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The Shadow Line: A Confession by Joseph Conrad (1917)

A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were, physically – a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that counted, and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity – and of love.
(The narrator’s feelings in the early, optimistic, part of ‘The Shadow Line’, p.40)

When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave.
(The narrator’s feeling after weeks of being becalmed on a plague ship, page 92)

Conrad’s first novel was published in 1895 when he was 38 years old. By 1917 when ‘The Shadow Line’ appeared, he had published ten novels, six novellas and twenty-five or so short stories, so had a lot of experience under his belt. ‘The Shadow Line’ is often taken to be the masterpiece of Conrad’s late period, although he was to go on and publish four more long novels before his death in 1926 (aged 66).

Conrad coined the phrase ‘shadow line’ to mean the dividing line between youth and maturity, ‘that twilight region between youth and maturity’. A simple summary of the story is that it’s a first-person narrative by a young merchant officer who assumes his first command of a ship as captain, and the series of unfortunate and then disastrous events which follow.

Date: in the Officers’ Home the narrator and Giles read papers which are full of details of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, which was in 1887. The settings of a lot of Conrad’s stories are much earlier than you assume.

Synopsis

Part 1. In port

The narrator has been mate aboard a merchant ship operating around the Malay Peninsula for 18 months when he impulsively quits his job, citing an obscure feeling of ‘life emptiness’ (p.49).

He arranges to catch a ship home but has 4 days before it leaves so goes to stay in the Officers’ Home. Here the sullen steward tries to keep a letter from him which turns out to be a request to go and visit the harbour master about a possible command. The steward had wanted to hide it because he wanted the command to go to the long-term resident of the Home, a captain named Hamilton who hasn’t paid his bill for ages. This situation and the subterfuge of the steward and the encouragement of old Captain Giles to confront the steward and ask for the message and then the way the steward feels almost suicidal when his little deceit is discovered and Captain Giles has to go and comfort him – all this may appear extremely tangential to a story about a young merchant seaman being given his first command, and yet it takes up a third of the entire narrative, up to page 45 of this 130-page text.

Some of the descriptions of this behaviour (the steward’s, Captain Giles’s) barely make sense and the immense amount of time spent describing this trivial incident warns the reader that the sometimes incomprehensible element in Conrad’s imagining and writing are very dominant here; and, more importantly, give you a strong sense that he’s padding his story out.

Anyway, the harbour master has been looking for him because a British ship’s captain died in Bangkok, there’s a vacancy for the captainship and his previous captain, Kent, strongly recommended him, despite being a bit upset that he’d chosen to leave.

So old Captain Giles helps him pack up his stuff, get some coolies to carry it down to the docks, where he jumps into the steam launch which takes him out to the ship which the harbour master has arranged will transport him to Bangkok. He is aboard it for four days and the captain never ceases his antagonistic hostile attitude because waiting for the narrator, delayed their departure by three hours.

Part 2. His disastrous command

They arrive in Bangkok, he leaves the transporter ship and steps aboard his command.

Putting my foot on her deck for the first time, I received the feeling of deep physical satisfaction. Nothing could equal the fullness of that moment, the ideal completeness of that emotional experience which had come to me without the preliminary toil and disenchantments of an obscure career.

He quickly meets Burns, the first mate, a nervous wanting man who puts him at permanent unease. Burns tells him the story of the old captain’s infatuation with a white woman in Haiphong which kept them there long past their time, how he came onboard after a week’s absence looking ill, and declined quickly during the subsequent voyage, dying in his cabin chair about noon. Towards the end he was full of hate and spitefully told Burns he wished the whole ship would go down with all hands. Now Burns is sullenly convinced the narrator has taken the vacant post which he coveted.

So bad karma but worse is to come, namely 1) endless delay due to ‘silly commercial complications’ in getting the ship loaded and underway, during which 2) the tropical heat brings a lot of the crew down with illness. The steward goes ashore with cholera and dies within the week. Burns is afflicted and, sullenly, resentfully, has to be taken ashore.

Finally after 6 weeks stewing in the humid heat, the captain insists Burns, still too ill to walk unaided, is returned to the ship and they are towed downriver to the estuary. He is excited, sleeps and wakes to the first day of his command etc, but the ship is still cursed. There is virtually no wind and so, like Coleridge’s ship:

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

And they haven’t escaped the contagion. Two more of the crew come down with severe fever. The narrator makes a point of keeping burns, confined to his bed, informed of their lack of movement and is dismayed when the mate attributes it to the evil curse of the late captain.

They just can’t escape from the Bay of Siam. In particular the large mountain of Koh-ring stays within sight day after day, as if they’re bewitched, as if they’re under a spell, and Conrad very deliberately deploys words like magic, spell, bewitched, supernatural evil, evil spell, evil powers, purposeful malevolence, fiendish and so on to create a spooky atmosphere. Meanwhile the disease moves through the entire crew, except for healthy Ransome and the narrator, weakening them and leaving them with ‘a hunted, apprehensive look in their eyes’. Conrad lays on the ghost ship vibe with a trowel.

