The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 49
“When my friend was captured, I realized I was in danger.
His sister came to let me know that he had been arrested. I
burned all the revolutionary books and documents he had given
me. It took me the whole night to burn them.”
Diaries written by Jack and Bobby Kennedy describing
their trip to Indochina in 1951 offer a candid assessment of the
Vietnamese revolution. John F. Kennedy, who was then a thirdterm
congressman from Massachusetts, his twenty-six-year-old
brother, Robert F. Kennedy, and their sister Patricia visited
Vietnam in 1951 on a fact-finding trip designed to beef up
JFK’s résumé as he prepared to run for the senate the following
year. Flying into Saigon on October 19, they were greeted
at the airport by an impressive array of troops and tanks, a display
not intended for them but for de Lattre de Tassigny, who
was also visiting Saigon. “People seem sullen and resentful,”
Bobby noted in his journal. The countryside was held by the
guerrillas, not the French. “Could hear shooting as evening
wore on. Great many assassinations.”
The Kennedys noticed right away that the French Indochina
War was not being fought by the French. Certainly the
French were throwing their best officers and many billions of
francs into the conflict, but of the one hundred and fifty thousand
colonial troops in Indochina, only fifteen percent came
from metropolitan France. Of the eighteen thousand soldiers
in the French Foreign Legion, for example, ten thousand were
Germans who had fought in World War II. To avoid starving to
death in the internment camps set up at the end of the war, they
had volunteered to fight in Asia. Supporting this force were
another one hundred and fifty thousand native troops.
By the fall of 1951, the Viet Minh had launched three major
attacks on French forces in the Red River delta in the north.
After ten thousand men were killed—many of them from aerial
attacks with American-supplied napalm—the Viet Minh
abandoned a general offensive and adopted guerrilla warfare.