Background For War: REPORT ON INDO-CHINA

Indo-China is one of the five critical places on earth that are most vulnerable to Communist attack (the other four: Formosa, Germany, Yugoslavia, Iran). If Indo-China falls, all of southeast Asia is likely to go. The U.S. position in the Philippines would be outflanked. The weak governments of Burma, Siam and Indonesia could probably not long resist Communist pressure, and the Red tide would sweep to the borders of India. Indo-China may hold the difference between limited success and total disaster of U.S. policy and U.S. hopes in Asia.

Can Indo-China be held against Communism? In search of an answer, TIME’S Paris Bureau Chief Andre Laguerre spent six weeks in the troubled, war-torn country. His report:

IN Hanoi it was the hour of the siesta. A Chinese soup vendor beat a hollow stick on a block of wood, click-clack-click, to proclaim his wares. Beyond the lake, in the pagoda of the Seven Crows, a wizened old man in a black robe bent in prayer before a dim effigy of the great Buddha. On the deserted curb five tattered Vietnamese newsboys were playing “to’,” an Eastern version of craps.

My luncheon guest—the leader of a group of Indo-Chinese Nationalist intellectuals who are still undecided about supporting French-sponsored Emperor Bao Dai—smiled down at the kids in the street. “Like most peoples of Asia,” he said, “we are chronic gamblers. Except,” he added thoughtfully, “in politics, where we like a sure thing.”

To many of IndoChina’s 23 millions, the struggle with Communism is a gigantic dice game, and before they place their bets, the Indo-Chinese want to know who is going to win. My guest’s remark contained the soundest piece of advice which could be given the West out here today: the best way to win this particular battle is to demonstrate that you have no intention of losing it.

The Three Battles. In this country there are really three battles in one. The first is against the forces of Communist Ho Chi Minh. The second battle is now being prepared—an invasion abetted or led by Red China. The third battle, urgent and complex, is political, and it has to be won if the West is to establish relations with Indo-China on a sounder moral and material basis than the past lack of an Asian policy has allowed.

The biggest reason why the first battle may be won, and why the second will either not take place or will be efficiently fought by the West, is the French expeditionary corps.

There are some severe things to be said of past and present French attitudes in Indo-China. But now it is the French army that is keeping Indo-China out of Communist hands. In Indo-China, France has committed one-quarter of her navy and more than half of her flying personnel. Her army of 150,000 in Indo-China includes her finest professional officers and troops, who would be of incalculable value in Korea, who are desperately needed in France for the defense of Europe.

How Good Are the French? These 150,000 men are tough and efficient soldiers. Their morale, considering the punishing climate and the terrain of jungle, mountain, swamp or flooded rice field, in a campaign against an enemy who consistently flees pitched battle, is surprisingly high.

Take René Dupuis, the 25-year-old engineer who drove me from Langson to the fort of Dongdang, on Viet Nam’s northeast frontier. “I like it out here,” said Dupuis. “It’s adventure, I feel I’m useful, and I like the Vietnamese.” His rifle was propped against the seat beside him. Every mile along the road a French fortress of brick and bamboo dominated the countryside. Between them we passed patrols of bearded men, four or five in a group, wearing jungle-green uniforms and broad-brimmed, shapeless felt hats, snaking in single file along the hillside.

Even so, Dupuis carefully examined the undergrowth. “This road is well held,” he said, “but you never know. It’s when you expect them least that they strike. They wriggle out of the bushes with grenades or a light machine gun—pam-pam-pam-pam —and they’re off before a patrol can reach you. If they capture you, it’s worse.”

Goums and French Foreign Legion troops are holding the outpost of Dong-dang. The Goums—bearded, bemedaled, fierce-eyed North African troops—are savage, close-quarter fighters whose physical courage seems to have no limits. Many of the legionnaires are German—lean, hard-mouthed, blond men in white kepis, their pockets stuffed with grenades. Among them are veterans of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. I asked Dupuis how he got on with them.

“Can’t stand them,” he replied promptly. “They don’t have any feeling about France or democracy, but they have the ‘esprit de la legion.” ”

How Strong Are the Reds? The military situation in Indo-China is not bad. A bleak way of putting it would be to say that the situation in southeast Asia has deteriorated so much that Indo-China emerges as the West’s strong point in this part of the world.

