Documentaries: Vietnam

The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam. Book review. Christopher Goscha. Princeton University Press. 2022.

The Road to Dien Bien Phu is an extensive and comprehensive account of the lesser-known First Indochina War – the one to oust the French colonial regime from 1945 to 1954, before the Americans took their place. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, author Christopher Goscha has apparently borrowed the book name from former army general Võ Nguyên Giáp, who plays a key role in the story and whose Vietnamese-language memoirs were also entitled Đường tới Điện Biên Phủ. Nevertheless, the key protagonist is Vietnamese national personality cult hero Hồ Chí Minh, whose conversation with an American journalist in 1945 is used by Goscha to problematize conventional understandings of the war and articulate his core argument.

According to this journalist, Hồ Chí Minh compared the French regime, with its vastly superior military power and resources, to an elephant which would slowly be harassed and defeated by the tiger of Vietnamese patriotic guerrilla fighters who dare not face the elephant in open combat but would rather take small bites out from behind before retreating into the forest. A nice analogy, but one that was inaccurate by 1954, when the Vietnamese communist-led army had become an ‘elephant’ in its own right and ended the war by winning an epic pitched battle against French troops and entrenched camps at Điện Biên Phủ. So the real question is: how did the tiger grow into an elephant? Goscha immediately discounts overly simplistic explanations of Vietnamese nationalism as the only crucial factor; rather, we must look at the processes of communist state formation, which harnessed this nationalism and enabled the ousting of the French in a forceful way unlike any other anticolonial movement in the twentieth century.

Goscha is quick to emphasise that the most significant event of the First Indochina War was not the battle of Điện Biên Phủ itself, which is only covered in the final chapter, but rather the remarkable rise of the Vietnamese communist state within the difficult conditions of protracted civil war. This leads Goscha to focus on the mundane (but crucially important) aspects of state-building such as telecommunications, transport, civil service bureaucracy, police and security services, administration of a war economy and clandestine commercial networks, propaganda campaigns and so on. Together, he maintains, ‘these things made up the nervous system that connected, supplied, and accorded operational coherence to what was […] a highly fragmented and rudimentary state of war’

A key theme running throughout the book is this fragmentation and messiness, which hindered and frustrated the aspiring communist state-builders. One useful analogy Goscha employs is the idea of French and communist spheres of influence during the civil war as two ‘archipelago states’ co-existing within the territory of Vietnam. Both states claimed national sovereignty, but had different spheres of influence on the ground: French forces controlling the key cities, ports and border outposts, which looked somewhat like ‘urban islands’ surrounded by communist-held rural areas. These two archipelago states were continually expanding and contracting, with conflict being most intense where the two rubbed up against each other. Within these dangerous internal ‘borderlands’, French and communist forces not only competed militarily but also strove to recruit civil servant defectors from the other side and secure rice production within the opposing state’s sphere of influence.

This leads on to another of the book’s core themes: the need for Vietnamese communists to compromise on ideology and work with a wide array of non-communist actors.

Especially in the early days, Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades knew their fragile position as but one of many Vietnamese decolonial movements and attempted all sorts of political and bureaucratic manoeuvres to co-opt and recruit non-communists to their cause, knowing they needed all the help they could get. This includes creating a multi-party ‘democratic republic’ (albeit with communists at the helm), appeasing Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese republicans, working with black market traders to leach off the colonial state for desperately needed resources such as medications, and encouraging sympathetic rich landlords to contribute to the revolution. After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1950 and started supplying weapons into Vietnam, communist power gradually increased until the point when the Party could mercilessly dispense of their non-communist allies. Nevertheless, right to the end of the war, Hồ Chí Minh was aware of their delicate position and the need to tread carefully with ideological imperatives in order to retain the support of the general population.

The third major theme Goscha draws out is the unique features of ‘war communism’ for both decolonising and state-building. So on one level, Vietnamese nationalists could draw from tried-and-tested Russian and Chinese experiences, advice and resources to generate and sustain a huge modern army capable of defeating the French. On the other hand, Hồ Chí Minh’s comrades also realised that war was, in some ways, a perfect opportunity for them to embed and enforce communist control into every level of society and economy through ‘revolutionary methods’ which may not have been palatable in a peacetime context. To name a few: rectification campaigns, new hero worship and personality cults, intensive cadre training, central planning, state banking, food requisitioning and, most controversially of all, land reform. A profound reflection on these dynamics is that not only do states make wars, but wars also make and fashion states long after the fighting ceases.

There is much to commend in The Road to Dien Bien Phu. Its masterful exposition of the economic factors so crucial to the tides of war covers international smuggling routes, the communists’ dependence on the Bank of Indochina and Indochinese piastre (in spite of attempts to promote their own currency) and their consequent vulnerability to trade deficit and rampant inflation, the taxation of rice and French economic warfare (destruction of grain reserves, dykes, canals, bridges, roads and tens of thousands of buffalo in communist-held areas). Another strength is Goscha’s attention to the international nature of this conflict, from the training of cadres in Chinese military schools to the tacit early support of Thailand to Vietnamese communists, allowing them to openly operate and trade before US diplomatic pressure forced this activity underground. Perhaps the most interesting chapter concerns the Vietnamese efforts to kickstart Laotian and Cambodian communist factions, which entailed even more heterodox alliances with monarchs and Buddhist monks in their attempts to overcome (or hide) the imperialistic undertones of expanding Vietnamese influence over Indochina.

