Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
commitment to the Korean war. In a somewhat premature judgment of outcomes, a progress report on the implementation of NSC 64 (March 15, 1951) stated that "American military aid furnished the States' forces and the Army of the French Union may have been the decisive factor in the preservation of the area against Communist aggression."45 Through 1952 and into 1954 "the MDAP shipments to Indochina increased steadily46: by February 3, 1953, the United States had shipped 137,200 long tons of material (224 ships' cargoes); by July 1954, approximately 150,000 long tons had been sent, including 1,800 combat vehicles, 30,887 motor transport vehicles, 361,522 small arms and machine guns, 438 naval craft, 2 World War II aircraft carriers, and about 500 aircraft. By the conclusion of the Geneva agreements in July, 1954, the U.S. had delivered aid to Indochina at an original cost of $2,600 million.47 Nonetheless, protests of the French at the slowness of deliveries and the "interference" of MAAG with French requests were recurrent, and peaked, during the crisis days of 1954. Yet these complaints probably reflected less genuine U.S. shortcomings than French resentment of American efforts to advise, screen, inspect, and verify, and sheer frustration. Moreover, the vagaries of the French logistic system not only made the MAAG job more difficult, but further impeded combat supplies.
- b. Effectiveness
In spite of the conditions under which U.S. assistance to France and the Associated States was given, the MAAG during the period of the Indochina war was little more than a small (70 in 1950, 3^2 in 195+) supply-support group which exerted far more influence upon U.S. decisions than on the French. The French, never eager for American advice, not only succeeded in limiting the function of MAAG to order-taking in the commercial sense, but in fact — through adroit pressuring of officials above the MAAG — sometimes reduced MAAG to the position of taking their military orders. Available data do not permit detailed evaluation of the efficiency of MAP, but it seems clear that French restrictions on the U.S. MAAG reduced it to virtual impotence.48
However, to relate any judgment of the effectiveness of the United States assistance program simply and directly to the outcome of the war would clearly be inappropriate. For the most part, U.S. expectations were not high. In the words of the American Ambassador to France in February, 1950, "obviously any program of external assistance was marginal in character and entirely dependent for its success upon the solidity of the base — in this case, the firmness of French policy and actions in Indochina."49 French determination to resist American advice was not matched by firmness in proceeding with granting independence to Vietnam, or otherwise meeting the political situation in Indochina. Hence, as the U.S. apparently expected, a favorable outcome to the Indochina war continued to elude France, even with American material and financial help. U.S. assistance enabled France to wage a military battle while it lost its political war — in Saigon and in Paris. (The military defeat at Dien Bien Phu was important primarily from the point of view of its psychological and political impact on the French, and was so interpreted in the relevant U.S. intelligence estimates.)50
