No More Vietnams Read Online Free PDF Page B

when the weather turned bad, little got through at all. By early April, the situation looked hopeless.
    The battle of Dien Bien Phu dealt a death blow to French morale. Because only about 5 percent of French forces in Indochina were involved, even total defeat at Dien Bien Phu could not have been decisive in the outcome of the war. But it had taken on symbolic importance out of proportion to its significance and proved to be a mortal psychological defeat. Ho Chi Minh had once said, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
    He turned out to be right. The Viet Minh suffered over three times as many casualties as the French did at Dien Bien Phu, but it was the French will to resist that was broken. Opposition to the war had been building in France. Now it snowballed. In the end, the war was lost on the home front in France rather than on the battlefields of Vietnam. No one dreamed that the same thing would happen to the United States twenty years later.
    Our primary interest in Vietnam was to prevent the fall of Indochina to the Communists. We wanted to prevent the loss of Vietnam because we believed it would lead to the fall of the rest of Southeast Asia. This came to be known as the “domino theory.” It was first set forth during the Truman administration in 1952. A National Security Council memorandum stated that in Southeast Asia “the loss of any single country would probably lead to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with communism by the remaining countries of thisgroup.” Dominoes would continue to fall because “an alignment with communism of the rest of Southeast Asia and India, and in the longer term, of the Middle East . . . would in all probability progressively follow. Such widespread alignment would endanger the stability and security of Europe.”
    John F. Kennedy, then a senator, expressed the domino theory even more vividly two years after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, when in a speech he described Vietnam as “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, and obviously Laos and Cambodia would be threatened if the red tide of communism overflowed into Vietnam.”
    Many would scoff at the domino theory in later years. But it is revealing to note that the siege of Dien Bien Phu was made possible only by the fall of Asia’s largest domino—China. With the French war effort in imminent danger of collapse, the United States had to decide what it would do to stop the next domino from tumbling over.
    When France asked the United States for help at Dien Bien Phu, its request was for air strikes, not ground troops. Only if the French were to withdraw from Vietnam would ground troops be needed. Having visited Vietnam the previous November, I made the point in a National Security Council meeting that our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden of preventing a Communist takeover later. Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that we use sixty B-29 bombers in the Philippines in night raids to destroy the Viet Minh positions. He also devised a plan, known as Operation Vulture, for accomplishing the same objective with three small tactical atomic bombs. This option was never seriously considered. President Eisenhower later spoke of possibly using diversionary tactics, such as a naval blockade, against the Viet Minh’s patrons and principal source of military supplies, the Communist Chinese. This plan was also abandoned.
    Both Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulleswere reluctant to take any of these steps. Like Truman, they believed any direct intervention to help the French would gravely damage our relations with newly independent countries. The President also insisted that we had to have