Category Archives: U.S.

by | 9 August 2025 · 1:56 pm

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, food, labor, migration, slavery, U.S.

by | 29 July 2025 · 5:59 am

Kościuszko in Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 404-407:

The last third of the eighteenth century had initiated an increasingly painful spiral of action and reaction. Catherine’s trampling of Polish religious sensibilities led to the Confederation of Bar, which in turn resulted in the first partition. That shock propelled Poles to contemplate the series of reforms that culminated in the Constitution of May 3, 1791. The reaction to this was the Targowica Confederation and the second partition. Despite the Russian terror and intimidation, however, not all Poles were resigned to this fate.

One of these Poles was Tadeusz Kościuszko. Hailing from the region of Polesie (in the vicinity of today’s Belarus), Kościuszko was one of the poor but deserving young noblemen who received an education from the reform-minded Piarists, as well as at the Knights’ School in Warsaw. After a brief period spent in France (where he studied further) and elsewhere in western Europe, Kościuszko headed across the Atlantic in 1776. The Pole offered his services to George Washington and the Continental Congress. Kościuszko’s arrival was timely, and his services were both needed and appreciated by the Americans fighting for their independence. The Pole was given a commission and put to great use his skill as both a military engineer and a field commander. Among other things, Kościuszko fortified and defended places such as Philadelphia, Saratoga, and West Point, thus enabling these locations to withstand British attack. For his contributions to the American victory, the Polish nobleman was given United States citizenship and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army before returning home in 1784.

Having secured a position in the Polish army as of 1789, he fought on the side of King Stanisław in August 1792. However, upon learning the summer of 1793 that the king had acceded to the Targowica Confederation, General Kościuszko resigned his commission and left the country. France awarded him honorary citizenship. While in emigration, he was prevailed upon to return to rump Poland to lead a national insurrection.

With his eye-opening experience in America as well as Poland, Kościuszko was the right person for the job. He was convinced that the Poles had to fight a new type of war, one in which the entire citizenry rose to defend their country. In other words, he sought to mobilize the entire population of Poland—all estates, all regions. The challenge of getting burghers and peasants as well as nobles to join the fight did not escape Kościuszko. He admitted himself, “we must awaken love of our country among those who hitherto have not even known that they have a country.”

Kościuszko, thus, was a man with a mission. Although given dictatorial powers to lead the national rising, the general was not one to abuse them. This is seen from the oath he gave in Kraków on March 24, 1794, when he took control of the rising that would bear his name. Kościuszko swore he would use the dictatorial powers invested in him “only for the defense of the integrity of the frontiers, the gaining of sovereignty for the nation, and the establishment of universal freedom.” He truly was an anti-magnate.

The all-powerful military commander set about gaining support from all sectors of society. An important source of manpower had to be the numerous peasantry. While in Kraków, Kościuszko conscripted local peasants, who—given their lack of other weapons—turned their scythes into bayonets and joined the battle for Polish freedom. (A lack of arms and ammunition was a big problem for the insurrectionists.) Fighting alongside what remained of the Polish army, such peasants—it was hoped—would be the mainstay of Kościuszko’s insurrectionary forces. Having over the course of several weeks assembled an army of some four thousand regular troops and two thousand peasant scythe men, Kościuszko set north to engage the Russians in battle.

The two forces met near the village of Racławice on April 4. The Russian army was in for a surprise. The first battle of the Kościuszko Insurrection would look like nothing the Russians had ever fought. The Polish military commander employed tactics inspired by his experience in America. While the regular troops engaged the Russians, the fearless peasant scythe men raced out from behind them and toward the Russian cannons. They captured a dozen cannon and caused disarray and dismay among the Russians, who hastily retreated—if not before taking heavy losses. The Russians also left behind much-needed ammunition and arms.

Kościuszko’s secret weapon—the Polish peasant—proved decisive at the battle of Racławice. After the battle, the military commander famously ennobled several peasant scythe men, the most notable of whom was Bartosz Głowacki, for their bravery. Kościuszko also donned the traditional peasant cloak as a sign of recognition of what this new and vital part of the nation had achieved. Still, for numerous reasons this did not result in an influx of peasant scythe men. The following month, Kościuszko would issue a proclamation at Połaniec that gave the peasants personal freedom and reduced their labor dues for the duration of the insurrection. Like the potent image of peasant scythe men defending their country, the picturesque symbolism of a nobleman in peasant garb was but a first step in breaking down the barriers that had separated the two estates.

