was a committed communist revolutionary a decade before Ho returned from exile, serving two long terms of imprisonment. He now acted as secretary of COSVN, the Vietminh’s southern directorate. Where other leaders had their own huts, bodyguards and cooks, the grimly austere Le Duan chose to sleep in a sampan moored deep in the Mekong delta, from which he worked with two aides. Among their couriers was a pretty, French-educated girl named Nguyen Thuy Nga. She was in love with another revolutionary, but the province Party committee had terminated the relationship, because the man had a wife and family elsewhere.

One day in 1950 Le Duan asked Nga to join him for breakfast. She was somewhat in awe of the ferocious energy and commitment that had earned him the nickname ‘two hundred-candlepower’. Tall, lean, gaunt, his clothes were in rags. Chain-smoking incessantly, he seemed to have no thought for anything save the revolution, and was twice Nga’s age. Before long, however, he announced that he had chosen her as his bride. She remonstrated that he, like her previous lover, already had a wife and children in the north. Le Duan shrugged that he had been victim of an arranged marriage, and had known nothing of his ‘wife’ for twenty years. Their wedding was held at COSVN jungle headquarters with Le Duan’s close comrade Le Duc Tho acting as matchmaker. The couple’s new life was scarcely domesticated: there was no trousseau, for the bride owned only a single pair of trousers. When they shifted camp, taking what little they owned in sampans, often Nga had to leap into the water alongside the men and push the boat over shallow places. They were always hungry, and seldom found more than a few jungle roots and vegetables with which to flavour the meagre rice ration.

Through 1951–52 Nga worked devotedly as Le Duan’s political secretary, and gave birth to a daughter named Vu Anh. Her husband seemed to love her, and once astonished her by a gesture of shameless frivolity when she approached COSVN through a patch of elephant grass. Glimpsing her he ran forward, seized her by both hands and swung her joyfully around himself. Here was an almost unique glimpse of human frailty in the life of this icily focused man who would play a role in Vietnam’s wars second only to that of Ho.

From 1951 onwards, the Vietminh emphasised ever more strongly the centrality of ideology, which in earlier years Ho downplayed. The Chinese supplied not merely military tutelage, but also political advice about how to establish a communist society, for which a key imperative was suppression of dissent: in the first two years of Mao Zedong’s rule, he killed an estimated two million of his own people. Now, in many Vietminh-controlled areas, radios were banned, to deny peasants access to information save that dispensed by the Party. Most intellectuals and middle-class adherents of the movement became outcasts.

Because the most fiercely contested battlefields lay in the north, that region’s people suffered dreadfully at the hands of both sides. Nguyen Cong Luan grew up in a small village near Hanoi, which reluctantly accepted French suzerainty. In consequence his father was seized by the Vietminh, subjected to torture, and eventually met death in one of their punishment camps. Yet colonial troops frequently detained his son, and on several occasions the boy feared for his life. France’s definition of its own role in Indochina as a mission civilisatrice was mocked by the reality. Luan wrote: ‘Our submission to the French military authority did not protect us from being looted, raped, tortured, or killed. Every private, whether he was a Frenchman, an African, or a Vietnamese could do almost anything he wanted to a Vietnamese civilian without fear of being tried in a court or punished by his superiors … A sergeant … had the power of a viceroy in the Middle Ages … People addressed him as “Ngai”, a word equivalent to “Your Excellency”, only used in connection with gods and mandarins.’

