Bernard B. Fall (19 November 1926–21 February 1967) was born in Austria, moved with his family to France after the 1938 Anschluss, lost his parents in the Holocaust, and joined the French Maquis at the age of 16. He thus earned experience with guerrilla warfare, including political mobilization and the assassination of collaborators with a view to separating the French population from the Vichy and German governments and building parallel hierarchies. As Nathaniel L. Moir emphasizes in this 516-page monograph, this in turn provided Fall with a basis for understanding the tactics used by the Viet Minh in its war with France 1946–54 and of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF) in its war against the US-supported South Vietnam from 1957.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 86
Nathaniel L. Moir, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare. London: Hurst, 2021. ISBN: 9781787384804.
Reviewed by Stein Tønnesson, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) emeritus
12 December 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE86 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Bernard B. Fall (19 November 1926–21 February 1967) was born in Austria, moved with his family to France after the 1938 Anschluss, lost his parents in the Holocaust, and joined the French Maquis at the age of 16. He thus earned experience with guerrilla warfare, including political mobilization and the assassination of collaborators with a view to separating the French population from the Vichy and German governments and building parallel hierarchies. As Nathaniel L. Moir emphasizes in this 516-page monograph, this in turn provided Fall with a basis for understanding the tactics used by the Viet Minh in its war with France 1946–54 and of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF) in its war against the US-supported South Vietnam from 1957.
From 1944 to 1946, Fall served with the French Army, gained French citizenship, and subsequently worked as an analyst for the Nuremberg court, documenting the role the Krupp company had played in supporting the Nazi war machine. In 1950, he obtained a Fulbright scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Maryland. He subsequently graduated from Syracuse University and completed his PhD in 1955, with a thesis on The Viet Minh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at Johns Hopkins University.[1]
His French background and US higher education prepared him for a unique role as a concerned military analyst during the Vietnam War, writing mostly in English but building on his French experience and military theory. With his background, Fall was not blinded by the normal American assumption that colonialism was a European tradition that could not apply to the US. While deeply critical of Vietnamese Communism and supporting the struggle of the South Vietnamese against the Communist insurgency that took off in the late 1950s, Fall criticized the US for prioritizing military rather than economic aid, and for flooding South Vietnam with money and American products instead of stimulating local economic development through the funding of its counterpart.[2] He was deeply critical of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime (1955–63), above all for replacing traditional local village leaders with new government appointees.
In the early part of his career as a reporter and analyst in Indochina, Fall’s criticism of US policies drew negative attention in Washington, DC. The FBI kept him under surveillance from 1959–1964. During those years, however, Fall gained the respect of both political decisionmakers and military officers, not least for the knowledge he derived from accompanying troops in the field during five long stays in Vietnam and Cambodia. In February 1967, he was killed by a landmine in South Vietnam while on patrol with US Marines.
In the year of his death, he published no less than four books. They included a selection of Indochinese Communist Party founder Ho Chi Minh’s writings with an introduction, a soon-to-be famous narrative of the 1954 battle at Dien Bien Phu, a revised edition of a comparison of North and South Vietnam (first published in 1963), and a reflection on the Vietnam War.[3] Moir builds his monograph on deep admiration for Fall’s knowledge, ideas, and writings. He has explored Fall’s personal archives, read his books and articles, and conducted interviews with Robert Cowley, David Marshall, and Karl Purnell. He also displays his familiarity with the scholarly literature on Vietnam that has been produced since Fall’s death.
The structure of Moir’s book is chronological, with chapters about each phase in a dramatic life. I would claim, however, that there are three books mixed into one. Instead of forming separate parts, they are mingled together in a convoluted way. The first book is a classic biography. It narrates Fall’s life in a captivating but somewhat cursory way and abstains from attempting to dig into the psychology of an Austrian Jew who lost his parents in the Holocaust, immersed himself in French, US, and Indochinese society, practiced a mix of journalism and academic research, built a fascination for revolutionary warfare, yet also married and had three daughters.
