Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file
The President to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (Gruenther)
Dear Al: I was struck by a sentence in your letter1 in which you quote Pleven as saying, “It (the loss of the Delta) would start a wave of anti-allied outbursts in France with great bitterness because the Allies let us down.”
Pleven knows as well as you and I do that, beginning in early 1951, every kind of presentation has been made to the French Government to induce that government to put the Indo China war on an international footing. These arguments applied both to the organization of the forces fighting the war on our side and to define the issues at stake in the conflict. In other words, all of us urged France to make certain that the world understood this to be a part of the struggle between Communism and freedom. We urged further that France not only declare her intention of making Indo China independent and that she was fighting for the right of Indo China to be independent—but that she should take steps to place the issue before the UN. At the very least, this latter action would have had the effect of legitimizing any kind of coalition that might then have been formed to fight the war.
As the conflict has dragged on, the United States has more than once offered help of a kind that would tend to keep our participation in the background, but could nevertheless be very effective. I refer to our efforts to get a good guerrilla organization started in the region, our offer to take over a great part of the burden of training native troops, and numerous offers of help in the logistic field.
Most of these have been rebuffed and for no other reason than because of France’s terrible fear of the effect on her position in Morocco and in Tus [Tunisia], as well as her seemingly hysterical desire to be thought such a “great power” that it was beneath her dignity to accept help in the conflict.
In recent months, the French government has begun to speak out of the other side of its mouth, and has been demanding help of various kinds. But it is noteworthy that all these requests for help have been [Page 1668] for help on France’s own terms—her government has consistently insisted upon promises from us of certain kinds of technical help which we would presumably turn over to them without question to be used by them as they saw fit.
Yet at the same time, they have made no single effort to meet the conditions that we have insisted upon for three years as constituting the only sound basis on which any European government could be fighting in South East Asia.
There is no point of reciting here the full list of details and complaints of the kind I have alluded to. The fact is that the United States has been more than forebearing and understanding in this whole issue. We do not hear a word of the enormous sums of money we have poured into the Indo China affair, even while we were necessarily carrying 95% of the burden that feel [fell] upon outside nations in fighting the Korean war. Much as I like Pleven—and have admired him—I get exceedingly weary of his failure to get the facts in the case in proper perspective. I do not minimize the great blow it would be to the United States if we should lose South East Asia. To the contrary, I think it would be a calamity of the most terrible immediate and eventual consequences. But when Pleven talks about the “wave of bitterness” that will sweep over France against us, it seems to me that he should realize that the only answer to this one is to show what the history of the past several years has been. The help that we have given over the years has been rendered in spite of, and not because of, the French attitude.
If Pleven is worrying what the French attitude toward America is going to be, he might take into consideration also what is going to be the American attitude toward France. Take, for example, the fact that while the United States was sending conscripted soldiers to Korea to fight a war in which we as a nation never had any of our political or economic interests involved, the French refused to send conscripts to Indo China, which had been for years merely one of their colonies.
I realize clearly that a mere recitation of fact or the development of argument to show that someone else was to blame, does not in any sense repair or avoid the disastrous consequences of a lost battle or war. As you undoubtedly know, I am even yet spending days and hours trying to get a political climate established among the interested powers that would make it politically feasible within the United States to render the kind of help that our own interests and those of the free world would seem to require. But because we insist on treating everybody concerned as sovereign equals, it is extremely difficult to bring about the meeting of minds that is now so necessary. Even at this moment France wants nothing except commitments from us—so far as I know they have made no real concessions to our frequently repeated [Page 1669] convictions, messages and recommendations that at times almost approached the characteristics of entreaties. Thailand, the Philippines—and in a more clandestine way—Australia, have all shown far more statesmanship and have all recognized the basic requirements of a cooperative effort more than our principal European allies, France and Britain.
We will probably continue this when you get here.
As ever,
- Not identified.↩