Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts

and militia in the center, south, and north, to stand together, go into battle, destroy the invaders, and save the nation” The war was on.
     
    Firmly in control of Tonkin’s major cities, the French high command knew it would have to conquer the Red and Mekong River Deltas to deprive the guerrillas of their rice supplies and the mountains near the Laotian and Chinese borders to strip them of their sanctuaries. General D’Argenlieu’s strategic approach seemed logical: Build isolated military outposts that the French termed hedgehogs, man them with crack troops, and roam into the countryside seeking out and destroying the Vietminh. Eventually, D’Argenlieu assumed, the Vietminh would run out of hiding places and be forced into a conventional set-piece battle, where superior French firepower could annihilate them. The French hoped to conclude a quick victory; otherwise, the war would be expensive, both politically and financially.
     
    Among the greatest challenges facing French soldiers, and later their American counterparts, was the climate, especially in southern Vietnam. Beginning in September, monsoon winds hit central Vietnam from the northeast, blowing across the South China Sea, picking up enormous amounts of water, and dropping them on the countryside until early February. Rainfall averages 100 to 200 inches a year there. Meteorologists classify it as tropical monsoon, but French troops dubbed it “wet hell” Farther south, in the region of Saigon and the Mekong Delta, a tropical savanna climate prevails. Summers receive large amounts of rainfall, with temperatures and humidity hovering in the nineties. French soldiers on summer patrols, especially if they were working their way through swamps and wetlands, often joked that they could not tell where the waterline stopped and the air began. A remark in the mid-1940s by Jean Dubé, a French soldier stationed in Cochin China in the late 1940s, sums up the experience: “I know what those GIs are going through. It really didn’t matter if we were wading through swamps or grasslands. We sweat so much we got just as wet in either place” The Vietnamese were not going to give the French a quick victory.
     
    Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap prepared for guerrilla war. They assumed that France would not have the resources to stay for the long haul. French politics was already a quagmire, and socialists as well as communists were calling for an end to the war. A bloody guerrilla conflict of ambushes, booby traps, and assassinations, with high casualties but no set-piece battles—at least not yet—was Giap’s strategy. While the French saw the war in military terms—defeating the Vietminh on the battlefield—Ho Chi Minh saw it in political terms: destroying the French will to continue.
     
    Throughout 1948 and 1949 the French established their hedgehogs on Route 3 from Bac Ninh to Cao Bang, Route 18 from Bac Ninh to Haiphong, Route 5 from Hanoi to Haiphong, Route 1 from Hanoi to Lang Son, and Route 4 from Cao Bang to Lang Son. In the Mekong Delta, they sought out the guerrillas in search-and-destroy missions. On the political front, the French had Bao Dai, whom they restored to the throne in 1946, sign the Elysée Agreement on March 8, 1949, which created the State of Vietnam as an independent nation but placed France in control of defense, finance, and diplomacy. France promised elections to incorporate Cochin China into a unified Vietnam and held them one month later. Convinced the elections were a sham, the Vietminh boycotted them. Only 1,700 people showed up at the polls, and they voted overwhelmingly to join the State of Vietnam. D’Argenlieu proclaimed that democracy had prevailed.
     
    But in 1949 the war became part of a much larger global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1948, anticommunist rhetoric had grown shrill in Washington. President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to provide $400 million in military