Kościuszko embraced the peasant out of conviction, not out of convenience. This, after all, was the man who had freed his own peasants upon his return to Poland and later would bequeath the property and money he had in the United States to free as many American slaves as was possible, charging his friend Thomas Jefferson to execute this, his last will and testament. Not for nothing did Jefferson famously call Kościuszko “the purest son of liberty.”

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Filed under Britain, democracy, labor, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, slavery, U.S., war

by | 28 July 2025 · 6:07 am

Poland’s Constitution of 1791

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 390-391:

The Constitution of 3 May 1791 was a portentous achievement. The shock of the partition of 1772 had led various inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Both Nations to conclude that reform was imperative. Long leery of change, the nation nonetheless had to change its priorities. As the reformer Stanisław Staszic observed and the Constitution’s preamble gently echoed, the fate of the nation had to take precedence over the Golden Freedoms; its continued existence should trump any considerations of individual comfort.

With Russia—and the Russian army—preoccupied elsewhere in 1788, the Commonwealth was able to avail itself of an unprecedented window of opportunity. The Great Seym not only provided stimulating years of dogged discussion of the country’s fate. It also enabled reform-minded national activists to flesh out a new framework—the framework that was pushed through that fateful May day in 1791.

The May 3 Constitution as Enlightenment, Polish Style

Presented as an emergency measure, Europe’s first constitution was craftily constructed. The tone of urgency that sounded in the Seym on May 3 was echoed in the preamble of the document, which declared that the new constitution was the only way to provide “for the general welfare, for the establishment [ugruntowania] of liberty, [and] for the salvation of our Fatherland and its borders.” Comprised of eleven articles, the Constitution first enumerated the country’s social framework, before elucidating the new shape of the government. In the process, centuries of native tradition were laced with innovations redolent of the Enlightenment, with elements based on the French, English, and American examples.

The innovations were seen above all in the altered nature of the government. While the will of the people was declared to provide all authority, there was no talk of a classical republic, as there had been in the sixteenth century. Rather, the focus was on the modern three powers of government: the legislative, judicial, and executive. (In this it was not unlike the U.S. Constitution, promulgated only several years earlier.) Set to meet every other year, the traditional bicameral Seym remained the locus of legislative authority. However, it would rely upon majority vote: the liberum veto and confederations were outlawed.

No less radical from the Sarmatian perspective were changes concerning the “supreme executive authority,” that of the king. There would be no more royal elections viritim. The monarchy was to become hereditary, not in the (non-existent) family of Stanisław August Poniatowski but in the Saxon Wettin dynasty. Furthermore, the king would have a small royal council (the so-called guardians of the laws)—essentially a cabinet of ministers—to aid with the execution of the laws as well as countersign the king’s actions. The competency of individual members of the royal council would extend to education, the police (here understood more as a ministry of the interior), war (defense), and the treasury; and each of these realms would have its own commission in the Seym. The new form of government was, in essence, a modern constitutional monarchy.

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by | 7 June 2025 · 4:51 pm

French Troops Leave Vietnam, 1956

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 819-821:

THE IMPORT OF THE MOMENT WAS NOT LOST ON LEADERS IN HANOI. They understood only too well that with his victory over the sects in early May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem had achieved his long-sought objective: the consolidation of power in Saigon as well as staunch American backing for his government. French military and political influence in South Vietnam, meanwhile, had suffered a blow from which it would almost certainly never recover.

For Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in the north, it was a stinging setback. Once again they had miscalculated, wrongly assuming that France would maintain a strong presence in the south through the elections for reunification scheduled for July 1956—elections that virtually all informed observers thought Ho would win—and thereby keep the United States from becoming more heavily entrenched. “It was with you, the French, that we signed the Geneva agreements, and it is up to you to see that they are respected,” Pham Van Dong, soon to be named DRV premier, had told a visiting French official on New Year’s Day 1955. On the first day of the year, it was still possible for Pham Van Dong to believe that France would follow through in that way; now, four months later, the hope seemed forever dashed. As they had done in 1946, during the negotiations that preceded the outbreak of major fighting, DRV leaders had overestimated the power of what they liked to call “democratic elements” in Paris to tilt French policy in Hanoi’s direction, or at least to ensure compliance among all concerned with the elections provision of the accords. In reality, few in French officialdom were so committed. With events in North Africa increasingly clamoring for attention, Indochina receded from view, and moreover there was the ever-present need to maintain smooth relations with Washington. Try though local French commanders might to assist the sects in their battle with Diem, they never had the full backing of authorities in the metropole.