Eventually you realise that there is precious little plot here, instead the narrative is following the classic Conrad parabola from reasonably sensible, real-world affairs and business, larded with a bit of youthful naivete, which is then slowly and steadily crushed, as the sense of doom and fatedness and futility and slow-mounting horror takes control, until the narrator ends up having visions of the ship as a floating grave and wonders whether he’s going mad.

There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but that I had gone mad already; so that I dared not open my lips for fear of betraying myself by some insane shriek… (p.100)

It is the usual Conrad hysteria breaking through, the same terrifying hysteria which dominates the end of The Secret Agent.

Next thing that happens is he discovers four of the vials in the medicine chest which should contain quinine are full of some nondescript white crystals. Burns accuses the captain of selling off the quinine ashore for a pretty penny. This only moderate incident is made the peg for the narrator to blame himself immoderately. it feels willed, it feels as if Conrad needed a pretext to place the narrator in the next stage of his transition from youthful optimism to more weathered manhood.

The person I could never forgive was myself. Nothing should ever be taken for granted. The seed of everlasting remorse was sown in my breast. ‘I feel it’s all my fault,’ I exclaimed, ‘mine and nobody else’s. That’s how I feel. I shall never forgive myself.’ ‘That’s very foolish, sir,’ said Mr. Burns fiercely.

And you’re inclined to agree with Burns, the emaciated obsessive. But the narrator goes on becoming more hysterical. He quotes from the journal where he knocks off standard Conrad expressions of horror and futility:

All sense of time is lost in the monotony of expectation, of hope, and of desire… I emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. Even as I have been decoyed into this awful, this death-haunted command… we were lost in the darkness… (p.97)

What doesn’t help is sick, emaciated Burns’ conviction that the ship really genuinely was cursed by the previous captain and that only when they pass the precise point on the map where burns buried his body at sea, only then will the spell be broken. Privately the narrator is now having Ancient Mariner visions of the entire ship’s crew dying, of it becoming a ghost ship, ‘my appalling vision of a ship floating with a dead crew’. Publicly he tries to keep control of himself and give orders in a calm, rational way.

It feels again and again in these stories that Conrad is giving way to the acute depressions which crippled him in real life. The stories, often with the thinnest of plots, are only as long as they are because draped in cascades of prose which repeats the same idea of horror and futility and anguish and despair again and again:

The memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant

Hundreds of sentences like these drown the reader in thick dark despair. For fifteen days the sick crew endure this hell of being completely becalmed and very ill. Conrad pops in a sentence or two explaining why this was the shadow line, the transition from youth to maturity.

It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day [when they set sail, 15 days earlier] is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow. (p.106)

There’s little plot, just an ever-deepening intensification of the jet black atmosphere; literally, because, on that night, some kind of cloud covers the sky and stars and the narrator feels they’ve descended into hell.

The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance. There was in it an effect of inconceivable terror and of inexpressible mystery… the closing in of a menace from all sides.

Anyway, wading through this hysteria the actual events are that the sky grows pitch black, then there’s an intense downpour of rain which extinguishes the last lights on the ship, plunging them into the blackness of hell etc. In this dark the narrator sees a Shape loom up from the floor, huge and shaggy, and screams with pure unadulterated horror.

Moments later it is revealed to be the emaciated mate, Burns, who’s wrapped himself in a thick coat. He repeats for the hundredth time his conviction that the old captain has doomed the ship and then bursts into hysterical laughter, an ‘insane screeching’. This daunts the drew who think the captain’s gone mad so the narrator has to quickly move to tell them it’s the mate, and ask for help to get him back below decks.

And then a wind comes, the first wind for 18 days, the masts fill and the ship starts moving. The narrator bounds up to the helm, helping Frenchy replace the exhausted Grumbal, while Ransome takes Burns below. He reports that Burns has finally fallen into a deep sleep. The reader guesses all this has happened because they’ve finally passed beyond the spot where the old captain was buried at sea and so broken the curse. And he goes on to state it explicitly:

By the exorcising virtue of Mr. Burns’ awful laugh, the malicious spectre had been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of a kind and energetic Providence. It was rushing us on…

And so the ship sails swiftly through the foamy sea and, 40 hours later, arrives back at the same harbour it left 21 days earlier. Conrad describes the immense effort of the weak and feeble hands to reef in the sails and drop anchor. They are flying a signal for medical assistance flying on the mizzen so doctors boats come out to see them. The sick men are taken off. The narrator watches them feeling guilty and responsible. A doctor examines him and recommends a strong sedative for that evening.

Once on shore he bumps into old Captain Giles, which allows Conrad to bring the story round full circle. It also allows him to end it with something like normality, two seamen sharing a meal in the dining room of the Officers’ Home, trying to eclipse the way he has just put us through a steadily intensifying horror show.