The second book provides a highly useful summary of Fall’s writings as they evolved over time. The book does not, however, develop a critical analysis of Fall’s publications. Instead, Moir’s interpretations are in line with those of Fall’s. Moir adds a third book, where he cites from more recent scholarship, and which serves the function of backing up Fall with reference to respected authorities such as George Herring, David Marr, Fred Logevall, and Christopher Goscha.[4] Moir also adds some supportive statements of his own. This third book strikes me as superfluous. It is not always clear whether Moir is summarizing Fall’s views, recounting later historical analyses, or expressing his own opinions. The more exciting question to ask is why some Vietnam War scholars build upon and make many references to Fall,[5] while others do not mention him at all.[6] It would be interesting to critically assess the impact Fall has had on the historiography of the Indochina wars.[7]
The two most valuable contributions of Number One Realist are its discussion of Fall’s influence on contemporary decisionmakers and its analysis of the concept of “revolutionary warfare.” The clearest example of the impact of Fall’s thinking involves Senator J. William Fulbright, the man who gave his name to the Fulbright scholarship program that brought Fall to America and who, in Moir’s terminology, was among those “waking up to what Bernard Fall was writing” (346-349). The story of how Fulbright read Fall’s Street Without Joy (1961) in 1965, asked to see the author, and as a result fundamentally changed his view on the war, regretting his support for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, is a striking example of how scholars can influence the views of decisionmakers. Moir also recounts other examples of Fall’s impact. Towards the end of his short life, despite his critical attitude Fall was extremely popular as a speaker at military conferences both in Vietnam and at Fort Bragg.
Chapter 7, which deals with the first phase of the South Vietnamese insurgency, is the best part of the book. It deals with the notions of “revolutionary warfare” and “parallel hierarchies.” Fall learned these concepts from French military scholars who wrote and taught about counter-insurgency warfare based on the history of the Indochina War and during the war in Algeria (187, 299, 301).[8] They were dissatisfied with the broader term “insurgency,” and preferred the notion of “revolutionary warfare” because it highlights the ideological and political aspects of war. They also avoided speaking of “guerrilla” warfare, except as a military tactic. The terms used by Communist theoreticians, such as “People’s War” or “Resistance War,” were seen as too ideological. “Revolutionary warfare” allowed the French theorists to emphasize the political nature of struggles to insulate a state hierarchy from the local population and build a parallel administrative hierarchy. A key tactic in revolutionary warfare is to coerce local administrators to support the new parallel hierarchy or to kill them if they refuse. Fall’s recipe for what we might call counter-revolutionary warfare was therefore also political: it called for emphasizing economic development in close cooperation with local leaders to ensure their loyalty. Fall soon developed a conviction that the US risked failing in the same way the French had done. In 1962, he wrote to a friend: “To win the military battle but lose the political war could well become the U.S. fate in Vietnam” (337).
Moir agrees with Fall, whom he calls “the foremost scholar on warfare in Vietnam in the twentieth century” (28). He does not, however, engage with alternative theories. It seems to me that there is an interesting difference between the positions held by Fall and by today’s leading scholar on the French Indochina War, Christopher Goscha.[9] Fall and Goscha both reject the common view that the key to the victories of the Vietnamese Communists was the use of asymmetric guerrilla tactics. However, whereas Fall finds his key explanation in the Viet Minh’s political struggle for local support and claims that political subversion in the Red River delta was more important than the battle of Dien Bien Phu for breaking the back of the French war effort in 1954 (298, 303), Goscha ascribes the Viet Minh’s victory to the fact that it could build a coercive state machinery that was able to sustain a conventional army and win conventional battles at Cao Bang in 1950 and Dien Bien Phu in 1954, thus superseding guerrilla warfare. From 1950, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was, in Goscha’s view, transformed from a coalition state to a communist party state with a capacity for coercing northern peasants to provide soldiers and rice to a conventional army. According to Goscha, Viet Minh’s revolutionary warfare helped it survive the difficult years from 1947–1949 but could not lead to victory.[10] In one of Moir’s few critical remarks about Fall’s writings, he notes, in apparent support of Goscha’s argument, that Fall’s The Viet Minh Regime[11] does not explicitly ask “whether the DRV pursued land reform to mobilize Vietnamese society for personnel needed to support conventional military operations” (163). This is central to Goscha’s argument, which sees an intimate rapport between land reform and the Viet Minh’s Napoleonic levée en masse. Fall, however, held that “victory goes to the side that ‘out-administers’ the other, not to the one that outfights or outguns the other” (368).