And so, seemingly overnight, French political and military influence in South Vietnam withered. On May 20, 1955, French forces withdrew from the Saigon area and assembled in a coastal enclave. From there, their numbers steadily dwindled, until on April 28, 1956, the last French soldier departed Vietnam—signifying the symbolic end, some said, of France’s century in the Far East. Earlier in the month, on April 10, there occurred the last parade of French troops in Saigon. Foreign legionnaires in sparkling white kepis, paratroopers in camouflage uniforms and dark red berets, and bearded Moroccans with tan turbans marched by, their flags rippling in the breeze. In the crowd were Vietnamese who wore medals they had won in the service of France. Some could be seen wiping away tears as the troops disappeared out of view, bound for their waiting ships.

…

That month Paris also shut down the Ministry for the Associated States and moved its functions to the Foreign Ministry. And to fully sever the old colonial connection, France withdrew her high commissioner from Vietnam (to be replaced by an ambassador, who was not appointed for more than a year).

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Filed under democracy, France, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam

by | 5 June 2025 · 12:36 pm

Diem Survives in 1955

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 813-815:

Then, in late April, with [“Lightning Joe”] Collins back in Washington for consultations, Eisenhower and Dulles went further, in effect conceding the ambassador’s point, made during lunch with the president on April 22, that “the net of it is … this fellow is impossible.” They took the plunge. At 6:10 and 6:11 P.M. on April 27, 1955, top-secret cables went out from the State Department to the embassies in Saigon and Paris initiating a process designed to remove Diem and replace him with a leader selected by Generals Collins and Ely (while every effort was to be made to make the new government appear to be chosen by the Vietnamese). Diem was to be told that “as a result of his inability to create a broadly based coalition government, and because of Vietnamese resistance to him,” the United States and France “are no longer in a position to prevent his removal from office.”

Then, near midnight the same day, came word from Saigon: Fighting had erupted in the streets of the city between the Binh Xuyen and the VNA. Almost certainly Diem had been tipped off about the ouster orders, perhaps by [CIA agent] Lansdale, who was by his side almost continuously throughout the crisis. With nothing to lose and much to gain, he then in all likelihood initiated the battle. Diem always denied being the instigator, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Binh Xuyen fired first; conclusive evidence remains elusive. Whatever the case, the violence worked immediately to Diem’s advantage: At 11:56 P.M., Dulles canceled the earlier directives calling for Diem’s removal, less than six hours after they had been issued. In the days thereafter, fierce gunfights continued, leaving five hundred dead and two thousand wounded, and government troops gradually got the upper hand. Leading sect figures surrendered. Trinh Minh Thé was killed by a shot to the back of the head while he watched his troops engaging Binh Xuyen forces, the identity and allegiance of his assassin forever a mystery. Soon the crime syndicate was routed, and Bay Vien, the vice kingpin of Saigon-Cholon, fled to a cushy retirement in Paris. The religious sects retreated slowly into the Mekong Delta background, never again to threaten Diem’s rule.

No less portentous for the future, Diem’s actions in the “Battle of Saigon” made him a heroic figure to many in the U.S. Congress and press. In the Senate, California Republican William Knowland offered a lengthy paean to Diem’s fortitude and courage, and Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey proclaimed that “Premier Diem is an honest, wholesome, and honorable man. He is the kind of man we ought to be supporting, rather than conspirators, gangsters, and hoodlums … who are diabolical, sinister, and corrupt.” Mansfield chimed in too, extolling Diem as the leader of a “decent and honest government.” Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee registered their opposition to the administration’s withdrawing support from Diem. Democratic congressman Thomas Dodd of Connecticut demanded that Collins be fired in favor of “someone who measures up to the needs of the hour.”

