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By Root 894 0

A high-ranking officer, Major General Thomas Trapnell, returning from service with MA AG in 1954, reported a war of paradoxes, in which “there is no popular will to win on the part of the Vietnamese” and in which “the leader of the Rebels is more popular than the Vietnamese Chief of State.” His recognition of absent will, however, did not preclude this officer from recommending more vigorous prosecution of the war. Eisenhower, too, had to admit at a press conference to “a lack of enthusiasm which we would like to have there.” In his memoirs, published in 1963 (well before his successors took America into the war), he acknowledged that “the mass of the population supported the enemy,” making it impossible for the French to rely on their Vietnamese troops. American aid “could not cure the defect.”

By 1953 French domestic opinion had grown weary and disgusted with an endless war for a cause unacceptable to many French citizens. The conviction was growing that France could not at the same time maintain guns in Indochina and guns for the defense of Europe while providing the butter of domestic needs. Although the United States was paying most of the bill, the French people, assisted by Communist propaganda, were raising increasing clamor against the war and mounting heavy political pressure for a negotiated settlement.

Dulles’ desperate effort was now exerted to keep the French fighting lest the awful prospect of losing Indochina to the Communists become a reality. Early in 1954 forty B-26 bombers with 200 United States Air Force technicians in civilian clothes were despatched to Indochina, and Congress appropriated $400 million plus another $385 million to finance the offensive planned by General Henri Navarre, in a last fevered burst of French military effort. By the time of the terminal catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu a few months later, American investment in Indochina since 1946 had reached $2 billion and the United States was paying 80 percent of the French expenditure for the war, not counting aid to the Associated States intended to stabilize their governments and strengthen their resistance to the Viet-Minh. Like most such aid, the bulk of it trickled away into the pockets of profiteering officials. As the Ohly memorandum had predicted, the United States was ineluctably approaching the point of supplanting rather than supplementing the French in what remained, whether we liked it or not, a colonial war.

Knowing what was wrong, American officials kept insisting in endless policy papers addressed to one another and in hortatory advice to the French that independence must be “accelerated” and genuine. Here was folly shining bright. How could the French be persuaded to fight more energetically to hold Vietnam and simultaneously be brought to pledge eventual true independence? Why should they invest a greater effort to retain a colonial possession if they were not going to retain it?

The contradiction was clear enough to the French, who, whether they were for or against the war, wanted some form of limited sovereignty that would keep Indochina within the French Union, a postwar euphemism for empire. French pride, French glory, French sacrifice, not to mention French commerce, demanded it, the more so as France feared the example for Algeria if Indochina succeeded in breaking loose. In American policy the underlying absurdity of expecting both battle and renunciation from the French was possible because Americans thought of the war only in terms of fighting Communism, which could include independence, and closed their eyes to its aspect as the dying grip of colonialism, which obviously could not.

Mesmerized by a vision of Chinese intervention, Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others believed that as long as the Chinese were discouraged from entering by subtle warnings of “massive”—meaning nuclear—retaliation or other American action against the mainland, the balance in Indochina would eventually swing toward the French. Characteristically this ignored the Viet-Minh and a hundred