Psychological Warfare

It ill becomes an American to criticize the French for their policy in Indochina since it was by virtue of a U.S. strategic decision and a U.S. logistical action that Indochina was turned first from Japanese hands into the hands of the British in the south and the Chinese Nationalists in the north. The British did not care much about the local situation. The particular Chinese Nationalists in northern Indochina were mildly sympathetic with local nationalism, but chiefly preoccupied with stealing everything that could be put on a truck. After this ill-fated liberation the Americans then assisted the French in transporting forces back to Indochina. This was after much of the U.S. press and many U.S. leaders had indicated their disapproval of French colonialism and had given indirect but powerful encouragement to Viet Minh's rebellion against the French. Having helped foul up the situation for the French hopelessly, the United States then observed their return (a return which was definitely, though indirectly, made possible only by U.S. aid to France) with uncertainty and disquiet. It took the Americans four years to decide that they were on the French side and even then they were not very much on the French side.

The "French side" was an indefinable amalgam of old-fashioned French colonialism, the membership of three small Asian states in a French Union, and anti-Communism. The French made the mistake which the Americans repeated when they invited the Chinese Communist general, Wang Hsiu-ch'üan, to New York to defame the United States through the courtesy of the United States Government, or when they tried dealing with the Chinese Communists, fighting them, dealing with them, and fighting with them again. When the French finally decided to seek an all-out military victory against the Communists they set up local governments which they themselves promptly dishonored, giving them neither prestige nor authority enough to combat the Communist menace in local Asian terms.

That the French should have held the Asian anti-Communist front under these strange political circumstances is a credit to France. The Indochinese war has been dirty, discouraging. It has often verged upon the hopeless. The French have been criticized by the Americans in the early period of the reoccupation of Indochina for not turning the country over to Communist "nationalists" lock, stock and barrel; later the Americans criticized the French because the French did not annihilate the same "Communist nationalists" whom the Americans had previously lauded. In the end, Dien Bien Phu and Geneva were the inevitable concomitants of Panmunjom. Once we made "peace," the French had to make an equally bad "peace" too.

The United States was adroit enough to obtain the immense psychological leverage of getting the Korean war recognized as a UN war. The Indochinese war was not made a UN war even though it was the same enemy who was being fought—Asian Communists underwritten by Peking and guaranteed by Moscow—in each case.

Amazing though it may seem, practical psychological warfare was almost completely neglected by the French until the Americans supplied the French with printing facilities for French Annamite leaflets in 1950. By 1952 the French had assigned staff officers to carry out psychological warfare responsibilities and were making a serious effort to link up with the other anti-Communist forces in East Asia for the purpose of obtaining psychological warfare know-how. A considerable improvement in tactical psychological warfare was made between 1950 and 1952. The strategic psychological warfare position of the French in the area must be referred back to the "battle of the probabilities," mentioned earlier in this chapter. So long as French, Americans, and Annamites all feel that a French defeat is quite probable and say so both publicly and privately, it will be difficult for the French to make the Indochinese believe that Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos are here to stay as French-protected and anti-Communist nations.51