Publisher Henry Luce, in his weekly editorial in Life, could barely restrain himself: “Every son, daughter or even distant admirer of the American Revolution should be overjoyed and learn to shout, if not pronounce, ‘Hurrah for Ngo Dinh Diem!’ ” Diem’s decision to confront the “Binh Xuyen gangsters,” Luce went on, “immensely simplifies the task of U.S. diplomacy in Saigon. That task is, or should be, simply to back Diem to the hilt.” U. S. News & World Report made the same argument in more restrained language, as did The New York Times. The latter added a prediction: “If Premier Ngo Dinh Diem should be overthrown by the combination of gangsters, cultists, and French colonials who have been gunning for him, the communists will have won a significant victory.”

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by | 4 June 2025 · 5:33 am

Catholic Exodus to South Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 804-805:

Lansdale also helped facilitate the mass movement of refugees from north to south—though almost certainly his role has been exaggerated in some accounts. Beginning in a serious way in the summer of 1954, waves of refugees, most of them Catholic, went to the south under the provisions of the Geneva Accords permitting civilian regroupment. (Article 14d: “Any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so.”) As hundreds of thousands of refugees descended upon Haiphong in August and awaited evacuation, the French Air Force and Navy, realizing they were unprepared for the onslaught, asked Washington for assistance. The Pentagon ordered the U.S. Navy to mobilize a task force to assist in the evacuation, and in short order, ships were steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines, bound for Haiphong.

All told, French and U.S. ships would make some five hundred trips in three hundred days, ferrying almost nine hundred thousand people southward, in perhaps the largest civilian evacuation—and largest sea migration—in history to that point. Entire northern Catholic communities abandoned most of their worldly possessions and set off en masse, their priests in the lead, in what the U.S. Navy dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom. The result was a major reordering of the religious balance of Vietnam. Before the exodus, most Vietnamese Catholics lived north of the seventeenth parallel; afterward the majority lived south of it. By 1956, the diocese of Saigon had more Catholics than Paris or Rome. By then, more than a million of Vietnam’s Catholics lived in the south, 55 percent of them refugees from the north.

The United States and the State of Vietnam reaped significant propaganda benefits from the mass exodus to the south in 1954–55. It seemed a perfect example of refugees “voting with their feet,” a damning indictment of the Viet Minh regime, and it was especially notable for the fact that comparatively few people went in the other direction, from south to north. The evacuation received wide play in the American press, with readers learning that the travelers, once they completed the journey, were given “welcome kits” of soap, towel, and toothpaste, and tins of milk labeled “From the people of America to the people of Viet Nam—a gift.” Left out of the accounts was that the exodus was not altogether spontaneous. Though many Catholics needed no incentive to leave the north, Lansdale and his CIA team initiated a campaign to convince the skeptics. In Catholic areas in the north, they broadcast the messages that “Christ has gone to the south” and “The Virgin Mary has departed the north” in order to be with Diem, a devout Catholic. They promised “five acres and a water buffalo” to every relocated refugee. In another gambit, Lansdale arranged for leaflets to be dropped over the same areas showing a map of North Vietnam with a series of concentric circles emanating from Hanoi. The none-too-subtle suggestion: that Hanoi was a likely target for a U.S. atomic bomb.

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by | 1 June 2025 · 5:22 am

Zhou Enlai’s Plan for Indochina

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 739-741:

Vietnamese sources, meanwhile, suggest Zhou Enlai may also have had another motivation for the new line: a desire by the CCP to incorporate Laos and Cambodia into China’s sphere of influence, if only to keep them from falling into Vietnam’s. Better to give the two states neutral status than to allow Ho Chi Minh’s government to dominate all of Indochina.

On June 19, the day before the chief delegates were scheduled to leave Geneva to return home to consult with their governments, Zhou Enlai told Canadian diplomat and China expert Chester Ronning that a settlement was within reach if only France would commit herself to a political solution. China and her allies had made important concessions, Zhou said, and now the French should follow suit. The next morning he reiterated these points to Eden and also expressed his keen desire to meet the new French premier. Eden, stopping in Paris en route to London later in the day, happily passed the message on to Pierre Mendès France. He urged the Frenchman to meet with Zhou at the earliest opportunity. Mendès France, having received the same recommendation from Jean Chauvel, agreed. But where should the meeting occur? The Chinese foreign minister would not go to Paris as long as his government was not recognized by France, while Mendès France feared he would be perceived as a supplicant if he went so soon to Geneva. Dijon was suggested, but the two sides settled instead on the Swiss city of Bern, on the pretext of thanking the Swiss Confederation president for providing a locale for the negotiations. The meeting was arranged for the following Wednesday, June 23, in the French embassy.

