Alan Brinkley: Review of Fredrik Logevall's "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam"

...Fredrik Logevall’s excellent book “Choosing War” (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With “Embers of War,” he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one — from the end of World War II to the beginning of the second Vietnam War in 1959. It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam.

Logevall begins with the efforts of Ho Chi Minh, who spent his life trying to bring independence to his country. He fought alongside Americans in the battle against Japan during World War II, and he hoped to build an independent Vietnamese nation with American support. But since Ho’s Viet Minh party was both nationalist and Communist, American support in the deepening cold war was impossible. By 1946, Ho was already planning for a war to drive the French out. But the weak and frequently changing French governments had other ideas. They set out to restore Vietnam as a colony of France, and they did so with the financial help of the United States. The French insisted that without Vietnam their economy would collapse. But they wanted more than money. They wanted to secure what they considered the greatness of “eternal France,” which included its colonial enterprises.

The French campaign was a long and ugly conflict that lasted almost a decade. It reached its apex in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, a remote area surrounded by hills in the North, where the French believed they could “withstand any kind of attack the Viet Minh are capable of launching.” The long siege of Dien Bien Phu could have gone either way, but the French underestimated the power of the Viet Minh and lost. By the end, 110,000 French troops were dead — about twice the number of American deaths in the second Vietnam War. Approximately 200,000 Viet Minh soldiers were killed, along with 125,000 civilians. By 1955, the French had left Vietnam for good, abandoning what they had once considered the jewel of their empire....