The colonists’ conspicuously privileged existence enabled the Vietminh to exploit their own austerity as a propaganda gift. Lt. Gen. Sir Gerald Templer, Britain’s security overlord during Malaya’s insurgency, observed with dry wit: ‘You can see today how the communists work. They seldom go to the races. They don’t often go to dinner or cocktail parties. And they don’t play golf.’ Since French draftees were not obliged to serve in Vietnam, most of their army’s rank and file were mercenaries – North Africans, West Africans or Vietnamese. Half the Legion’s men were Germans. A licensed indiscipline prevailed among off-duty troops, with widespread alcoholism. The scent of burning caramel revealed the proclivity of old hands for opium-smoking as surely as did their yellow complexions and an oily smudge on the left forefinger. When Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny assumed proconsular powers in December 1950, he began to create an explicitly Vietnamese conscript army. ‘Vietnamisation’ would become a dirty word by 1971, but the French made it so twenty years earlier with their term for de Lattre’s policy – ‘jaunissment’ – ‘yellowing’ the war, or at least its corpses. No one held the new Vietnamese force in much esteem, partly because a fifty-thousand-piaster bribe procured escape from service.

Giap now deployed in northern Vietnam six ten-thousand-man divisions, well-armed with light weapons, though short of food, clothing and equipment. In the early years the Vietminh had no waterproof clothing or weather protection. Only in 1952 were there issues of flimsy coverings, which seemed miraculous to those simple peasants. In the words of a communist soldier, ‘We marvelled that mankind had produced a piece of paper that rain ran off.’

The French continued to have their successes: gunboats in the Red River delta choked rice shipments to communist forces further north. On 25 May 1950, after the enemy bombarded a French camp at Dong Khe, a few miles inside Vietnam’s border with China, parachute-landed reinforcements drove the attackers scuttling away into the jungle. Nonetheless, colonial garrisons in the mountainous far north, holding positions linked by ribbons of road strung along narrow valleys, remained vulnerable, especially when Giap’s regular units acquired mortars and artillery. The French had been rash enough to extend delicate tendrils – relatively small forces – into antheaps crawling with Vietminh. While the colonial power had far more soldiers countrywide, in the north-west Giap could sometimes outnumber his foes.

Early on 16 September, five Vietminh battalions, supported by artillery, once more attacked the French base at Dong Khe. The communists had spent weeks preparing and planning, a hallmark of all their important operations. Early in the battle, Giap’s headquarters was alarmed by reports that one regiment had lost its way, failing to reach the start line, and that initial casualties were heavy. But Ho Chi Minh, who had walked many miles to witness the assault, urged calm and perseverance. After fifty-two hours of fierce fighting, the attackers prevailed: Dong Khe fell at 1000 on the 18th. An officer and thirty-two Foreign Legionnaires escaped just before the end, emerging from the jungle to rejoin French forces after a terrible week-long march.

Giap now embarked upon a banquet at his enemy’s expense in the mountainous Chinese border region. The French resigned themselves to abandoning another camp at Cao Bang, twenty miles north of Dong Khe. On 3 October its foul-mouthed but popular commander Lt. Col. Pierre Charton led forth a truck column bearing 2,600 mainly Moroccan soldiers, five hundred civilians including the personnel of the town brothel, together with a tail of artillery and heavy equipment. Charton had ignored orders to abandon such baggage: he determined to retreat with dignity and honour, a gesture of stubbornness that cost hundreds of lives. In defiles nine miles south of Cao Bang his straggling caravan was checked by a succession of blown bridges and ambushes. Within twenty-four hours the retreat stalled, amid teeming enemy forces firing from dense vegetation on higher ground.

Charton’s predicament represented only one-half of a horror story, however. A second force, designated Task Force Bayard and composed of 3,500 mainly Moroccan troops stiffened by a crack paratroop battalion, was dispatched north to meet the Cao Bang column and support its passage to safety. Bayard left That Khe on 30 September, commanded by Col. Marcel Le Page. As the force approached Dong Khe it too was halted by Vietminh, raking and pounding the column with machine-gun and mortar fire. Higher headquarters ordered Le Page to adopt desperate measures: burn his vehicles, abandon his guns, take to the jungle, march his men around the Vietminh to meet Charton. The experience that followed was dreadful indeed. In accordance with his almost deranged instructions, Le Page led his men away from the French lines, ever deeper into a wilderness, to link hands with another doomed force.

