ABSTRACT
In July 1951 a Senate Committee investigating the costs of the war visited Paris, where ambassador Bruce gave them his muddled account of the war. He explained that the French fought ‘the unknown war’ against communism in which ‘nobody understands what it means to them, and very few people are sympathetic with the necessity, as they see it’. He assured the Senators that the war was inexpensive to the French because of the low wages paid to the 160,000 troops they maintained there. Soldiers were paid the equal of five US cents per day, and a second lieutenant in the US Army was paid approximately the pay for a major-general in the French Army. The pay for a draftee in America was 61 times that of a private in the French Army. The Senators were concerned about the French inability to fight both in Europe and Vietnam, but were placated by General George Richards, Chief of MAAG in France, explaining that France could field an army of 5,000,000 troops. Its army then consisted of 850,000 plus a trained reserve of 2,000,000 plus a partly trained reserve of another 2,000,000 plus the untrained reserve, thus making the 5,000,000.1
Another insight to the war’s progress came from the Office of Intelligence Research of the Department of State through its Intelligence Report on Reactions to Possible Range of US Tactics in Indochina prepared by its Estimates Group in the fall of 1951. On the proposition of there being a Chinese invasion, the report emphatically concluded that ‘A Chinese Communist invasion is not now imminent, although the capabilities for such action exists’. On the subject of US-French relations, it described a situation marked by vacillation on the part of the French who, while welcoming ‘our military aid and constantly press for larger and quicker deliveries, they look askance upon the STEM program (ECA) and upon the increasing numbers of American officials and correspondents present in Indochina’.2 The Chinese intention was to sustain the DRV ‘sufficiently to prevent the West from gaining control of an area bordering on Communist China and preserving an active salient pinning down the forces of one of the major powers’. The continuation of the Korean War, said the Report, reduced the Chinese freedom of action in Vietnam, and the anti-Chinese sentiment among the local people inhibited the DRV from increasing the numbers of Chinese technicians and advisors.3