An epic encounter it would be. Zhou Enlai, attired not in his usual blue high-collared tunic but in a gray business suit and tie, looked younger and more relaxed than he had in Geneva, and he made an immediate winning impression on Mendès France: “L’homme était impressionnant.” Zhou opened sternly—China feared neither threat nor provocation and considered both to be illegitimate means of negotiation—but then followed a conciliatory line. He had lived in France and felt an attachment to the French people, he said, and moreover his view aligned with the French view, meaning military questions should take precedence over the resolution of political issues in Indochina. Achieving a cease-fire was the first priority. Much to the Frenchman’s satisfaction and relief, Zhou then made clear that he accepted not only the view that Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam should be evaluated separately but also, indirectly, the view that there existed “two governments in Vietnam.” Following an armistice, he went on, there should be elections for reunification of that country under a single government.

Zhou declared that his government—like that of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—intended to move swiftly toward recognition of Laos and Cambodia and to follow a policy of nonintervention toward both. He even hinted that Beijing would have no objection if one or both of the kingdoms chose to be attached to the French Union. What would not be acceptable, however, would be for the United States to misinterpret this Chinese and DRV policy as an excuse to turn the kingdoms into “bases of aggression.” In order to facilitate national reunification, both Phnom Penh and Vientiane should grant recognition to the resistance movements—Khmer Issarak and Pathet Lao—for the sake of unity. The latter, being a significant presence in Laos, should be granted a zone of administrative control, but Viet Minh forces that penetrated Laotian territory might be withdrawn after an armistice.

Mendès France liked what he heard, and he could see by the expression on Jean Chauvel’s face that the ambassador was pleased as well. The premier agreed that there should be no American bases in Cambodia or Laos, and he voiced support for elections in Vietnam. The vote could not happen immediately, though, and there was moreover the issue of what kind of temporary division to have in the meantime. Did the Chinese government support partition? Zhou Enlai initially evaded a direct answer but then said he favored a formula involving “large sectors.” Mendès France agreed that a “horizontal cut” was possible, but not as far south as suggested by the Viet Minh at Geneva. Everything else, he continued, depended on a resolution of this issue of the regroupment zones. Zhou concurred and said “this [is] also Mr. Eden’s opinion.” With hard work, he speculated, the military negotiators in Geneva ought to be able to reach agreement “within three weeks,” at which point the foreign ministers could return and be ready to sign the documents. Mendès France, finding this time limit (July 15) to be uncomfortably close to his own July 20 deadline for the settlement of all outstanding problems, replied that three weeks “should be regarded as a maximum.”

The meeting drew to a close. Both sides were pleased with the outcome and said they understood each other well, but neither doubted that tough slogging remained. Mendès France flew back to Paris, while his Chinese counterpart, having earlier held sessions with the leaders of the Cambodian and Laotian delegations (he promised them that Beijing would respect their sovereignty and independence), departed for a series of meetings in Asia, among them a two-day secret session with Ho Chi Minh.

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Filed under Cambodia, China, democracy, France, Laos, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 31 May 2025 · 5:52 am

U.S. & France Shift Vietnam Policy

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 727-730:

IF AMERICAN MILITARY INTERVENTION IN VIETNAM WAS AT LONG last off the table, the Eisenhower administration still could not bring itself to take the next step and support a negotiated settlement. Even as each of the other main players in Geneva gravitated toward partition as the preferred solution—Viet Minh and French negotiators made significant progress on the particulars in secret meetings on June 4, 5, and 10, even as Georges Bidault personally remained noncommittal—the administration was loath to sign on. (At least publicly; privately, Bedell Smith told Australia’s Casey on June 13 that he personally accepted the idea of partition.) In domestic political terms, it would be better for the conference to collapse than for it to agree to a compromise with Communists, especially of the Chinese variety.