Marchers soon began to fall out and vanish, never to be seen again: a man wounded was a man fated to die. Each climb and descent was agony for heavily-laden infantry, drenched by rain that also denied them air support. The Vietminh were weary too, after days of strife and pursuit, but they enjoyed the peerless thrill of winning: they knew the French were in desperate straits. Giap issued an exultant 6 October order of the day: ‘The enemy is hungrier and colder than you!’ Charton and Le Page met next day, their columns alike shrunken by losses, lacking water, food, ammunition. Then the Vietminh struck again – fifteen battalions pouring fire into their exhausted enemies. The Moroccans broke in panic. Their commanders ordered dispersal into small parties, what became almost literally a ‘Sauve qui peut!’ Charton was wounded and taken prisoner; most of the other fugitives were killed piecemeal. Just six hundred men eventually reached French positions further south; some 4,800 were listed as dead or missing, while material losses were immense: 450 trucks, eight thousand rifles, 950 automatic weapons and a hundred mortars. Giap celebrated by getting drunk with his Chinese advisers, for what he later claimed was the first time in his life.

On 18 October the French abandoned another northern camp at Lang Son, where huge stocks of munitions fell into communist hands. The cost of these battles was high for the Vietminh – an estimated nine thousand casualties. But whereas the world quickly discovered the scale of the French disaster, now as in the future the communists suppressed all tidings that might tarnish their triumphs, demoralise their supporters. Not all the fighting went one way: during the early months of 1951 Giap failed in a succession of large-scale assaults. In January when the Vietminh attacked a base thirty miles north-west of Hanoi, French air power and especially napalm inflicted crushing losses – six thousand dead, eight thousand wounded. The lesson for the communist commander was that he must still expect to be beaten when he committed large forces within reach of French air- and firepower.

A Western general who suffered such a succession of defeats as did Giap in the spring of 1951, creating such hecatombs of his own men’s corpses, would have faced a political and media storm, almost certainly been sacked. The Vietminh politburo, however, faced no public scrutiny. Ho Chi Minh, the only arbiter who mattered, kept faith in his general. Giap, like Marshal Zhukov in World War II, was never held to account for the shocking ‘butchers’ bills’ his victories imposed. This gave him an important edge over an enemy whose people were reading daily, in newspapers back home in France, about the anguish of their army in Indochina.

2 WASHINGTON PICKS UP THE TAB

Perhaps the most famous lines in Graham Greene’s novel set in Saigon during the late French era are delivered by his protagonist, the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who says of The Quiet American Alden Pyle: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused … impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.’ The most historically important trend in the war was that as the French reeled before its soaring cost, they turned to the Americans to pay the bills. Which, from 1950 onwards, they did. Far away in Washington, policy-makers became ever more alarmed by the notion that South-East Asia might follow China, submerged beneath a communist inundation. Moreover, the US sought leverage to reconcile a bitterly reluctant France to the rearmament of Germany. Dollars, not francs, soon paid for almost every bomb and bullet expended on the Vietnam battlefield.

American largesse was prompted by communist threats to the stability and democratic institutions of many nations, notably including Greece, Italy, France, Turkey. George Kennan, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and author of the famous 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow, characterised Soviet assertiveness as a ‘fluid stream’ that sought to fill ‘every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power’. Stalin and later Mao supported revolutionary movements wherever these seemed sustainable. On 12 March 1947 America’s president proclaimed before Congress what became known as the Truman doctrine: ‘At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one … I believe that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’

Yet while the international communist threat was real, and the Western commitment to resist it deserves historic admiration, it caused the US and its allies to commit some grievous injustices. For almost two generations Washington acquiesced in the fascist tyranny of Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, and also sustained Central and South American dictatorships whose only merits lay in their protestations of anti-communism. In southern Africa, the British and Americans indulged white minority rule for decades after its indefensibility had become apparent. And in Indochina the French persuaded the West’s Croesus-state that the cause of colonialism was also that of anti-communism. After Mao Zedong’s forces swept China, conservative Americans appalled by the ‘loss’ of their favourite Asian nation demanded stern measures to ensure that such an outcome was not repeated elsewhere. Henry Luce, proprietor of Time-Life and a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists, threw the weight of his empire behind the anti-communist cause in Vietnam, for which it remained an advocate through two decades.

