Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Great Britain did likewise.15 It is also fact that France speedily divested itself of responsibilities for "civil administration" in South Vietnam. In February, 1956, the GVN requested France to withdraw its military forces, and on April 26, 1956, the French military command in Vietnam, the signatory of the Geneva Agreement, was dissolved. France, torn by domestic political turbulence in which past disappointments and continued frustrations in Vietnam figured prominently, and tested anew in Algeria, abandoned its position in Southeast Asia.16 No doubt, an increasingly acerbic relation between its representatives and those of the United States in South Vietnam hastened its departure, where American policy clashed with French over the arming and training of a national army for the GVN, over French military assistance for the religious sects, over French economic policy on repatriating investments, and over general French opposition to Diem.17 But more fundamentally, France felt itself shouldered aside in South-Vietnam by the United States over:
(1) Policy toward the DRV. The French averred initially that Ho was a potential Tito, and that they could through an accommodation with him preserve their economic and cultural interests in Vietnam—in their view, a "co-existence experiment" of worldwide significance in the Cold War.18 As of December, 1954, they were determined to carry out the Geneva elections. Eventually, however, they were obliged to choose between the U.S. and the DRV, so firmly did the U.S. foreclose any adjustment to the DRV’s objectives.
(2) Policy toward Diem. France opposed Diem not solely because he was a vocally Francophobe Annamite, but because he threatened directly their position in Vietnam. His nationalism, his strictures against "feudalists," his notions of moral regeneration all conjoined in an enmity against the French nearly as heated as that he harbored against the communists—but to greater effect, for it was far easier for him to muster his countrymen's opinion against the French than against the Viet Minh. By the spring of 1955, the Diem–France controversy acquired military dimensions when French supported sect forces took up arms against the GVN. At that time, while the U.S. construed its policy as aiding "Free Vietnam," the French saw Diem as playing Kerensky's role in Vietnam, with the People's Revolutionary Committee as the Bolsheviks, and Ho, the Viet Minh Lenin, waiting off stage.20
(3) Military Policy. By the end of 1954, the French were persuaded that SEATO could never offer security for their citizens and other interests in Vietnam, and had despaired of receiving U.S. military aid for a French Expeditionary Corps of sufficient size to meet the threat.21 U.S. insistence that it should train RVNAF increased their insecurity. Within the combined U.S.–French headquarters in Saigon thereafter, officers of both nations worked side by side launching countervailing intrigues among the Vietnamese, and among each other.22 The relationship became intolerable with French involvement in support of sect forces in open rebellion against U.S. assisted GVN forces.
