Eisenhower Library, Whitman file, Name Series
The President to Captain E. E. Hazlett, Jr., USN (ret.)1
[Extract]
Dear Swede:
. . . . . . .
In my last letter I remember that I mentioned Dien Bien Phu.2 It still holds out and while the situation looked particularly desperate during the past week, there now appears to be a slight improvement and the place may hold on for another week or ten days. The general situation in Southeast Asia, which is rather dramatically epitomized by the Dien Bien Phu battle, is a complicated one that has been a long time developing. It involves many talks on the international level and the frantic desire of the French to remain a world power, but at the same time defeating themselves through their deep divisions and consequent indecisiveness at home.
For more than three years I have been urging upon successive French governments the advisability of finding some way of “internationalizing” the war; such action would be proof to all the world and particularly to the Viet Namese that France’s purpose is not colonial in character but is to defeat Communism in the region and to give the natives their freedom. The reply has always been vague, [Page 1428] containing references to national prestige, Constitutional limitations, inevitable effects upon the Moroccan and Tunisian peoples, and dissertations on plain political difficulties and battles within the French Parliament. The result has been that the French have failed entirely to produce any enthusiasm on the part of the Viet Namese for participation in the war. (Incidentally, did you ever stop to think that if the British had, in our War of the Revolution, treated as equals the Americans who favored them—whom they called Loyalists and we called Tories—the job of Washington would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. I have read that when the entire colonial forces in the field numbered not more than twenty-five thousand, that there were fifty thousand Americans serving in some capacity with and for the British. Yet no really effective service was rendered by these people because the British persisted in treating them as “colonials and inferiors.”)
In any event, any nation that intervenes in a civil war can scarcely expect to win unless the side in whose favor it intervenes possesses a high morale based upon a war purpose or cause in which it believes. The French have used weasel words in promising independence and through this one reason as much as anything else, have suffered reverses that have been really inexcusable.
The British are frightened, I think, by two things. First, they have a morbid obsession that any positive move on the part of the free world may bring upon us World War III. Secondly, they are desperately concerned about the safety of Hong Kong. For the moment the Chinese Communists are not molesting Hong Kong and the British are fearful that if they should be identified as opponents of the Communists in the Indo-China affair, they might suffer the loss of Hong Kong at any moment. All this is conjecture, but in respect to this particular point, my own view is in almost direct opposition. I personally feel that if the Communists would take a good smacking in Indo-China, they would be more likely to leave Hong Kong severely alone for a long time. Moreover, if a “concert of nations” should undertake to protect Western interests in this critical section of the globe, it would appear that Hong Kong would almost automatically fall within the protected zone.
Just what the outcome will be, of course, is still largely a guess, but in any event I feel that the situation is a shade—but only a shade—brighter than it was a week or so ago.
. . . . . . .
As ever,
- A personal friend of the President, with whom he corresponded frequently.↩
-
In a letter to Hazlett of Mar. 18, the President had stated the following:
↩“The third major problem of the day is the increasingly bad situation in Indo-China. As you know, the Vietminh continue their assault on Dien Bien Phu, and the situation there becomes increasingly disturbing. I hope the French will have the stamina to stick it out; because a defeat in that area will inevitably have a serious psychological effect on the French. I suspect that this particular attack was launched by the Communists to gain an advantage to be used at the Geneva Conference. At any rate, it is just another of the problems that is dumped in my lap—in this particular case, of course, there is little I can do except to wait it out and hope for the best.” (Eisenhower Library, Whitman file, Name Series)