Scan barcode
A review by mburnamfink
Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina by Bernard B. Fall
5.0
Street Without Joy is the definitively account of the first Indo-China War, as France attempted to hold on to it's East Asian colony. Bernard draws on first hand experience and documentary research in Paris to describe the slow defeat of France in the "vast empty spaces" of Vietnam's jungle and highlands to the light infantry of the Viet Minh.
Fall describes the complete failure of heavy mechanized units in guerrilla warfare. Tied to the scanty road network, the Groupes Mobile were juggernauts, but ones that could be avoided and lured into ambush by the Viet Minh. The epic destruction of G.M 100 at the same time as Dien Bien Phu is the climax of the book, an account of outnumbered professionals calmly laying down their lives after the war is lost. Heavy units imply substantial logistics needs, and the second battle was the battle of the forts, as France distributed its forces in penny packets along the de Lattre line and strategic roads. These forts were ineffective at preventing mass Viet Minh infiltration, served as supply depots for the enemy when overrun individually and looted, and cost on average 3 to 4 men per 100 km of road per day. Multiply it out, and it comes to thousands of casualties just to hold static positions without any pacification effort. The part of the war that Fall thinks worked were the command groups, alliances of French specialists and Montagnard guerrillas to attack Viet Minh supply lines, but this force was inherently limited and difficult to scale.
Fall's book has the flaws of its strengths. The wonderful portraits of the men and women who fought are a romanticized version of the French empire. (about 30% of the soldiers were French, with the rest split between Foreign Legion, Colonial units from Africa, and local levies) Communist tactics come down to 'screaming human wave attacks' a few too many times, without much insight into the actual weakness of light infantry forces. Bernard gets the problem of what he calls Revolutionary Warfare right, and the ways in which a motivated local force fighting for its own values will beat foreign occupiers, but doesn't extend the critique to the anti-communist project broadly speaking, or how Western democracies could defeat communism without becoming a mirror image of the enemy.
Ultimately, Fall was right, but there's little satisfaction in being a Cassandra, as the American military fought the same war as the French, but faster and louder.
Fall describes the complete failure of heavy mechanized units in guerrilla warfare. Tied to the scanty road network, the Groupes Mobile were juggernauts, but ones that could be avoided and lured into ambush by the Viet Minh. The epic destruction of G.M 100 at the same time as Dien Bien Phu is the climax of the book, an account of outnumbered professionals calmly laying down their lives after the war is lost. Heavy units imply substantial logistics needs, and the second battle was the battle of the forts, as France distributed its forces in penny packets along the de Lattre line and strategic roads. These forts were ineffective at preventing mass Viet Minh infiltration, served as supply depots for the enemy when overrun individually and looted, and cost on average 3 to 4 men per 100 km of road per day. Multiply it out, and it comes to thousands of casualties just to hold static positions without any pacification effort. The part of the war that Fall thinks worked were the command groups, alliances of French specialists and Montagnard guerrillas to attack Viet Minh supply lines, but this force was inherently limited and difficult to scale.
Fall's book has the flaws of its strengths. The wonderful portraits of the men and women who fought are a romanticized version of the French empire. (about 30% of the soldiers were French, with the rest split between Foreign Legion, Colonial units from Africa, and local levies) Communist tactics come down to 'screaming human wave attacks' a few too many times, without much insight into the actual weakness of light infantry forces. Bernard gets the problem of what he calls Revolutionary Warfare right, and the ways in which a motivated local force fighting for its own values will beat foreign occupiers, but doesn't extend the critique to the anti-communist project broadly speaking, or how Western democracies could defeat communism without becoming a mirror image of the enemy.
Ultimately, Fall was right, but there's little satisfaction in being a Cassandra, as the American military fought the same war as the French, but faster and louder.