Hence the equanimity with which U.S. officials greeted the splits that emerged in restricted sessions in mid-June. The disagreements concerned the authority and composition of an international supervisory commission that would monitor the peace, and the status of Cambodia and Laos. Resolution seemed impossible, and many delegates, Eden among them, concluded that a breakup of the conference was imminent. Dulles was pleased, or at least not disturbed. “It is our view,” he cabled Bedell Smith on June 14, “that final adjournment of Conference is in our best interest, provided this can be done without creating an impression in France at this critical moment that France has been deserted by US and UK and therefore has no choice but capitulation on Indochina to Communists at Geneva and possible accommodation with Soviets in Europe.”

But what if such capitulation and accommodation occurred, or what if the Communists used the failure of the conference as an excuse to try to conquer the whole of the Indochinese peninsula? Robert Bowie, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, articulated precisely that fear at a meeting of the NSC on June 15. Here was the United States, Bowie said, withdrawing from the Geneva Conference because she found the Communist proposals unacceptable, yet she was unwilling to do anything to bolster the French position. The likely result: The Viet Minh would charge down the peninsula and get more of Indochina than they were demanding at the conference. In the wake of such a development, Nehru and other “Asiatics” would swing to the Communist side. Far better, Bowie asserted, to defend “South Vietnam,” if necessary with four U.S. divisions.

Although U.S. diplomats in Saigon had made similar noises for several weeks, this was a revolutionary idea in the halls of power in Washington.53 Bowie had not merely asserted that partition served American interests better than allowing the negotiations to fail; he had said the southern half of Vietnam was militarily defensible. The five-power staff talks had come to the same conclusion, with a consensus that a line from Thakhek (in Laos) to Dong Hoi—that is, about 17°50’ north—could be defended. For the moment, Bowie found few takers for his argument, but his advocacy gained force among high officials in the days thereafter. Already by June 17, John Foster Dulles could be heard singing a new tune at another meeting of the NSC. Seconding Eisenhower’s comment that the native populations of Southeast Asia viewed the war as a colonial enterprise, the secretary, according to the note taker, said “perhaps the time had come” to let the French get out of Indochina entirely and then try to “rebuild from the foundations.” And later in the same meeting: “For the United States or its allies to try to fight now in the Delta area was almost impossible, if for no other reason than that the French have no inclination to invite us in. They are desperately anxious to get themselves out of Indochina.… Probably best to let them quit.”

The “perhaps” and the “probably” were important. Although in hindsight Dulles’s words constituted a watershed moment—the first clear sign of a monumental policy shift, from keeping the French fighting and resisting negotiations to moving France out of Indochina altogether and “rebuild[ing] from the foundations,” without the taint of colonialism—at the time, in mid-June 1954, neither he nor President Eisenhower knew what they wanted. They still groped hesitantly for some means of reconciling the competing imperatives on Indochina: to keep the nation out of “another Korea” while avoiding any hint of “appeasement” of the Communists. Seeing danger whichever way they turned, especially in a congressional election year, the two men still saw advantages in letting the Geneva meeting collapse without an agreement. On June 12, Smith candidly told Eden that he had just received a “plain spoken” personal message from Eisenhower instructing him to do everything in his power to bring the proceedings to an end as quickly as possible. “We decided,” the president himself would recall of this period in June, “that it was best for the United States to break off major participation in the Geneva Conference. The days of keeping the Western powers bound to inaction by creating divisions of policy among them in a dragged-out conference were coming to an end.”

In Paris, however, one man had a different idea. On June 18, six days after the Laniel government failed to win a vote of confidence (306 to 296), Pierre Mendès France, who had spoken out against this war longer and more fervently than any other leading politician, became France’s new prime minister. In soliciting the National Assembly’s support, the veteran Radical deputy didn’t merely proclaim as his first objective a cease-fire in Indochina; he vowed that he would resign within thirty days of his investiture if an agreement had not been reached. His last act before resigning, he added, would be to introduce a bill for conscription to supplement the professional army in the field, which the Assembly would have to vote on the same day. Mendès France was sufficiently encouraged by the results of the de Brébisson-Ha secret discussions to make this pledge, but he knew it was a gamble. How would the delegations at Geneva respond? Would he be able to bring the Viet Minh, the Americans, the Chinese, the Soviets along? And what about Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, which that week had had her own change of leadership, one little noticed at the time but with enormous implications for the future? Buu Loc was out as prime minister, replaced by Ngo Dinh Diem. Would Diem, who immediately announced his opposition to any settlement involving partition, upset the Mendès France timetable?