When the narrator surprises Captain Giles by saying he’s aiming to recruit a new crew from a recently shipwrecked ship and cast off tomorrow to head for the Indian Ocean, Giles nods approvingly, ‘That’s the way. You’ll do.’

The very final passage of the narrative is the narrator signing Ransome’s termination of contract. Ransome was the only other crewman not afflicted by sickness, was as solid and dependable as a rock, from his clockwork cooking to his encouragement of morale, to his mucking into help with sails and steering. By the end he has become an allegorical figure of devotion to duty. But even he is mortal and is terrified that his faulty heart will give out at any moment. He shakes hands and leaves the ship to the narrator preparing for his next voyage.

And with this highly symbolic apothegm – that none of us know when our common enemy will strike – this harrowing and haunting story ends.

Resemblance to ‘The Secret Sharer’

Obviously the story has lots in common with The Secret Sharer, which also features a captain taking his first command, who becomes possessed by a strange obsession, and keeps going down to the cabin to update a sick man confined there, Leggatt in ‘Sharer’ and the wasted first mate Burns in this story.

Even the location in the Bay of Siam and the ominous and then supernatural power of the mountain island Koh-ring appear in both.

The Great War connection

Conrad wrote the novella after the outbreak of the First World War. His son, Borys, served in (and survived) the war, and ‘The Shadow Line’ is dedicated to him. So plenty of critics have interpreted ‘The Shadow Line’ as Conrad’s response to the Great War. This seems to me most obvious in the descriptions of the haggard band of sick and haunted men, worn down by their ordeal and yet doggedly loyal and dutiful, and the portrait of their pitying and reluctant officer.

Those who were able to walk remained all the time on duty, lying about in the shadows of the main deck, till my voice raised for an order would bring them to their enfeebled feet, a tottering little group, moving patiently about the ship, with hardly a murmur, a whisper amongst them all. And every time I had to raise my voice it was with a pang of remorse and pity.

It’s easy to take the disease which afflicts the ship as a metaphor of war:

The disease disclosed its low type in a startling way. It was not so with many of the men. The wastage of ill-health seemed to idealise the general character of the features, bringing out the unsuspected nobility of some, the strength of others, and in one case revealing an essentially comic aspect.

And this passage seems to be an unambiguous tribute to the suffering of the soldiers:

If I remember all their faces, wasting tragically before my eyes, most of their names have vanished from my memory. The words that passed between us were few and puerile in regard of the situation. I had to force myself to look them in the face. I expected to meet reproachful glances. There were none. The expression of suffering in their eyes was indeed hard enough to bear. But that they couldn’t help. For the rest, I ask myself whether it was the temper of their souls or the sympathy of their imagination that made them so wonderful, so worthy of my undying regard. (p.100)

The thematic structure

His critics follow Conrad’s claims in his boring prefaces that his stories are about ‘morality’ but they aren’t really, are they? They are far more accurately described as harrowing visions of horror and futility. The figure of Ransome is meant to be some kind of rock to which the narrator can cling, a symbol of what is, in the end, Conrad’s extremely simple Victorian belief that (as the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Jeremy Hawthorn puts it) ‘work has a moral force and action a therapeutic value’.

A kind of intellectual duality is built into the text, which obviously aims to contrast moral strength with moral dissolution, Ransome’s dutifulness with the narrator’s sense that he has failed, visions of sin and hell with Ransome conceived as an angel and old Captain Giles’s wisdom. These antitheses are all very cleverly worked out and inhabit what you could call the world of liberal sensibility. But the actual experience of reading the text has nothing to do with moral discriminations; it is extraordinarily intense and melodramatic. It is like being hurled into Samuel Beckett land, only even bleaker than Beckett land.

Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight. At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night. (p.113)

The text again and again immerses the reader in such feelings of existential dread, aloneness, crisis and collapse. It makes for an extraordinary experience.

Three elements

As ever, the reader is struck by three really obvious elements of a Conrad story:

  1. it is very wordy, and the style is that of a non-native English speaker, with odd vocabulary (‘unexpugnable’) and unidiomatic word order which frequently reminds you of French rather than English
  2. the wordiness sometimes obscures the events, which themselves sometimes feel odd, not in a profound writerly way, but frequently in a cack-handed, surprisingly amateurish way
  3. although 130 pages long (in the Oxford Classics edition), like so many other Conrad novellas and short stories ‘The Shadow Line’ has a surprisingly large number of characters, named and unnamed

Cast

The unnamed first-person narrator, admits that he has the touchiness of youth. He describes himself as sullen and sarcastic, petulant and grumpy.

On his first ship

Its Arab owner, a Syed, the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, an old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers’.

The Captain, Kent, a man with a thick iron-gray moustache.

The second engineer, John Nieven, ‘a sturdy young Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes’, ‘a fierce misogynist.’

The chief engineer, ‘young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard face’, ‘a confirmed dyspeptic’.

Ashore

Unnamed official in the Harbour Office who is sad the narrator is signing off from his ship.

Chief Steward of the Officers’ Home, ‘an unhappy, wizened little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to perfection’.