The Sino–Soviet treaty of February 1950 seemed to create a real threat of a Red Asia. The American conservative Michael Lind has written in his revisionist study of Vietnam: ‘On the evening of February 14, 1950, in a banquet hall in the Kremlin, three men whose plans would subject Indochina to a half century of warfare, tyranny and economic stagnation, and inspire political turmoil in the United States and Europe, stood side by side: Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh … There was an international communist conspiracy, and Ho Chi Minh was a charter member of it.’ Kim Il-sung’s June invasion of South Korea galvanised a frightened West. US and allied forces hastened to the Korean peninsula where they fought a three-year war, latterly against the Chinese. The Korean experience goes far to explain why the Americans threw their support behind French colonialism in Indochina, without diminishing the rashness of the policy.

At the State Department Dean Acheson and his assistant secretary Dean Rusk were haunted by memories of the disasters that had followed the democracies’ 1930s appeasement of fascist dictators. The Democratic administration faced mounting congressional pressure to show steel towards the ‘Moscow–Beijing axis’. Sen. William Fulbright observed later that it was essential to judge contemporary US policies against the background of indisputable Soviet expansionism: ‘Here we were in this deadly confrontation with the Russians, and we thought it our duty to thwart them everywhere.’ The McCarthyite witchhunt for left-wing sympathisers in the US government caused the foreign service officers who knew most about Asia to be winnowed out of the State Department, leaving behind an awesome ignorance, especially about Vietnam.

Not everyone in Foggy Bottom, however, wanted to see America embrace colonialist France. State’s Raymond Fosdick early in 1950 urged presciently against repeating America’s China blunder, of becoming ‘allied with reaction’. Whatever were residual Parisian delusions, Fosdick wrote, Indochina would soon become independent. ‘Why, therefore, do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?’ The French were losing their war not primarily because they lacked guns and ammunition, but because they would offer nothing that any reasonable Vietnamese might want.

In the following year a young congressman from Massachusetts visited Saigon and wrote in his trip diary: ‘We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what the new nations want.’ Here was wisdom from John F. Kennedy, but Americans were in no mood to heed it. George Kennan in old age bemoaned the manner in which his advocacy of containing the Soviets, and later the Chinese, was misinterpreted in Washington to justify employing to this end almost exclusively military tools, whereas political, cultural, economic and diplomatic ones were often more appropriate.

During 1950’s Korean winter panic, when outright defeat for UN forces seemed possible, Washington signed off a massive Indochina aid increase. Thereafter, as France’s will to fight weakened, that of the US stiffened: the colonial army became increasingly an American proxy. Truman and Acheson, far from pressing Paris to negotiate with the Vietminh, urged it to do no such thing. Here was Washington’s first big blunder in Indochina, from which US policy-making never recovered. Its military aid contribution ballooned to $150m, delivered almost without strings – the proud French refused to confide in their paymasters about operational plans. By early 1951 they were receiving more than 7,200 tons of military equipment a month. The imperial power waged its war wearing American helmets, using many American weapons, driving American jeeps and trucks, flying mostly American planes. Under such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that when American soldiers a decade later arrived in Vietnam, they appeared to its people children of their earlier oppressors.

By September 1951 it had become apparent to objective observers that the French had no realistic prospect of holding Indochina. Yet after their warlord Gen. de Lattre de Tassigny staged a brilliantly theatrical personal mission to the US, within four months Washington shipped to his forces 130,000 tons of equipment, including fifty-three million rounds of ammunition, eight thousand trucks and jeeps, 650 fighting vehicles, two hundred aircraft, fourteen thousand automatic weapons and 3,500 radios. This was de Lattre’s last important contribution before his abrupt departure from Indochina, and death from cancer.