So many questions, so much to work out. And the clock was now ticking.

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by | 30 May 2025 · 2:58 pm

Negotiating Partition of Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 718-719:

The president had indicated he would not order unilateral intervention, certainly not without the backing of a Congress that showed scant enthusiasm for going in alone. Dulles therefore continued the Franco-American negotiations over intervention, continued to apply pressure on Australia and New Zealand, continued to warn the British and French against agreeing to partition. The latter task became more difficult on May 25, for in restricted session on that day, Pham Van Dong explicitly endorsed the concept—or as explicitly as was possible without uttering the word. Each side would have complete administrative and economic control over its territory, he said in his characteristically staccato French, and would withdraw its military forces from the other zone. A similar arrangement would be implemented in Laos and Cambodia, with one zone for the royal governments of the Associated States and one for the Viet Minh–supported Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak. Pham Van Dong stressed that his proposal did not represent a violation of the national unity of each country; the division in each case would be temporary and would lead to elections for reunification.

Pham Van Dong knew the general concept he was outlining would find favor in the British delegation and among many in the press corps. More important, he knew partition had growing support in the French camp. Georges Bidault, anxious to assuage the fears of the South Vietnamese government, remained hostile, but several officials—Claude Cheysson and Raymond Offroy, both of them Indochina specialists, as well as Jean Chauvel and Colonel de Brébisson—were convinced of the wisdom of attempting some kind of division of Vietnam, one that would give each side one of the deltas. A week earlier de Brébisson had commenced a series of face-to-face sessions with the Viet Minh’s Colonel Ha Van Lau, the first such Franco–Viet Minh meeting of the conference. Their initial charge was to discuss the evacuation of the wounded from Dien Bien Phu (it will be recalled that several hundred had been too ill to march to Viet Minh prison camps and had been left behind) as well as a possible exchange of prisoners, but in the days thereafter, they also considered other issues of contention, including the mechanics of a cease-fire and how to achieve the regroupment of the two sides. In the weeks to come, these two colonels, who had fought on opposite sides since the outbreak of the struggle—de Brébisson had been among the first French troops to disembark in Saigon, in November 1945, and Ha, a former clerk in the French colonial administration, had been political commissar in the 320th Division—would contribute as much as anyone to the final work of the conference.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Smith seemed to be coming around to the need for some kind of division of the country. At a press conference on May 27, he admitted that one could not ignore Ho Chi Minh’s well-disciplined and formidable fighting force, which controlled a significant proportion of the territory. This Viet Minh position of strength on the battlefield could not be wished out of existence. What the Eisenhower administration sought, Smith continued, was some means of reconciling this reality with American principles, leading to a “termination of hostilities on an honorable basis.”

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by | 26 May 2025 · 4:09 pm

Wide Support for Dividing Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 662-666:

Keeping the United States out of Vietnam meant cultivating support for the DRV internationally, and that too argued for being open to diplomacy. Alienating world opinion by forswearing the chance for peace would be unwise. “We have always followed the situation in the world” and “coordinated with the wishes for peace of the people of the world,” one official said. A negotiated agreement would therefore be a “victory” as it met “the pressing needs of the world’s peace lovers.” In the view of deputy prime minister and foreign minister Pham Van Dong, the DRV needed “the sympathy and the support of all peoples” to contain its enemies and protect its sovereignty.”

Party officials were less keen to talk about yet another possible consequence of a prolongation of the fighting, namely that the struggle would become increasingly fratricidal over time. Already now, Vietnamese were killing other Vietnamese in larger numbers. Viet Minh strategists remained confident they had the vast majority of people on their side, and they were as contemptuous as always of what party documents habitually referred to as the “puppet army” created by the French, but in quiet moments they expressed concern about the changing nature of the war. The revolutionary cause they championed was based on the principles of national unity and derived its legitimacy from its status as the only real representative of the populace. In the spring of 1954, the revolution was not yet seriously threatened, but how would things look in six months or a year, or in two years?