The dozing stranger who Giles says is an officer from some Rajah’s yacht.

Hamilton, well-groomed aloof permanent resident of the Officers’ Home who a) regards everyone else as ‘an outsider’ and b) to the despair of the Steward, has never paid his bill.

Captain Giles, seasoned old expert navigator round the Malayan seas.

Mr R, the Head Shipping Master, secretary to…

The Harbourmaster, Captain Ellis, who sends for him and asks if he wants to captain the skipperless ship in Bangkok.

En route to Bangkok

The unnamed captain of the unnamed ship which transports the narrator to Bangkok, ‘a thin, long-armed, long-legged man, with a closely clipped gray beard.’

His command

The steward.

Burns, the first mate, ‘His long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.’

The previous captain, now dead: ‘He was a peculiar man – of sixty-five about – iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours – till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.’ (p.58)

The former captain’s white woman in Haiphong, seen only in a photograph.

The doctor of the Legation and Consulate.

Ransome the cook, a fit handsome man who, however, cried off being a dull seaman because he has a heart condition’. Ransome becomes the stoutest, bravest, most loyal and dutiful of the crew throughout the nightmare voyage.

The second officer, ‘a callow youth with an unpromising face.’

Frenchy, a short, gingery, active man with a nose and chin of the Punch type’, ‘To see him coming aft to the wheel comforted one. The blue dungaree trousers turned up the calf, one leg a little higher than the other, the clean check shirt, the white canvas cap, evidently made by himself, made up a whole of peculiar smartness, and the persistent jauntiness of his gait, even, poor fellow, when he couldn’t help tottering, told of his invincible spirit.’

Gambril, ‘the only grizzled person in the ship’.

Vivid phrases

Like diamonds in mud Conrad continually comes up with vivid images.

Captain Giles… began to haul at his gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket like solid truth from a well. (p.27)

The doctor’s glasses were directed at me like two lamps searching the genuineness of my resolution. (p.71)

Cosmic visions

As usual I spotted a couple of Conrad’s cosmic comparisons, the astronomic similes which seem to lift you clean off the surface of the earth and into another dimension or genre.

The darkness had risen around the ship like a mysterious emanation from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned on the rail and turned my ear to the shadows of the night. Not a sound. My command might have been a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed path in a space of infinite silence. (p.74)

As I’ve repeatedly said, his bleakness often becomes so intense as to carry him out of the realm of realistic literature altogether and into the realm of science fiction.

There was still no man at the helm. The immobility of all things was perfect. If the air had turned black, the sea, for all I knew, might have turned solid. It was no good looking in any direction, watching for any sign, speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like run-down clocks. (p.108)

Conrad’s style

In the first half of the story Conrad’s aim is to make the narrator appear naive and innocent; part of this strategy is to make him feel superior and quick to judge all the other characters. He has the arrogance, the cocksureness of youth. When he is offered the captaincy it makes him feel like he is walking on air, floating with happiness, feels as if he’s in a fairy tale etc. In the second half, well, I’ve described and quoted how the story collapses into horror and terror.

Clunkers

As usual, a lot of the text is only borderline English and Conrad fairly often writes sentences that cross the border, into being non-English and sometimes almost incomprehensible.

‘Well, no,’ I conceded, restraining a desire to laugh at that something mysteriously earnest in delivering the conclusions of his wisdom as though it were the product of prohibited operations. (p.41)

The doctor’s round, full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the perfection of a dignified amenity. (p.66)

These occasional weirdnesses have a charm of their own. Alternatively, sometimes his sentences aren’t incomprehensible, they’re just poorly written and phrased.

Seizing eagerly upon the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be paid for in some way. (p.83)

I said to myself disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the smallest degree my fortitude. (p.86)

French word order

In English we tend to put adjectives and adverbs before the noun or verb. In French they do it the other way round. Very often Conrad writes sentences with the adjective or adjectival phrase following the noun in a pronounced and foreign-feeling way.

He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams… (p.90)

Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words…

Poor quality wisdom writing

Conrad has a related habit which is writing something which starts out looking like it’s going to be a quotable bit of wisdom writing, but then turns out to be disappointingly banal or flat. To be harsh, he sounds like a man who, in the first fifteen years of his career, had written everything interesting and shocking and insightful he was ever going to write, and is now just going through the motions.

People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in this connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions. (p.65)

It starts off with the flow and feel of something which is going to be profound but ends up, in fact, being both obvious and clunkily phrased.

Credit

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad was first published as a serial in the English Review from September 1916 to March 1917 and published in book form by J.M. Dent in 1917. Page references are to the 1985 Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition.

