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Ultimately, the U.S. foots the IndoChina bill: the war so far has cost France more than $2 billion—$71 million more than the total U.S. Marshall Plan aid to France. Whether the U.S. likes it or not, the U.S. is very much in the "dirty war" itself; while that war continues to drain from France what the U.S. puts in, France cannot be expected to pull her full weight in NATO. In Indo-China the battle lines of Asia and Europe merge. This is the crucial point which Douglas MacArthur fought to prove, i.e., that Communism cannot go unchecked in Asia and still be defeated in Europe.
General de Lattre de Tassigny, who has been called the MacArthur of France, and who is in Washington fighting to prove the same point, is himself one of the best reasons to hope that the West can win the worldwide battle.
"You Will Be Led . . ." Early last December, about the time the Chinese Communists were sweeping down through North Korea from the Yalu, Indo-China seemed all but lost. Ho Chi Minh's forces, newly equipped by Red China, drove the French into a pocket on the Red River delta around Hanoi and Haiphong, were shifting from guerrilla raids to frontal attack, and boasting that they would take
Christmas dinner in the French strongholds. The French commanders themselves had given up hope of victory. At this nadir, De Lattre was sent from France. Within weeks he worked a change of spirit, and reversed the tide of war. Frenchmen could only compare it to the miracle of the Marne.
"From now on," cried De Lattre to his demoralized troops, "you will be led!" He was 62, a veteran of two World Wars and a colonial war (in North Africa), eight times wounded, 46 times decorated, the pre-NATO commander of West Europe's common defense—but the next 30 days in Indo-China carried his career to its pinnacle.
Brusquely he stopped the panic in Hanoi, canceled the order for evacuation of women & children, brought his own wife from France to his side. Like a burst from a Tommy gun, he cut down and broke incompetent and sluggard officers, cleared the goldbrickers out of the saloons and brothels, conferred on the worst of them what his soldiers came to call "the order of the steamship ticket," i.e., packed them off to France.
When a guard of honor at Haiphong seemed slovenly, De Lattre tongue-lashed the general and colonel in charge, a terrifying treatment known in French slang as the "shampoo." He ordered 25 days' confinement for the pilot of his plane, because the pilot had neglected to put the new commander's insignia on the fuselage. To a bearded copilot, De Lattre snapped: "And you've got five minutes to shave yourself clean!" Later, to an aide, the martinet confided: "I have terrible obligations. I have to abuse those I like the best. These air force men are genuine heroes, but they behave too badly."
To the U.S. liaison officer in Indo-China, Brigadier General Francis Brink, De Lattre handed a list of urgently needed weapons and supplies. He grasped at once the importance of a U.S. weapon ideal for jungle fighting: napalm. His predecessors had never used it.
De Lattre shuttled over the front in a small plane, with a display of energy that left aides ashen-faced with fatigue. Everywhere he touched dormant chords of national pride and restored to his soldiers the will to fight.