By the end of 1953, the new Eisenhower Republican administration was paying 80 per cent of the cost of the war, a billion dollars a year. The British, still important allies and increasingly expert at retreats from empire, deplored this: they believed that no quantity of guns and bullets could avert looming French expulsion from Indochina. The government of Winston Churchill was alarmed by what it considered an ill-directed US obsession. Selwyn Lloyd, a Foreign Office minister, wrote in August 1953: ‘There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China and to a lesser extent Russia which borders on hysteria.’ The Vietminh were branded, of course, as instruments of the satanic forces in play.

3 PEASANTS

A small minority of Vietnamese who were sufficiently educated to think beyond their own villages witnessed the brutalities of the Vietminh, and welcomed the promise of foreign succour. A schoolboy in the north wrote: ‘From the books I read, I believed that the Americans might be at least better than the French … I was sure that like any other country the US must have some interest when it helped its allies, but … the Americans seemed to be generous in assisting poor countries.’ However, it is easy to understand why many Vietnamese adopted a contrary view, and supported a revolutionary movement that promised the removal of an oppressive colonial regime, together with an assault on a landowning class, French and indigenous, that had exploited the peasantry for generations.

Such was the poverty of rural Vietnam that a man with a primary school certificate was respected as an ‘intellectual’. Some couples owned only a single pair of trousers, which husband and wife took turns to wear. Much of the peasants’ daily labour involved paddling water uphill to irrigate the paddies, often by moonlight because the days became so hot, in good times singing as they worked. The rice had to be fertilised once, weeded three or four times, cut twice. The spring crop accounted for three-quarters of the harvest, because it profited from higher rainfall. Poor villagers might supplement their income by trekking into the wildernesses to gather firewood for sale. Some migrated to towns to work. Those burdened by the worst indebtedness hired themselves out as field labourers.

Family and village were the dominant social institutions. Beside nearly every hut stood its wooden altar, containing offerings of fruit and sweets: the richer the family, the grander its altar. Few parents felt embarrassed by establishing a hierarchy of affection for their many children, rooted in a judgement about which were the ablest and most hard-working. A father’s word was law, though mothers arguably wielded the real power. There was a popular saying: ‘Without a father you could still enjoy rice and fish, but without a mother you might expect to eat only fallen leaves.’ Beyond family, peasants said, ‘The king rules – subject to village regulations.’ Most Catholic communities had a bell tower, Buddhist ones a temple and magnolia trees. There might also be a meeting hall called the dinh, and maybe a carpenter’s and a tailor’s shop.

Villages were subdivided into hamlets in which much of life and labour was shared: at new year people worked together to make rice cakes that were cooked overnight, then threaded on fine strands of bamboo. They gathered to wish parents long life, health and wealth: the Vietnamese, like most Asians, believed that each year conferred upon the old an additional accession of wisdom. After a pig had been slaughtered, children might beg its bladder as a plaything. They played hide-and-seek, shot ‘jute guns’ made from bamboo pipes – like Western pea-shooters – or competed at another game, ‘hitting stick’. At festivals they might taste jam, sweets, peanuts, birds’ eggs and squashes coated in sugar. For the most part, however, they knew only rice and vegetables – and were thankful to get them.

Some Vietnamese later idealised the simplicity of peasant life before war descended. One said: ‘Everybody knew each other and never closed doors.’ She waxed lyrical about ‘the beauty of togetherness’, shared tasks and pleasures. Yet such nostalgia was rare among the vastly greater number who recalled only hardship, persecution and near-starvation. Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh was born east of Hanoi in 1948, daughter of a poor peasant who cultivated four hundred square yards of rice. Her parents and their six children occupied a thatched hut in a hamlet of some thirty families, none of which owned a radio set or bicycle. Few inhabitants could read: when an occasional newspaper reached them, people gathered under a tree, while a literate villager with a good voice perched on a branch to read aloud to them interesting items.