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The Last Valley by Martin Windrow (2004)

While an increasing flow of American dollars, weapons, vehicles and aircraft in the early 1950s did improve the fire and mobility of the CEFEO, they could not offset the fundamental disadvantages of a roadbound army facing a hill and forest army in a country which had few roads but a great many hills and forests.
(The Last Valley, page 129)

This is a really epic book about an epic battle. Its full title is The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam and it does what it says on the tin at immense length and in fascinating detail, clocking in at a whopping 734 pages, including detailed endnotes, bibliography, list of acronyms, no fewer than 21 maps, and a thorough index. It clearly sets out to be the definitive account of this military debacle.

1. Background

The first hundred or so pages take us through the origins and early stages of the First Indochina War (1946 to 1954). Vietnam had been part of French colonial Indochina since the 1850s, a colonial territory which was consolidated at the turn of the twentieth century. The higher education the French offered the natives ironically educated a generation of Vietnamese to demand greater freedom and independence.

The most notable of these nationalists was Ho Chi Minh (born 1890) who travelled to France after World War One and tried to contact the American delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, hoping that President Woodrow Wilson would apply his Fourteen Points to Europe’s colonies – particularly French Indochina – and secure their independence. But young Ho’s letters to the President went unanswered.

Rebuffed, Ho set about educating himself in communist doctrine and guerrilla tactics, travelling to Soviet Moscow to study, then returning to Vietnam where he helped set up the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 and then helped weld the various disparate Vietnamese nationalist groups into a united front, the Viet Minh, in 1941.

After the Fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, the French authorities in Indochina (as in France’s other colonies) switched allegiance to the new Vichy government, a fascist puppet state which the Nazis allowed to administer the south of France and the French Empire.

On September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, which became known as the Axis alliance. Japanese forces entered French Indochina and took over all important administrative powers from the Vichy French. The native Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians) watched in wonder as their European imperial masters were humiliated by fellow Asians. In a culture based on ‘face’, the French empire in the East (like the British one) never recovered from the loss of face involved in their feeble surrender to the Japanese.

France was finally liberated by the Allies in late 1944 and the Vichy regime was overthrown. This put the Vichy administrators in Indochina in a tricky position vis-a-vis their Japanese masters and the growing tension came to a head in March 1945 when the Japanese rounded up the Vichy forces, locking them up in Japanese prison camps and executing anyone who resisted (‘In Saigon the senior military and civil prisoners, General Lemonnier and Resident Auphalle, were beheaded after being forced to dig their own graves,’ page 81.)

In the six months between Japan’s seizure of power and the final Japanese defeat in September 1945, the Japanese left the Viet Minh to their own devices, allowing them to organise and set up cells throughout the country. The Japanese concentrated their efforts on pillaging Vietnam’s food resources to feed Japan, leading to the catastrophic famine of 1945 in which well over one million Vietnamese starved to death.

When the Japanese finally surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh, led by Ho, their by-now veteran organiser, immediately declared Vietnamese independence to cheering crowds and amid nationwide rejoicing. Frederick Logevall’s epic account of the period, Embers of War, includes eyewitness accounts by the handful of Americans on the scene, who were amazed and impressed when Ho quoted the American Declaration of Independence. Like the Americans, the Vietnamese just wanted to be free from an imperial oppressor.

Which makes the tragedy all the more bitter, which makes you want to weep tears of frustration, when you read how the Americans under President Truman abandoned their wartime commitment to liberate colonial peoples, and instead stood behind General de Gaulle’s typically arrogant insistence that all of Indochina must be returned to French Imperial rule.

As per the agreement made between the Big Three powers (the USA, Britain, USSR) at Potsdam earlier in 1945, a ragtag army from nationalist China was allowed to occupy the north of the country, and a division of the British Indian army occupied the south, the idea being that they would maintain the peace until the French military returned.

Through late 1945 into spring 1946 the French armed forces arrived from Europe, determined to restore the status quo ante, immediately rounding up any nationalists foolish enough to trust them, amid an atmosphere of mistrust and tension. Scattered moments of resistance quickly grew into a guerrilla insurgency across the country, in the north and south, which was crystallised in a dispute over customs dues in the port of Haiphong. On November 26 1946 the French navy bombarded the city, seriously damaging it and killing over 6,000 civilians, in just one afternoon. After such a massacre by the country’s ‘protectors’, there was no going back (page 90).

2. The first Indochina war

So by 1947 France found itself drawn into an unwinnable guerrilla war against an enemy who mostly refused open battle in preference for urban terrorist attacks and hit-and-run guerrilla operations in the steamy jungles of northern Vietnam. In a way the 8 years of war, from 1946 to 1954, are footnotes to, or simply the logical consequence of, the fatal initial French decision to reoccupy the country against the express wishes of the majority of the population.

The French military struggled to contain an insurgency which was so unpredictable and where the terrain and the people were so much on the side of the insurgents. French generals arrived in Indochina full of enthusiasm and confidence, slowly grasped the hopelessness of the situation, and ended up writing bleak reports back to Paris, while all the time little convoys and isolated outposts were ambushed and annihilated.