What really makes Goscha’s book stand out from standard historical accounts, however, is his focus on particular individuals – from Central Party secretaries to lowly civilians – which humanises the war and the high price paid by the Vietnamese people. It is fascinating to learn the backstories of celebrated war heroes whose names have become standard street names in major Vietnamese cities, such as the legendary Trần Đại Nghĩa, who gave up a prestigious engineering career in Europe to establish ‘jungle factories’ producing weapons and even rocket launchers out of rudimentary materials. It is equally harrowing to hear of the lives of peasants growing up under the constant threat of death or the testimonies of some of the thousands of people who committed suicide during ‘struggle sessions’ (think re-education camps for party members) or lost everything in the land reforms, even after enthusiastically supporting and funding the Party for several years…

book reviewed by Michael Schaub

NPR March 12, 2010

On March 12, 1954, the day before Vietnamese nationalist forces attacked the French military base at Dien Bien Phu, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap proclaimed, "It is not Dien Bien Phu or Hanoi, but the whole of Vietnam that is the prize of this battle."

History, of course, proved Giap right — the French loss at Dien Bien Phu resulted in both the end of the First Indochina War and the end of French rule in Vietnam. It also resulted in the division of Vietnam into two countries, an arrangement that was supposed to be temporary, but which ended up causing the Vietnam War.

The story of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu is frustrating and heartbreaking — thousands were killed, thousands wounded — but it's key to understanding the events in Vietnam that would transfix the world in the decades to come. In his new history of the battle, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War, Ted Morgan provides a compelling, detailed and extremely readable account of how Dien Bien Phu came to pass and what it meant for Indochina, France and the United States. Morgan, a French-born American citizen, French army veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, proves uniquely suited to the task of explaining the battle and its impact on the midcentury world.

The First Indochina War broke out shortly after World War II, when France attempted to re-establish its colonial rule in Indochina, which it had lost to Japan. The French plan wasn't universally popular — there were detractors in Vietnam, France and the United States (including the anti-colonialist Franklin D. Roosevelt). A nationalist movement led by Ho Chi Minh began to catch on in Vietnam, but the French, backed by the British (and, later, the U.S.) refused to give up their colony.

Ted Morgan won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1961. He was nominated for the prize again in 1983 for his biography of Winston Churchill.

The war culminated at Dien Bien Phu, where the French established an airhead and base in an attempt to draw the Viet Minh liberation army away from the Red River Delta and prevent any Viet Minh attacks on Laos. But the plan was flawed from the start — the assumption that the base could repel a Viet Minh attack proved tragically wrong; the French troops in the valley were sitting ducks, surrounded on all sides by Vietnamese fighters in the jungles and mountains, who knew the terrain intimately. The battle lasted two months; the fallout, sadly, lasted decades.

Morgan's skills at reporting and research are matched only by the quality of his writing — Valley of Death is as absorbing as any great novel; it's not a book that requires an extensive knowledge of military history to read. It's incredibly detailed, not only in the mechanics of the battle (and the worldwide political maneuvering that led to it) but in the testimony of the soldiers, commanders and witnesses who saw it firsthand. Maybe nobody can fully explain what happened at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but Morgan comes impressively close, and the result is this fascinating, remarkable book.

Former Captain Randy Floyd

Review by James Poniewozik

New York Times

Sept. 14, 2017

“The Vietnam War” begins in reverse. After a brief introduction, there’s a sequence of familiar footage, running backward. Napalm is sucked out of the jungle. Bombs fall up. A prisoner springs to life as a bullet shoots from his head into the chamber of a gun.

The sequence feels like a mission statement for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s plangent, encyclopedic, sometimes wearying documentary. Yes, you’ve seen these images before. But to have even a chance at understanding this mess, you have to go back. Way back.

The first episode pedals back to 1858 and the French conquest of Indochina. Most of it is devoted to Vietnam’s colonial history, the rise of Ho Chi Minh and France’s own doomed war. This gives you a sense of the scope of the series, at 18 hours and 10 episodes one of Mr. Burns’s longest. It also sets a theme: that this history had its own history, one we disastrously ignored. (“We” here and below means Americans, because while Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick include many Vietnamese voices, they are ultimately telling U.S. history.)

“The Vietnam War” is not Mr. Burns’s most innovative film. Since the war was waged in the TV era, the filmmakers rely less exclusively on the trademark “Ken Burns effect” pans over still images. Since Vietnam was the “living-room war,” played out on the nightly news, this documentary doesn’t show us the fighting with new eyes, the way “The War” did with its unearthed archival World War II footage. But it is probably Mr. Burns’s saddest film. “The Civil War” was mournful, but at least the Union was preserved. “The War” ended with fascism defeated.

The war in Vietnam offers no uplift or happy ending. It’s simply decades of bad decision after bad decision, a wasteful vortex that devoured lives for nothing. It was, the narrator Peter Coyote says, “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”

“The Vietnam War” is less an indictment than a lament.

This is where Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick’s primary-source interviews are so effective. Arguably, the most important Ken Burns effect is not a visual trick but the refocusing of history on first-person stories.