Moir’s book provides a laudable contribution to the scholarship that highlights Fall’s importance and to a continuation of the scholarly debate about the relative importance of political, economic, and military struggles in civil wars and wars of intervention. The admiration that pervades Moir’s account makes it tempting to compare his book to Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie.[12] They build on a supposition that if Americans had listened to the wisdom of Edward Landsdale (Boot’s hero), John Paul Vann (Sheehan’s hero) or Bernard B. Fall (Moir’s hero), they could have avoided the Vietnam tragedy.
Stein Tønnesson is research professor emeritus at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His doctoral thesis at the University of Oslo, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945 was published by SAGE in 1991. His monograph Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (University of California Press, 2010), was translated into Vietnamese as Việt Nam 1946: Chiến Tranh Bắt Đầu Như Thế Nào? (Nhà Xuất Bản Chính Trị Quốc Gia, 2013). He is now engaged in writing a short introduction to the Vietnam War in his native Norwegian language.
[1] Bernard B. Fall, The Viet-Minh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, issued jointly with the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1956).
[2] “At the very core of Bernard Fall’s writing, this was the central message he sought to convey…,” 300.
[3] Bernard Fall, Ho Chi Minh: On Revolution. Selected Writings (New York NY: Praeger, 1967); Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New York NY: Da Capo Press, 1967); Fall, The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York NY: Praeger 1967); Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York NY: Doubleday, 1967).
[4] George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York NY: McGraw Hill Education, 1st ed. 1979, 6th ed. 2020); David G. Marr, Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution, 1945–1946 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Fred Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York NY: Random House, 2012); Christopher E. Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York NY: Basic Books, 2016).
[5] For example, Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York NY: HarperCollins 1991; Fred Logevall, Choosing War (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999); Logevall, Embers of War; Max Hastings, Vietnam: The Epic History of a Tragic War (London: William Collins, 2018).
[6] For example, George McT Kahin, Intervention (New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, 1986); Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ralph B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War (London: Macmillan, 3 vols, 1983, 1985, 1991); David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War (2 vols, Armonk NY: M.E. Sharp, 2003).
[7] A good beginning is Christopher E. Goscha, “‘Sorry about that …’ Bernard Fall, the Vietnam War and the Impact of a French Intellectual in the US,” in Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, eds. La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003): 363–400 (which Moir includes in his bibliography).
[8] Colonel Gabriel Bonnet, Les guerres insurrectionnelles et révolutionnaires de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Payot, 1958). Colonel Roger Trinquier, La guerre moderne (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1961), and Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (New York NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964). Colonel Charles Lacheroy, De Saint-Cyr à l’action psychologique. Mémoires d’un siècle (Panazol: Lavauzelle, 2003). For an exposition of Charles Lacheroy’s work, including his Indochina experience, see Marie-Catherine and Paul Villatoux, “Aux origines de la ‘guerre’: le colonel Lacheroy parle,’ Revue historique des armées, no. 268, 2012, pp. 45–53.
[9] Christopher E. Goscha, Vietnam: Un état né de la guerre 1945–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); The Road to Dien Bien Phu (Princeton NJ; Princeton University Press, 2022).
[10] Goscha, The Road…, pp. 249, 266.
[11] Bernard B. Fall, The Viet-Minh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Institute of Pacific Relations, 1956).
[12] Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Landsdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York NY: W. W. Norton, 2018; Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989). For a reference to Sheehan, see Moir, 9.