I recently picked up a copy of Howard R. Simpson’s “Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle That America Forgot” (Brassey’s Inc: 1994) as part of my obsessive quest to read everything about Dien Bien Phu that I could possibly assimilate during the course of my video project about this fascinating conflict.

The American attitude towards the French colony of Indochina underwent significant transformation in the immediate postwar period with the fall of China to communism in 1949. Previously, the French had maintained at least nominal control over Indochina during the Second World War, and it was only in March 1945 that the Japanese took full control in a forcible takeover that cost several thousand French lives. American opposition to colonialism was so strong that US forces in the region were instructed not to aid the French, even as they were slaughtered retreating along the long road to safety in Nationalist China.  Only American General Claire Chennault — of “Flying Tigers” fame — disobeyed orders and flew missions in support of the French from his bases in China.

French troops were in transit to reoccupy Indochina when the war abruptly ended, and even though the US opposed the reintroduction of French control in Indochina, France received surreptitious support from the British, who were struggling to maintain their colonial holdings much as the French were.  Although Britain’s position vis-a-vis Indochina was to drastically change after Indian independence in 1947, for the brief but crucial period of 1945-6, they were critical in allowing the reimposition of French power in their former colonial holding.  Ironically, it was a reversal of this position on the part of the British that ultimately doomed the French at Dien Bien Phu.

Two other considerations complicated American policy: the outbreak of the Korean War, and the problem of German rearmament.  The Korean War brought the Free World Allies into direct conflict with Communist China (and, surreptitiously, China’s ally, the USSR) and dramatically increased concern about the possible spread of communism in Southeast Asia.  Simultaneously, the Soviet threat to Western Europe made rearming Germany essential to the continent’s defense, and the French, as recent victims of German aggression and ultimately victors in the war and one of the “Big Four” occupying powers, essentially had veto power over the nascent European Defense Community.  So French cooperation in Europe became an additional factor in the political war between the interventionists and non-interventionists in the US government.

When the bloody fighting in Korea ended in 1953, the Chinese were freed to provide substantially more military aid to the Viet Minh, and the United States had another demonstration of the high cost of containing aggression by regimes intent on spreading totalitarian principles without the restraint of popular opinion.  While America was already providing a substantial amount of military aid to France, whose wrecked postwar economy (and divided public opinion) could never have sustained the commitment necessary to prosecute an overseas war alone, President Eisenhower was wary of making a unilateral commitment to what could turn out to be another Korean-scale bloodbath without strong support from the rest of the West.  By now, however, the British were firmly opposed to any military intervention anywhere on behalf of colonialism, except their own colony of Malaya, and were eager to see France bring a negotiated end to its occupation of Indochina.

With the rest of its allies unwilling to make definite commitments to Indochina (the so-called “united action” premise), the Americans took on more and more of the financial burden of supporting the war, but were unwilling to take any direct steps to intervene militarily unless they were able to affect the war’s direction.  The French saw Indochina as their domain, and at Dien Bien Phu, US aid was seen as a one-time event to shore up the military position prior to the Geneva Conference scheduled for April 1954, with the implied threat that without US aid, the French would negotiate Indochina all the way to communism. As the situation at Dien Bien Phu worsened, the French formally asked the Americans for air intervention, with B-29s from Clark Field in the Philippines, and F9F Panther jets from the carriers USS Essex and USS Boxer in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was codenamed “Operation Vulture.”

There are a number of excellent books about the diplomatic situation surrounding Dien Bien Phu, but the best one I have read is a slim volume by Melanie Billings-Yun called “Decision Against War” (Columbia University Press: 1988), which has the added bonus of containing a tremendous bibliography. In it, Billings-Yun makes an elegant case for the impossibility of any direct US military action in Indochina in support of the French due to a host of intertwined and mutually exclusive reasons: President Eisenhower was unwilling to consider unilateral action without the consent of Congress, Congress was unwilling to authorize action without independence for the Associated States (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) which the French found unacceptable, and required a commitment from the British, which the British found unacceptable, and the British were unwilling to take action without a negotiated settlement, which the United States found unacceptable. Furthermore, Billings-Yun makes a convincing argument that after Korea, Ike was none too eager to commit US ground forces again, and that given the fact that his own Joint Chiefs of Staff (with the notable exception of Admiral Radford) felt that airstrikes alone were unlikely to change the outcome, he played the sides against each other to give himself the strongest possible diplomatic position without having to back it up with military force. Eisenhower scholarship has certainly developed in different ways since his death, and there are other interpretations, but I found her arguments convincing.

In this context, the use of nuclear weapons in any form was impossible, and while US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles is reported as having said to French Foreign Minister Georges Bideault, “And if we gave you two atomic bombs to save Dien Bien Phu?” no record exists of this discussion, Dulles denied saying it, and even if he had, it is hard to imagine how he could have made it happen, since the French actually did request American (non-nuclear) intervention, and they were refused. The fact that Dulles was opposed to the unilateral intervention itself makes this even more unlikely. It certainly did not constitute “a plan to use atomic weapons” in any sense of that word.

But people get stuck on this possibility, probably because the United States did eventually bomb Vietnam, but it did not use atomic weapons, so who cares if B-29s might have bombed a remote border town in 1954, when B-52s had bombed not only North Vietnam, but South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by 1972. So the American involvement in the 1950s is seen as uninteresting or even irrelevant. I think that’s a dramatically misguided understanding of history.

Paul Rohrbaugh’s game, La vallée de la mort, is the only game I know of that allows for possible US intervention. I’m surprised, because this is exactly the kind of speculative history at which wargames excel. But even Paul’s rules don’t have a nuclear option.

In the context of America’s eventual 10-year, ultimately unsuccessful war in Vietnam, the fact that she seriously considered direct military intervention in 1954 on behalf of the French at Dien Bien Phu seems unsurprising, even logical – a foreshadowing of subsequent events.  In order to make the story exciting, the focus falls on atomic weapons, which according to all the academic research I can find were never practicable and never seriously considered.  It’s too bad, because serious misgivings about direct American military involvement were clearly present well before the French colonial project collapsed, and many of those objections were the same ones that surfaced two decades later.  The story of Vietnam immediately after World War II is fascinating, and informs much of the nation’s subsequent history as well as the relations between the so-called Great Powers as several of them were losing that appellation.  It’s a shame to devalue this fascinating history by sensationalizing a hypothetical that almost certainly would never have happened.
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Enjoy part two of the video series. Part one is here.