Such people grew up without photographs of parents or children, because none owned a camera. Pyjamas, ba ba dress, brown in the north and black in the south, was the clothing of peasants which only incidentally became the uniform of guerrillas. Infant mortality rates were appalling, partly because it was customary to sever umbilical cords with fragments of broken glass. Villages frequently had to be abandoned because of flood or famine. Binh had no memories of childhood happinesses: life was merely an unremitting struggle for existence, in which children gathered snails to supplement the family diet. At twenty she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party, regarding Ho Chi Minh with quasi-religious fervour as ‘the indispensable, incomparable leader’.

Although Ho’s armed supporters in the south-west never matched the spectacular military successes achieved by Giap’s formations in the north, his movement won widespread support on the single issue of land redistribution. Even prosperous tenant-farmers craved ownership: many were hopelessly in thrall to creditors who appropriated up to half their production. Debtors could become body-slaves, enlisted to rock a landlord’s hammock. They eagerly supported the secret land-redistribution plan of the Vietminh, one of whose cadres told Norman Lewis in 1950: ‘Our enemies are slowly converting us to communism. If it is only by becoming communists that we shall achieve our liberty, then we shall become communists.’

A historian has described Giap’s soldiers as ‘simple men whose world view was formed entirely by their own and their families’ immediate experience … coloured by oppression and hardship over generations’. The foremost strengths of Vietminh fighters were discipline, patience, ingenuity; a genius for fieldcraft and especially camouflage; tolerance of hardship and sacrifice. Above all there was motivation: they yearned to share the fruits of a political, economic and social revolution. Itinerant communist cadres launched political-education programmes and composed folk songs to help villagers learn their alphabets. There was a ‘learn through play’ programme for children. Virtuous as that may sound, it was reinforced by compulsion: cadres caused villagers to display banners decorated with flowers, proclaiming ‘Long live the fighters against illiteracy’. In some places non-readers were wantonly humiliated, forced to crawl through mud to go to market. As ever when communist doctrine was imposed, victims were reminded that this was cruelty with a purpose, for the ultimate good of The People.

As for more drastic penalties, even an official Party history admitted later that ‘not a few innocent people were killed’. Simple country folk serving the Vietminh assumed that any man who affected blue trousers and a white shirt with a tailor’s label must be a French spy. Whereas the Mafia employed the euphemism of sending an enemy to ‘sleep with the fishes’, in the equally watery words of Vietnam’s communists he was dispatched ‘to search for shrimps’. Killings were conducted with maximum brutality and publicity: Vietminh death squads favoured burying victims alive or eviscerating them in front of assembled neighbours. ‘Better that a possible innocent dies than that a guilty man escapes,’ ran a Party catchphrase. In the ‘liberated zones’ the Vietminh established notorious punishment camps. When Nguyen Cong Luan’s father died in one of them, a cigarette lighter was the only possession his jailers grudgingly returned to the widow.

In 1947 the Vietminh conducted an ideological ‘cleansing’ campaign, in which a large though never quantified number of ‘class enemies’ were murdered. Any landlord or government office-holder lived under threat of a death sentence which extended to his family. The Catholic religion bore the taint of foreign ownership, and thus its adherents were vulnerable. Local denunciation sessions – dau to – held in the courtyard of a pagoda or landlord’s house, inspired the dread their organisers intended. Farmers or peasants, often impelled by grudges, rehearsed landlords’ alleged crimes before people’s courts run by Vietminh cadres. If death sentences were pronounced, a victim might there and then be shot, stoned to death, hanged, or face a crueller death. At My Thanh in the Mekong delta a Cao Dai functionary, about to be buried alive, pleaded for a merciful bullet. His killers observed contemptuously that ammunition was being conserved for ‘the pirates’ – the French.