Back in Paris the governments of the Fourth Republic proved themselves as addicted to bickering and posturing as the French governments before the war had been, lacking – in a neat formulation of Windrow’s – either the strength to prosecute the war with conviction (to implement conscription and triple the number of French troops in Vietnam) or the political courage to face the facts and agree to talks with the Viet Minh.

The situation underwent a sea change in October 1949 when Mao Zedong’s communist forces finally secured power in war-torn China. Mao immediately set about sending supplies to the Viet Minh and Windrow describes how military training camps were set up in south China for cohorts of Viet Minh forces to attend – learning the skills of organisation, rifle, machine gun, mortar and artillery technique.

Reading the history of this period has taught me that the fall of China to communism caused massive recriminations in American politics, with a wave of republicans queueing up to accuse President Truman’s Democrat government of being ‘soft on communism’. The American political atmosphere was paranoid even before communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, precipitating America into a bloody three-year struggle in support of the beleaguered south.

All this turned the independence struggle in Vietnam into a cauldron of the Cold War and, especially after the Korean War ground to a long-delayed armistice in summer 1953, the two sides (Viet Minh and French) were supplied ever increasing amounts of arms and matériel by their respective backers (China and America). By the time the Indochina war ground to a halt in 1954, the United States was paying three-quarters of the cost of the war.

3. Dien Bien Phu

In 1951 and 1952 there were larger-scale engagements as the Vietnam Liberation Army’s self-taught general, Vo Ngyen Giáp, experimented with larger attacks on French positions around Hanoi in the North. Windrow describes each of these in meticulous detail, with precise maps showing troop dispositions in staggering detail, and there are very precise maps for each of them, so that you can follow the night’s or day’s events with great precision.

November and December 1952 saw the Battle of Nà Sản. Giáp attacked the French outpost at Nà Sản, an isolated fortified camp in Tonkin supplied only by air. Giáp sent wave after wave of Viet Minh infantry in direct attack, but these either failed, or the territory they seized was immediately retaken by aggressive French paratroop units. Ultimately, Giáp failed, with the Viet Minh suffering very heavy losses.

In May 1953 French General Henri Navarre was dispatched to Vietnam with orders to bring the situation to some kind of resolution favourable for possible negotiations. He based himself in Hanoi in the north of the country, where the Viet Minh were strongest. His first priority was maintaining security in the corridor from Hanoi down to the port of Haiphong and in the broader delta of the Red River. Late in the year he launched an anti-insurgency operation in the middle of the country, the territory known as Annam.

But the idea slowly took shape of deliberately recreating the Nà Sản experience on an even larger scale with the aim of drawing Giáp into committing the bulk of the Viet Minh forces – also known as the Vietnam Liberation Army (VLA) – into a massed assault which would allow superior French artillery, armour and air support to decimate them.

Given France’s total domination of the air, the idea developed that the base used to draw the Viet Minh in would be supplied by air, and air forces would also help to decimate all the VPA units brought against it.

Windrow charts the process whereby various factors led the French to decide to locate this ‘air-land base’ at the remote settlement of Dien Bien Phu. Dien was actually a straggle of small villages in a long narrow valley far in the north-west of the country. It was given strategic value by being a kind of crossroads for Viet Minh forces coming from China and/or heading south-west to threaten French-occupied Laos.

Plans were drawn up to parachute in over 10,000 men, mainly crack paratroop regiments and Foreign Legionaries, along with vast amounts of equipment, including 10 Chaffee tanks and bulldozers to create a working airstrip. Operation Castor, as it was called, commenced on 20 November 1953.

Once the airstrip was laid, old Dakota transport planes from the Second World War began flying in scores of artillery guns, hundreds of mortars, vast amounts of ammunition and everything required to build a huge military encampment in the long narrow valley. During this set-up phase there was little or no sight of the enemy and countless politicians and journalists flew in to be impressed by the might and power of the French Army. In fact, right from the start, a lot of the planes, crews and equipment were supplied by the Americans.

4. Catastrophe

The entire project rested on a number of assumptions or propositions:

1. Dominance in the air would prove decisive, so that:

  • supplies could be dropped indefinitely
  • wounded taken out by air
  • new men brought in
  • Vietnam Liberation Army forces could be identified from the air and wiped out
  • VLA artillery could be identified from the air and wiped out

2. The VLA would not be able to get their artillery over the high ridges surrounding the valley, and if they did they’d be wiped out from the air.

3. The base could be used for offensive attacks on VLA supply lines.

In the event, every one of these assumptions proved false. The few attempts to go out on offensive patrol were beaten back by the encircling VLA with heavy French losses. As January changed to February the early monsoon brought fog and mist, drastically reducing flights in and out of the airstrip. The VLA went to extraordinary lengths to camouflage their supply tracks, bending trees over to be tied in the middle above jungle paths, meticulously camouflaging each other’s uniforms and helmets and, most effectively, only moving at night. The VLA did manage to haul their heavy guns over the ridges, in heroic efforts which Windrow describes at length. This took the French completely by surprise. And then the VLA dug them into deeply embedded fissures and caves with huge overhangs of solid rock. For the entire battle the French struggled to locate the attacking guns and, despite dropping hundreds of tons of explosives, didn’t destroy a single one.

