Danger in Indo-China

A dozen of the uppermost generals and admirals of the Big Three Western powers locked themselves into a map-hung inner sanctum in the Pentagon one day last week and conferred for eight hours. Their sole topic: the increasing threat of an all-out Communist attempt to swallow up Indo-China.

Blood & Billions. General Alphonse-Pierre Juin, inspector-general of the French army, had been dispatched to Washington to plead France's case. The French were frankly alarmed. General de Lattre de Tassigny, the leader on whom France, and France's friends, had counted, was out of the battle (see below). The guerrilla warfare the French had been fighting since 1946 had already cost more casualties than those suffered by the U.S. in Korea--including the equivalent of three entire classes from St. Cyr, France's West Point, and ten sons of French generals. It had also cost at least as many dollars as all the billions in aid the U.S. had sent to France since the end of World War II.

The stability achieved by De Lattre's masterly maneuvering against Ho Chi Minh's Communist guerrillas would collapse the minute 200,000 Chinese Communist forces, now poised along the Indo-Chinese border, slipped over the line, either in an outright invasion or in the guise of "volunteers."

There were portents: last week ten French fighter planes were shot down by radar-controlled antiaircraft guns which could only have come from Russia. The French seized an American-made 105-mm. gun, noted that its date of manufacture was 1950 and made the obvious conclusion: it had been captured by the Chinese Reds in Korea and shipped south to Ho. In every engagement, the rebels were squandering guns and ammunition which formerly they spent carefully.

How to Retaliate. The French generals argued against a sapping sophistry that is prevalent in France as well as in the U.S. State Department: that in Indo-China

France fights a colonial war, that overt help to her should be avoided lest it dismay the Indians, the Burmese and the, Indonesians. The French wanted a definite U.S. promise of armed forces for IndoChina--sea and air support, not ground troops--in the event the Chinese invaded. Without such a commitment, the French argued Indo-China would fall to the Communists, and so, in a matter of time, would British Malaya, Burma, Siam and probably Indonesia.

U.S. Generals Omar Bradley, Joe Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg and their British opposites listened sympathetically, but they were not empowered to give France the specific military promise it wanted. Two days later however, in a speech in New York, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden beamed a crucial warning to the Communists. "It should be understood," he said, "that the intervention by force by Chinese Communists in Southeast Asia--even if they were called vol- unteers--would create a situation no less menacing than that which the United Nations met and faced in Korea. In any such event the United Nations should be equally solid to resist it."

While the question of just how to resist is still to be settled, as the anxious French generals discovered in the Pentagon conference room, the U.S. has apparently already decided it will not be sucked into another limited "police action" of the Korean type. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are now convinced that the answer to the next Chinese war is air and sea war against China itself (TIME, Jan. 14). Declared a high-ranking State Department official: "We are not going to try to localize any more wars."

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