Viet Nam, as the Indo-Chinese call their country, is shaped like the load which millions of her barefooted peasants carry over their shoulders: two bulging baskets at either end of a thin pole. One bulge is northern Viet Nam (Tonkin), and the other southern Viet Nam (Cochin China). In the slender central region (An-nam), the mountains ripple almost down to the coast. Ho Chi Minh’s Communist forces terrorize the coastal plains. In the south, terrorists make life unpleasant in the crowded Saigon region, and the Communist Vietminh haunts the marshes between the numberless arms of the Mekong River. In the northwest and southwest, as in the relatively unimportant kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, the country is calm.

The Communists have a regular army of some 80,000 men, plus up to 100,000 guerrillas organized in small bands. Half the regular forces are concentrated in a triangle of mountainous country in upper Tonkin, the base of which lies between the French frontier posts of Caobang and Laokay, giving the Reds poor but uninterrupted lines of communication with Mao’s forces in China.

No mistake should be made about the quality of Ho’s regular forces. They are well disciplined, and in five years of war they have learned much from their adversaries, the French. For months, arms and ammunition from China have leaked through the mountain paths that riddle the Sino-Tonkinese frontier. The regular Communist battalions now have as much firepower as their French equivalents.

Certainly, there is no call for wild optimism. French equipment sadly needs modernization and overhaul. The French would put up a stiff fight against invasion, but there is no doubt that if Stalin threw caution to the winds and ordered Mao to march south with everything he had, the French would be swept into the sea.

The political disadvantages of an open Chinese invasion (it would be a death blow to the Communist pretense of fighting for the national independence of Asia’s people), and the fact that in the near future the native Reds alone can scarcely hope to overrun the French, make the odds slightly against an all-out attack this fall. But only slightly: the Red radio is still talking blithely of the coming “general offensive.”

Ho’s Show. The Vietminh, completely dominated by the Communist Party of Indo-China, is a state as well as an army, recognized by the U.S.S.R. and her satellites, though the government has no capital and dares not sit for two successive days in the same place. Its chief is a 60-year-old Tonkinese agitator named Nguyen* Tat Thanh, who has a dozen aliases, of which the best known is Ho Chi Minh (One Who Shines).

He has had a gaudy revolutionary career in Britain, France, Russia, China and Indo-China. Today, Ho Chi Minh is a great figurehead whose prestige as a “liberator” still stands high, even outside the areas he controls. But his star in the Communist firmament has waned. His health is poor (tuberculosis). He has traveled too far, and seen too much, and talked to too many people to have the rigidly closed type of mind required of a top party militant in time of war. He is one of those international Communist bosses—France’s Maurice Thorez is another—who retain titular leadership mainly because their names still ring strongly in the world’s ears.

Ho Chi Minh and his government are prisoners of the sinister Tong Bo, the Communist Party Politburo, and in particular of five of its members, rising young extremists who really run the show. The most important is Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietminh’s frail, passionate, 38-year-old Minister of National Defense. Vo Nguyen Giap, a Communist since his teens, was first arrested when he was 18. His wife died in a French jail four years ago. More than anyone else, he created the Vietminh army. A ruthless and bloodthirsty man, he has coldly directed the liquidation of anti-Communists in “liberated villages,”and he has ordered French prisoners buried alive.

Bao Dai’s Show. Facing the Vietminh is a weak Vietnamese government without credit in the country. The chief of state and Descendant of Heaven, Emperor Bao Dai, is still a symbol commanding great respect, only some of which has been frittered away by his consistent neglect of public affairs.

Bao Dai’s government has no social policy at all; in fact, it has no social sense. There are some emergency relief operations for the homeless, but nothing is done on a serious scale to combat the diseases (malaria, conjunctivitis, amebic dysentery) which ravage the country. There is no overall plan to help agriculture or expand education facilities.

There are some capable Vietnamese administrators, and one of these is Nguyen Huin Tri, governor of Northern Viet Nam. A dapper, dark-eyed man, Nguyen Huin Tri has at least got the machinery of government turning with reasonable efficiency in his area. Hadong, a poor, rice-growing province in the governor’s domain, typifies the country’s needs. “Last year 40% of our rice fields were uncultivated, but this year only 30%,” explained Nguyen Van Thanh, chief of Hadong Province. “Many of our young men and our buffaloes have been taken by the Communists. Sometimes the women pull the plows through the mud. In the villages where the Vietminh still comes at night, the villagers are taxed 35 piasters ($1.75) a head. But though things are bad, we are working, and there is big improvement. In many villages our militia provides security at night. Security is the great thing.”

