Almost All Over

INDOCHINA

The Communist Viet Minh did not bother to launch their offensive against the Red River Delta last week. At Geneva and across the shrouded land of Viet Nam, they were winning the war by default.

All week, French and Vietnamese truck convoys were rolling down alien roads toward the coast. The French were withdrawing from their blockhouses and redeploying, and the Communists were moving in.

"Namdinh, third biggest city in the Delta, already has the look of a city awaiting death and whatever life may come after it," reported TIME'S Senior Editor John Osborne. "French army trucks, private furniture vans and ancient buses loaded to their creaky axles crowd the hot streets and the roads leading out to Hanoi. At the city airstrip, the families of policemen and politicians, nuns in white cotton habit, priests and Catholic seminarians in black march sedately into the black-bellied Dakotas that fly in and out all day, ferrying a favored few thousands to the uncertain havens of Hanoi and Haiphong. Most of Namdinh's 80,000 people are staying on, awaiting the unknown, manning their shops, thronging a market place bright with aluminum pans, preserving the ritual of their noontide siesta. In the siesta, the calm of Namdinh seems to be the calm of a coma."

Erosion in the Land. "At Namdinh and throughout Viet Nam, the wait-and-see-ists are going over to the Communists for one easily comprehensible reason: the Communists are strong, the West is weak, and the Communists are winning. 'It is not a matter of mind or heart or preference,' explained one weary Frenchman. 'It is simply a matter of safety.' Said a dejected Vietnamese councilman: 'The people do not like the Viet Minh. But what can they do?'

"Events everywhere seem in conspiracy. As seen from Indo-China, Geneva is an impressive display of Communist strength and Western weakness. The humility of the French empire before Chou Enlai, the calculated susceptibility of London, the drift and confusion of Washington all contribute to the net effect of Red ascendancy, and that is in itself the decisive Red advantage in Indo-China.

"Even millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment, like U.S. policy, has little if any compensating effect. Tons of it pile up each day at the docks and airfields, giving an impression of massive power, then disappear. One of the mysteries of Indo-China is how so much U.S. equipment can be dispersed so quickly and so unnoticeably." Parley in the Village. The erosion was almost too far advanced even for Ngo Dinh Diem, the firm-minded new anti-Communist Prime Minister of Viet Nam (TIME, June 28). Diem arrived in Saigon from Paris last week promising independence, land reform and war against corruption--measures that a few months ago might have changed the course of the war.

"I am destined," he cried, "to open the way to national salvation and to bring about a revolution in all fields." But Diem's own associates were fast losing their confidence. "We cannot hope to defeat the Viet Minh," said one. "The most we can do is try to diminish their influence." French General Cogny, commander of the Delta, wanted to bring in heavy reinforcements and fight it out. U.S. Major General John W. O'Daniel, head of the U.S. military mission, still believed the war could be won, especially if his plan for U.S.-style training of the Vietnamese army could get under way. But French GHQ was told by Paris instead to get in touch with the enemy, "in line with agreements reached at Geneva." This week French staff officers therefore prepared to meet the Communists in the small village of Tunggia, halfway between Hanoi and the Red base at Thainguyen, to work out arrangements {e.g., the regrouping of both armies) toward a ceasefire. Even the name of the village, Tunggia, remote and unheard-of, and the hastily built truce hut, had the mocking quality of Panmunjom.

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