As a peasant child, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh remembered landowners hiding from their accusers by immersing themselves in the nearby pond and covering their heads with reeds, while others adopted crude disguises. Some failed, and she stood among her fellow-villagers watching their trials. Even as a loyal Party cadre, she later admitted that ‘a lot of those people were wrongly accused’. In the north a ‘people’s court’ was often staged as a theatrical event, held at night in an area the size of a football pitch, ringed by bamboo torches. A presidium of seven judges, poor peasants, was attended by a Land Reform cadre and sometimes also Chinese advisers. Behind the stage hung portraits of Ho, Mao and Stalin, together with painted slogans such as ‘Down with the Treacherous Reactionary Landlords’.

As for summary executions, one peasant retained an indelible childhood memory of the Vietminh visiting his northern village in 1952, seizing two unarmed soldiers in French service who had called to wish friends a happy new year, and beheading them behind his family’s house. This twelve-year-old said later: ‘I can still hear the sound of their necks being cut through.’ Then the guerrillas left, and French troops arrived. They accused neighbours of responsibility for the men’s death – and burnt every surrounding house. In 1953 the Vietminh sentenced the child to spend two weeks in re-education camp, conducting self-criticism: ‘Everything that I did wrong, or my parents or grandparents did wrong, had to be written down. Everybody had to think hard what to write.’ When Stalin died, all prisoners were obliged to assume black mourning bands. Soon after, a French offensive forced the guerrillas to flee, liberating the boy. He and his family briefly returned to their house, then fled to Hanoi.

The struggle’s seesaw fortunes imposed continual strain. A poor peasant in the Mekong delta expressed his delight during a period of Vietminh reverses, when their economic blockade was lifted and he was for a time free to sell his produce: ‘The people were very happy … I myself said many times, “I hope that just one side will control us – no matter which one. Living under the control of both is too much.”’ Anh, a daughter of landowning parents, joined the Vietminh because she sought the expulsion of the French, married a fellow-fighter, gave birth to a son, and shared the hardships of life as a guerrilla in the Mekong delta. In 1952, however, she quit: ‘I saw too many frightening things. The communists were grabbing all the power and killing off the nationalists.’ She attributed her own survival merely to the fact that she was too young to pose a threat.

In the ‘liberated zones’ of the north, rather as some British people in old age became nostalgic for the legendary ‘blitz spirit’ of 1940, Vietminh later looked back on wartime as a halcyon era. Guitarist Van Ky, who became a guerrilla strolling minstrel, enthused, ‘The spirit was marvellous! We imagined that we were all part of one big family.’ Volunteer canteens were formed, known as ‘soldiers’ mothers’ restaurants’, at which local women provided free food for fighters. Ky and his trio walked hundreds of miles to perform: ‘There was something very interesting and wonderful about this. Even though we were in a war zone where the fighting was very fierce, every night we would organise a show, and draw big crowds. The songs I sang weren’t very good, and we did not harmonise well, but we would tell stories, recite poetry.’ Often the lights around the stage had to be masked, to escape French attention. Ky performed as far south as Hue, where he slept on the bank of the Perfume River, ate food brought out from the city, smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and briefly fell in love with a girl in one of his audiences.

Ky persuaded his English-speaking fellow-performer Hai Chau to read aloud to them from the Reader’s Digest, to help him learn English phrases, in preparation for life after the war. Some of these were unexpected, such as ‘I have a surprise for you in my pocket.’ Periodically on their travels they would be abruptly awakened by a voice shouting ‘Tay can!’ – ‘French sweep!’ As the enemy approached, Vietminh fighters would say wearily, ‘The buffalo are out.’ Hai Chau wrote a song with that title, which soldiers loved, satirising the occupiers. Ky was one among many revolutionaries who discovered romance in their shared experience. It offered Vietnamese what the French had for a century denied them: self-respect. Moreover the passage of each month, then of each year, increased the belief of millions of Vietnamese that the best reason to support the communists was that they were destined to win. A little peasant girl sat up far into the night with her mother and sisters in their hut near Hue, making Vietminh flags, ‘red with the yellow star, because we knew that the people would want them to celebrate … victory’.