What the People Want. In the last two months, 400 Communist soldiers who knew they would find security with the Vietnamese forces went over to the government side in Hadong. Nguyen Van Thanh put the surrendered Communists to work in a youth camp. Nguyen Ba Cue, a 26-year-old youth with shaggy eyebrows, deserted two weeks ago. “I couldn’t stand the Communist dictatorship,” he explained to me when I visited the camp.

That sounded a bit parrotlike. “How did the dictatorship affect you?” I asked.

“I was poor, and they made me pay heavy taxes. They did nothing for independence, that is all empty talk.”

Many of the villagers are pathetically primitive in their political views. But in the village of Thanh Liet an old farmer gave me an excellent definition of their foes: “The Communists suffice unto themselves. They need neither god, nor parents, nor love, and I need all three.”

Nguyen Van Thanh summed up: “Ninety percent of the Vietnamese live on the land. For years they have been torn between French, Japanese, Chinese and Communist masters. Above all they want peace now. They have no liking for Communism, which is contrary to their traditions. If the West can bring them security and a little improvement in their lives, they will be happy.”

Halfway House. Through IndoChina’s political jungle the French move warily, paying a heavy penalty for past mistakes. Viet Nam is in a sort of halfway house on the road to self-rule—a self-rule principally limited by membership in the new French Union, of which France is very definitely the senior partner. French unwillingness to take generous chances and the French legalistic mind have combined to give the Union a rigidity which threatens it with strangulation at birth.

Nevertheless, French force in Indo-China is buying time for the West, and the first axiom of U.S. policy here, therefore, must be aid for the French army. It is sometimes suggested that the French ought to hand over total independence to Bao Dai and get out. But two weeks after the French left, a Communist government would rule in Saigon.

What the French Should Do. Another suggestion is that Vietnamese politics be left in abeyance, and that only French power be reinforced to crush Communism. But this idea defies the one principle which the West cannot ignore: neither Europe nor Asia can be permanently defended by outside forces. They can be helped, but they must be able and willing to defend themselves. This is partly an Indo-Chinese civil war, which can only be completely won by a majority of a free people inspired by a national ideal.

There is also a third and viable solution that will bring the kindly, intelligent and sensitive people of Viet Nam solidly and healthily to the Western side. They must be given the self respect of free men. Tangibly, that means that a Vietnamese national army must be built up by the French which can eventually replace the French. The French must give arms to villagers whose desire to defend themselves is beyond reasonable doubt.

There are other things, little things, that count. Some Frenchmen continue to address adult Vietnamese in the familiar “tu”—a pronoun which in French is reserved for children, intimates and riffraff. This habit could be uprooted with slight effort.

What the U.S. Can Do. The U.S. is committed to $23.5 million of civilian aid to the Vietnamese government. Saigon also expects that the U.S. will spend $200 million for military aid to Indo-China (out of the total of $300 million earmarked for southeast Asia). As that aid is given, the U.S. is going to have to put tactful pressure on Viet Nam and on the French to correct their mistakes. Energetic administrators like Governor Nguyen Huin Tri must be helped, and others told to use what they have before asking for more. A social policy must at least be initiated. Indo-Chinese intellectuals must be taught that self-rule is not merely something presented with a charter and pink ribbon, but a status to be earned and a responsibility to be accepted.

All this can be done. This is not just one man’s idea; it is also that of U.S. Minister Donald Heath, whose personnel is pouring into Indo-China. Five months ago, only seven men were attached to the U.S. legation in Saigon, and now there are-nearly 200. They are enthusiastic young men who have the right ideas. No one can visit Indo-China without praying thc.t they be totally backed in Washington, and that the free world be spared another heartbreaking Chinese experience.

The five kids playing dice on the curb in Hanoi have to be shown that they should no longer be solely concerned with guessing about who is going to win in their own country. If there is a gamble to be made, it should be on themselves.

*Pronounced “Wen.” Nguyen is the most common of all Indo-Chinese surnames, but like Smith and Jones, its closest English counterparts, can also be used as a given name.