French intelligence knew that Giáp was building up large forces around the base and expected an attack in late January. By 31 January the French were completely surrounded. The battle proper started on 13 March 1954 with a devastating barrage of one of the most remote outposts of the base. (In a hilariously French touch, it is alleged that the nine or so outcrops of the base, located on small hillocks scattered along the valley, were named after mistresses of the womanising camp commander, Colonel Christian de Castries – hence the names camp Elaine, camp Beatrice, camp Gabriele and so on.)

That first evening’s barrage destroyed lots of French illusions. It was as intense as a Great War artillery attack and ranged freely from the intended target (the most isolated stronghold, ‘Beatrice’) across the entire camp, damaging the airstrip, threatening command HQ deep in the compound, and killing key commanders at Beatrice within half an hour. De Castries’ chief of staff had a nervous breakdown on that first night from which he never recovered. It took only a few more days of similarly intense barrage for the French artillery commander, Charles Piroth, to realise that: a) the VLA had brought their artillery over the mountains, b) they had hidden them so effectively they couldn’t even be located let alone neutralised by the French from the ground, c) air attacks were similarly ineffective. Plunging into a depression, after only a week the chief of staff withdrew to his hut and killed himself with a hand grenade. La gloire!

Windrow then proceeds to describe the 56 day-long ordeal of the French forces as they were slowly, systematically reduced, the VLA targeting one stronghold after another, softening them up with overwhelming artillery attacks and then sending wave after wave of fanatical VLA troops against the French forces. The French troops showed episodes of tremendous courage but time and again were borne down by the sheer numbers of the enemy.

(In one of the book’s countless insights, Windrow highlights the narrowness and inflexibility of Giáp’s own tactics which were, in essence, exactly the same as First World War tactics – dig trenches close up to the enemy positions, fire a devastating bombardment, then pour endless troops into the breach, regardless of horrendous losses.)

Windrow

What makes Windrow’s account distinctive is the immense detailed attention he pays to every aspect of the military side of the battle. For example:

  • He devotes pages to a minute breakdown of the exact structure of the Viet Minh / VLA, giving the names and numbers of each division, brigade, along with the respective generals and senior officers.
  • He explains the threefold division of the Viet Minh forces, into: local irregulars based in villages who provided support; militia based in villages who were organised to carry out small scale engagements; and regular army who were fully trained and lived in jungle ‘barracks’ high up in the inaccessible hill and jungle territory of North Tonkin, near the Chinese border.
  • He gives comprehensive histories of all the French divisions, regiments and battalions involved in the battle, down to platoon and squad level of all the French forces.

I have never read such an exhaustive account of a sustained military operation, such a precise breakdown of the forces involved, nor such a minute-by-minute narrative of almost every parachute that opens, every canon that fires, every machine gun blockhouse which fights on to the death.

Hundreds of pages are filled with comprehensive blow-by-blow descriptions of every unit involved in the battle, clotted with division or regimental or battalion numbers, commanders and personnel, sometimes amounting to lists of acronyms and locations which can get quite confusing. This is a typical paragraph chosen from thousands like it:

The withdrawing Group East consisted of Colonel Barrou’s GM 100, the Vietnamese light infantry unit TDKQ 520, and irregular scouts. Although much harried over the past five months this motorised brigade had a fine reputation; its infantry were the two-battalion Régiment de Corée – the former French UN battalion from the Korean War, expanded by local recruitment – and BM/43 RIC, a good unit enlisted mainly from ethnic Khmers from western Cochinchina. Coming to meet them in Lieutenant Colonel Sockeel’s Group West were GM 42, built on three montagnard battalions recruited among Rhadés from around Ban Me Thuot; each brigade had the usual 105mm artillery battalion and a few Stuart tanks from the 5th Cuirassiers. Group West also had a small airborne brigade: GAP 1, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Romain-Defossés, with 7 BPC (Major Balbin) and 3 BPVN (Major Mollo). (page 634)

Learnings

The Last Valley is a profoundly instructive book because it takes you so deeply and exhaustively into every aspect of the battle – not only into the experience of the men fighting in the trenches and front line of each stronghold, but giving a complete account of all the orders issued, signals sent and plans devised both by General Navarre and his staff in Hanoi, and by de Castries and his staff in the camp, as well as insights into the challenges faced by the different air forces which were involved in the non-stop drop and resupply of the base. We get to know many of the officers, including the legendary Lieutenant-Colonel Marcel Bigeard and Colonel Pierre Langlais.

Windrow doesn’t lose sight of the wider context, for the battle was only part of the larger French strategy, and Navarre had, throughout its bitter course, also to defend the Mekong Delta and to provision his ongoing campaign in Annam.

One of the book’s major revelations is that most of the French forces fighting in the battle were not strictly French, for they included a large number of native forces, both Vietnamese and Thai regiments recruited from the locality, as well as a large number of Algerian forces, and colonial troops from French West African countries such as Senegal.