Yet it seems mistaken uncritically to accept Van Ky’s picture of the war years as a romantic idyll: the privations and sacrifices were terrible. Tensions increased between the revolutionary movement’s peasant supporters and its bourgeois ones. Nguyen Duc Huy, born in 1931 the son of a poor farmer, was sent to study at the new Vietminh military academy in China, where he found the atmosphere poisoned by class struggles and relentless self-criticism sessions. A cadet who had been decorated for bravery in battle killed himself under ideological interrogation. Huy was variously accused of running a French spy network and a nationalist assassination team, then imprisoned for seven months in an underground cell. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘The injustice of it all is impossible to describe.’ What seems extraordinary is that after such experiences he served as a company commander against the French, then led a battalion against the Americans, without losing faith in the Party.

Throughout Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan’s early years with the Vietminh she was harassed about her background in a wealthy dynasty. Her father was a member of the royal family who had served in the emperor’s cabinet. With Giap’s army, at first she was merely described dismissively as ‘bo doi nhoc’ – ‘a kid soldier’. Later, however, despite her passion for the cause, comrades said scornfully, ‘This girl went to a French school – why have they sent her here? How can a mandarin’s daughter live with the Resistance?’ Toan said later: ‘They made things hard for me. I was very unhappy.’ She herself remained nonetheless loyal to the Vietminh, but the enthusiasm for the guerrillas of another bourgeois, sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky, waned: ‘For them the Resistance movement was not merely about expelling foreigners. It was about turning the tables, becoming rulers, revenge.’ Ky eventually took an army commission with the French, becoming a pilot.

Despite heavy losses in clashes around Hanoi, the Vietminh continued to expand their northern ‘liberated zones’. By 1952 they were estimated to control a quarter of the south’s population; three-quarters of the people of central Vietnam; over half in the north. The French wasted immense resources on fortifications. The so-called ‘De Lattre line’, created to protect the Red River delta, poured fifty-one million cubic yards of concrete into 2,200 pillboxes, each one of which was allotted a number prefaced by ‘PK’ – poste kilométrique. This suited the Vietminh strategy of grignotage – gnawing away at French strength: they progressively eliminated such isolated positions, always in darkness. The first that defenders knew of their nemesis was the explosion of a pole charge in the barbed wire, followed by cries of ‘Tien-len!’ – ‘Forward!’ – from attacking communist infantry. By dawn the Vietminh would be gone, leaving only corpses, often mutilated, and blackened patches where mortars or rockets had exploded on earth or concrete. And in Hanoi or Haiphong, one French staff officer would mutter to another, ‘Did you hear what happened to PK141 last night?’

The war threw up many larger-than-life French leaders, such as the huge, red-bearded Col. Paul Vanuxem, a fifty-year-old intellectual warrior, qualified to hold tenure as a professor of philosophy. Maj. Marcel Bigeard had gone into World War II as a sergeant, and parachuted into France in 1944. Col. Christian de Castries was a cavalryman and a dandy, never without his silk scarf, who cherished his reputation as a ladies’ man. There were famous women, too – the likes of Valérie André, a doctor who was also a helicopter pilot, and the highly decorated airborne nurse Paule Dupont d’Isigny.

In the autumn of 1952 Giap concentrated three divisions on the east bank of the Red River, tasked with seizing Nghia Lo, a strategically important ridge. Thanks to night marches and brilliant use of daylight concealment, each man looking to the backpack camouflage of the soldier in front of him, they deployed unnoticed by the French. Then, in a series of assaults that began on 17 October, they overran a chain of posts. Marcel Bigeard’s para battalion covered the retreat of the surviving detachments towards the Black River, in a series of actions that became a nightmare legend. They were obliged to abandon their wounded, and local people later reported finding Bigeard’s trail adorned with the severed heads of those left behind, set on stakes by the Vietminh. The major and those of his men who survived were greeted as heroes when at last they reached the French lines, but the Nghia Lo battles had been a significant disaster.