Above all, Ho Chi Minh knew, negotiations for an end to the war would have to be attempted in Geneva because his patrons in Moscow and Beijing said so. Repeatedly since the end of the Berlin conference in February, the Communist giants had made clear their desire for a political solution in Indochina and had even made their continued material and rhetorical backing of the war effort contingent on the DRV declaring a willingness to seek peace. The Soviet Union still sought improved relations with the West and also hoped to induce France to agree to a tacit quid pro quo—Moscow’s help in facilitating a settlement in Indochina in exchange for Paris saying non merci to the proposed European Defense Community. China, for her part, viewed the Geneva meeting as an opportunity to solidify her membership in the great-power club and to forestall an American military intervention near her southern borders. Both Communist powers perceived as well a chance to drive a wedge between the Western powers. Said premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai on February 27, during a meeting with his associates in the Foreign Ministry: “While France seems interested in reaching a peaceful solution to the Indochina issue, the United States is not. Therefore, it seems that France is reluctant to let the United States put its nose into Vietnam.”

But how to reach such a “peaceful solution”? The Kremlin came down early on the side of partition, a Korea-type solution that would temporarily divide Vietnam in half. Such a solution would respect France’s continuing strength in Cochin China while also acknowledging the Viet Minh’s effective control of large areas of Tonkin and Annam. It would serve China’s security needs as well, by forestalling an American intervention and by giving her a friendly “buffer” state on her southern frontier. And it would stop the war, if not forever, at least for a time. Already in late January 1954, Moscow instructed its ambassador in Paris to float the partition idea with French leaders. “There would be a provisional armistice line drawn at the 16th parallel,” a U.S intelligence assessment said of this Soviet overture, and “the French would evacuate Hanoi and the Tonkin Delta.” The French reacted with caution but did not rule out the idea, and the Soviets were further encouraged when the British government in subsequent weeks began making supportive noises about partition.

The Chinese too were attracted to the idea. Beijing’s ambassador in Moscow, Zhang Wentien, told Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on March 6 that a division along the sixteenth parallel would be “very advantageous” for Ho Chi Minh and as such “should be accepted if it is put forward officially.” A few days later Zhou Enlai told Ho via telegram that conditions were ripe for a greater emphasis on the diplomatic struggle, and that, no matter what the likely outcome of the Geneva Conference, “we should actively participate in it.” Partition should be seriously considered, Zhou went on, because “if a ceasefire is to be achieved, it is better that a relatively fixed demarcation line be established so that [the Viet Minh] can control an area that is linked together.” As for where the line ought to be, the Chinese statesman singled out the sixteenth parallel as “one of our options.”

The VWP Politburo met three times in March to discuss negotiating strategy for Geneva, more specifically the notion of partition. Details from the meetings are sketchy, but we can guess that the sessions were stormy. Earlier in the month, the DRV ambassador in Beijing, Hoan Van Hoang, had shown little enthusiasm for partition when his Soviet counterpart brought up the matter. How can you find a demarcation line, Hoang asked, when there are no front lines? Over time, though, as the early assault on Dien Bien Phu failed to yield a decisive victory, the thinking in the Politburo swung in favor of partition, or at least against outright opposition. Members agreed to consider the possibility, so long as the division was temporary. The demarcation line would reflect the balance of military forces and would be as far south as possible. A party statement avoided mention of partition but extolled Geneva as “a victory for the forces of democracy” that, “together with big victories in the military field,” would make “our people in the occupied areas happy, and the puppets confused and concerned.” VWP instructions concerning the May Day celebrations stressed the need to encourage the people to write petitions to the government to express their “support of the Geneva Conference with a view toward finding ways for peacefully solving the Korean problem and putting an end to the war in Indochina.”

Still, it must have been with mixed feelings that Ho Chi Minh in late March arrived in Beijing, accompanied by Pham Van Dong, the DRV’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, for a pre-Geneva strategy session. His powerful allies were telling him to take half a loaf rather than the whole thing, even though his forces were winning on the battlefield. This was hardly what he wanted to hear, even if he had his own reasons for exploring a compromise diplomatic settlement. He and his comrades had not fought for seven-plus years to gain only partial control of the country. Now he had to listen as Mao and Zhou urged him to score a victory at Dien Bien Phu and thereby achieve results at Geneva, but they also cautioned him to have “realistic expectations” regarding how much could be achieved in the negotiations—shorthand, in all probability, for the estimation that the DRV would not come away from the conference with control over all of Vietnam. The Vietnamese, according to Chinese sources, agreed on both points.

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