A significant number of battalions were from the French Foreign Legion, none of whose men were French and a frisson goes through the reader to learn that many of these men were former Wehrmacht soldiers who had various reasons to flee Europe with no questions asked.

At regular intervals Windrow pauses his narrative to explain aspects of warfare, always writing with clarity and common sense.

  • He gives a detailed technical explanation of artillery shell fire, how it works, what it feels like and the kind of wounds it inflicts (pages 371 to 374).
  • What it’s like inside a tank (hot, cramped, blind, poisoned by fumes) (pages 448 to 449).
  • How a flamethrower works and what the flames looked like and did (page 504).

One of these digressions is the best description of what motivates men to fight I think I’ve ever read.

The section were the soldier’s closest comrades – his copains, mates or buddies; he marched, fought, ate and slept beside them, and came to know them as well as he had known his childhood brothers. It would be absurd to imagine that every soldier likes and trusts all the men in his squad; nevertheless, every serious study of human motivation among combat soldiers confirms that the key to a man’s behaviour in battle is his feeling of mutual dependence and obligation towards these immediate comrades. Today many veterans of serious and prolonged combat are not embarrassed to use the word love. This unique sense of unselfish fellowship forged in shared ordeals is the principal reward of soldiering, and its rupture by the death of friends is the most painful price. (p.176)

This put me in mind of all those accounts of British officers in the First World War who came to love their men, and were upset to be separated from them, by different postings or injury. The war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon write eloquently of this soldierly love, and only a force this powerful and primeval can explain why, right up to the end, French troops were still being parachuted into Dien Bien Phu to fight alongside their fellow Legionnaires or Parachute divisions, in a cause which was obviously hopelessly lost.

The Geneva Conference

As the battle grew more intense, preparations began for a major conference of diplomats and politicians to be held in Geneva, designed to bring together all the interested parties in South-East Asia (China, Russia, America, Britain, France) in order to address the aftermath of the Korean War as well as the situation in Indochina. Though it hadn’t been planned this way, political and military commanders on both sides (Ho and Giáp, Navarre and de Castries) now realised that the outcome of the Battle at Dien Bien Phu could well determine the outcome of the conference, and thus the entire fate of the French Empire in Asia.

Also the open access given to journalists from the start ensured that the battle had more, and more graphic, coverage on French radio, in newspapers and magazines, than previous confrontations. The struggle against overpowering odds of their brave boys in the jungle seized the French imagination more powerfully than any previous engagement in the eight-year-old war. As the situation became progressively more grim so did the mood of the French public.

I hadn’t really grasped how fragile France was after the Second World War. There were some 19 different governments between 1945 and 1954, many lasting only months, as the relentless backbiting of a host of extreme parties, including a powerful communist party, stymied any administration’s ability to govern.

Amid a welter of parliamentary backstabbing, and recriminations among the generals and between military and politicians, Dien Bien Phu eventually fell to the Viet Minh on 7 May 1954.

But, as Windrow harrowingly shows, the misery for the surviving French soldiers was only just starting because around half of the prisoners of war taken by the Viet Minh died on the long jungle marches to distant POW camps, or in the camps themselves, due to malnutrition and disease, a process he describes with characteristically grim thoroughness.

A thoroughly demoralised French government announced its intention to quit Indochina, despite the readiness of many, including General Navarre, to fight on. The Geneva Conference agreed to partition Vietnam along the 17th parallel, handing the north – Tonkin – to the Viet Minh, while the south was to be under the ‘democratic’ rule of the puppet emperor Bao Dai. Even before the French had left, Americans were appearing in numbers to give political, strategic and material aid to the southern regime, a further decisive step towards their entanglement in what became known as the Vietnam War, a decade later.

Right to the end Windrow’s book is full of fascinating insights. The final pages explain how many of the survivors of the Indochina campaign found themselves immediately redeployed to French Algeria, where the first attacks by the Front for National Liberation took place in October 1954, just a few weeks after the French had evacuated Hanoi.

He goes on to describe how many French soldiers felt betrayed by the lack of political and military support at Dien Bien Phu. The suffering was on such a scale that for the whole cause they were fighting for – to preserve the French Empire in the Far East – to be overthrown in just a few weeks of political haggling in Switzerland seemed like a grotesque betrayal. This laid the seeds of the growing alienation of the French Army in Algeria, which saw a similar betrayal by politicians beginning to take shape and led to the creation of the Organisation Armée Secrète, which was to wage a terrorist campaign against French politicians, and eventually try to mount a military coup in 1962.

For France herself, that was to be one of the legacies of Dien Bien Phu. For America, it was to be dragged into a catastrophic war which permanently damaged the country. For the poor Vietnamese it was to be another 20 years of war before they finally secured their hard-won independence.

Credit

The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow was published in 2004 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 2005 Cassell Military Paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purposes of criticism and review.

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Posted by Simon on February 20, 2017

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