751G.00/7–2754: Telegram

The Ambassador in France ( Dillon ) to the Department of State

secret

366. Repeated information Saigon 31. Guy La Chambre 1 came to see me today to talk about the future in Vietnam, and particularly about the future aid program. He said that his experts had studied the armistice document and that it was their view that U.S. military assistance to Vietnamese forces cld continue as long as it was channeled thru the French. He said that he hoped that we wld continue the military aid program as it was the French plan to build up the Vietnamese Army as rapidly as possible.

In this connection La Chambre said that many of the French Union units were composed of up to 60 percent Vietnamese. It was their intention to increase the percentage of Vietnamese in these units as rapidly as possible until they reached 100 percent. He said the French intended to detach their ablest officers from fighting units and assign them to training duty. He said the French feel that now that the fighting is ended they can greatly speed up the training and development of an autonomous Vietnamese Army with its own general staff. He said that the French had no intention of bringing back any large troop units to France or North Africa for at least the next six or eight months. This [Page 1880] did not of course exclude the possibility of a few North African battalions which might be repatriated.

La Chambre said that Bao Dai had told the French that the one most important thing was that the French Expeditionary Corps remain in South Vietnam and not be repatriated, as such repatriation wld be looked upon as abandonment. La Chambre said that he had talked this matter over with General Guillaume 2 who was in agreement.

La Chambre then said it wld be most important to make every effort possible to impress the Vietnamese with the virtues of democracy prior to the elections, and that this wld require substantial U.S. economic assistance to Vietnam which he hoped we wld be willing to undertake. I told him that there were no firm plans as yet but that we had every wish to do what was possible to win the elections. I then said that I was sure that we considered the problem basically a political one and that in our view the first thing to be done was to give the Vietnamese govt complete independence. I told him that if this were done I was sure we wld look much more sympathetically on the possibility of establishing a substantial program of economic assistance. La Chambre said that he was in complete agreement and he felt that actions of previous govts in negotiating basic treaties and then trying to hold back the attributes of sovereignty thru the interpretation of technical accords was a terrible policy. He said that Ely had already recd instrs to turn over the administration of the Port of Saigon, local administration throughout South Vietnam, meteorological services and civil aviation to the Vietnamese authorities. La Chambre said the present govt felt it was more important to actually turn over authority on the spot to the Vietnamese govt than to make a great show over the signature of general treaties. He said they had not as yet made up their minds whether to go through with the signature and ratification of the treaty which had been initialled this spring. They had some fear that doing this at this time with the Vietnamese who were now only responsible in the southern part of Vietnam wld give the impression of creating a permanent division of the country. However, in spite of their uncertainty on this subject they were proceeding rapidly to give actual authority to the Vietnamese govt and to building up an autonomous Vietnamese Army.

La Chambre then said that Diem constituted a certain problem as the bulk of his support came from the Catholic provinces of the north and Diem had very little support in the south and did not get along well with the various sects in that region. He said he felt that Diem shld remain as part of any govt that was formed because of his high moral standing and because he wld help with the Catholic population which remained in the north under Vietnam control. He clearly indicated, [Page 1881] however, that he did not think that Diem was suitable to continue as prime minister.

He then said that part of the difficulty in Vietnam came from the Bao Dai regime which was in effect a Mandarin regime and disliked by many of the peasants. Therefore, he felt the time had come to gradually ease Bao Dai out of the picture and create a truly democratic govt in south Vietnam. He offered no indications of just how the removal of Bao Dai cld be brought about.

Concerning the elections two years hence, La Chambre said that there were probably one and a half to two million more people in the northern zone than in the southern, but that he felt that this disparity wld be largely nullified by the movement of refugees from the north to the south. He expected a minimum of 500,000, and possibly as many as a million refugees. He said he felt that shelter and treatment accorded to these refugees wld be of the greatest psychological importance in Vietnam and he hoped that we wld help with this problem.

Dillon
  1. Minister for the Associated States.
  2. Chief of the General Staff of the French Armed Forces.