Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
3. The French Expeditionary Corps, with a force of 176,000 men in October 1954, figured heavily in U.S.–French plans for the defense of South Vietnam. In effect, the FEC was planned to be the shield behind which training of the VNA could be conducted, free of major concern over a Viet Minh attack across the 17th parallel. Unfortunate from the point of view of these plans were the major policy disputes that plagued — and finally did in — joint U.S.-French activities in Vietnam.
Dominant among U.S.–French disagreements were the French reluctance to support the Diem Government and the apparent French attitude of conciliation toward the Communists in both North and South Vietnam depends at a minimum on an early and convincing demonstration by the French of their wholehearted support."62 It was particularly frustrating not only that no such "wholehearted support" was forthcoming but also that considerable evidence tended to support the belief that the French were actively attempting to overthrow Diem during the period they remained in Vietnam.63
French reluctance to support Diem — or, as the U.S. estimated, "any nationalist government"64 — was consistent with their attitude toward Communist North Vietnam. Although Generals Collins and Ely enjoyed a cordial relationship of mutual trust, there is considerable evidence that Ely was, in a sense, the victim of both his superiors in the French Government and of his subordinates in Vietnam. Thus while Collins almost never expressed doubts regarding Ely's statements to him (and never of his integrity), French politics both high- and low-level, were particularly intense and seemed to be directed toward preservation of French commercial and cultural influence in both North and South Vietnam. The high-level French mission to Hanoi, the Saintenay Mission, was in particular regarded as evidence of French duplicity, although General Ely, in his memoirs, denies such duplicity.65 Suspected French assistance to the sect forces opposing the Diem Government and French activities within the joint U.S.–French Training Relations Instruction Mission were also consistent with the policy of preservation of French interests.
For some time U.S. policymakers had been thinking seriously about going it alone in Vietnam without the French. When at the Washington Conference in September 1954, the French delegates discussed their intentions to cut the FEC to 100,000 by the end of 1955 and asked for $330 million in U.S. support for the FEC at that level, the reaction among U.S. decision makers was negative. On November 5 it was decided that on balance the U.S. would probably fare better in Vietnam without the French, and it was tentatively agreed that the U.S. should not continue its support that had been requested, but should limit the contribution to $100 million. In their view a complete withdrawal of the FEC in 1955 would create a vacuum that only the Viet Minh could fill, for the VNA would remain incapable of coping even with Viet Minh irregular forces
