While Nemo and Ély’s reports may have been contained perspectives considered best-reserved for the highest staff levels, one report appears to have gained currency in military circles: Colonel Charles Lacheroy’s “Viet-Minh and Communist Action in Indochina,” subtitled, perhaps somewhat optimistically, “A Lesson in Revolutionary War”. Lacheroy, a veteran of Indochina and later major figure in French psychological warfare, particularly during the Battle of Algiers, delivered his paper as a lecture to the Advanced Studies Institute for National Defense and to the officers of the French Armed Forces General Staff in April and May 1955, around the same time as Ély’s report was finalized. Lacheroy brought a radically different message concerning why Indochina failed and how the campaign in Algeria would not. He centered his focus on the future of psychological warfare, and appeared to take every opportunity to win adherents to his camp.46
Lacheroy analyzed four common reasons given for the French loss in Indochina: “lukewarm public opinion at home, uncertainty and loss of vigor and unity of
governmental directives, lack of unity of action between France and the United States, and instability of the High Command.” For him, none of these common perceptions about the war could contend with the power of the “New Weapon,” a strategic invention of the
46 Algeria war veteran David Galula mentioned two camps of officer, the “warriors” who favored large-scale destructive missions and the “psychologists,” Lacheroy being the best example, who while few in number, “were very articulate. They managed to take hold of the professional French Army magazines in which, month after month, they published their thoughts and gave the impression that theirs was indeed the official doctrine.” David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), 65.
Viet Minh that synthesized two new tools. Working together, three “parallel hierarchies” and psychological war could literally own the country’s people, body and soul.47
Parallel hierarchies restructured social and political life in Vietnam. The Viet Minh movement grouped everyone into two different frameworks that required
mandatory participation. The Social Hierarchy split men and women, and then divided them by age groups (young men, young women, middle-aged men, old women, etc). Communist party leaders charged with identifying and “denouncing the slightest defiance” convened these groups regularly for “self-criticism” sessions to conduct
political education.48 Together with the Territorial Hierarchy, which treated the village as the basic social unit, the two hierarchies destroyed family bonds. The family was not a recognized social group under the Communist system; first allegiances were owed to the Social Hierarchy’s age- and sex-differentiated groups, rather than to family members. Mobilizing people for fighting or supporting roles became far easier because specific groups could be summoned and sent off on a variety of missions fitting their age, sex, and abilities. The third hierarchy, selectively built around a three to four man Communist party cell, executed policy at successive levels, and included at most a tenth of the population.49
47 Charles Lacheroy, Action Viet-Minh et Communiste en Indochine, April 25, 1955, 1, 10H 397, SHAT.
48“Self-criticism” was a process of political purification whose culminating act required members to write out all their sins against the Party and then allow the leader to read their confession out to the assembled group. Lacheroy described one such meeting in which a young initiate finally denounced his father “in order to be perfectly purified”. Lacheroy, Action Viet-Minh et Communiste en Indochine, 13.
While the three-fold hierarchy controlled people's bodies, Lacheroy deduced that the Communist use of psychological war or “moral techniques” could “take possession of souls.” The National Resistance Committee, which Lacheroy referred to as the “military brain” controlled and unified the propaganda used upon the people. The theory was analogous to “when one solidly holds the vessel he may fill it with what he wishes.” Since the hierarchical structure kept people ordered through mandated meetings and self- criticism sessions, the political officers could structure those events to suit their needs.50
Having seen these parallel hierarchies reap tremendous benefit for the Viet Minh, Lacheroy emphatically concluded that democracies must use this “New Weapon,”
psychological war, combined with parallel hierarchies unless they desired to lose the next revolutionary war as well. Ironically, the closest French parallel that Lacheroy observed was a French naval officer, appointed as Chief of Indochinese Youth Movements from 1941 to 1945, who used the Vichy regime’s youth movement structure to mobilize Vietnamese young men. Lacheroy acknowledged that “universal morals and the human conscience” caused “grave problems” with implementing such drastic social re-
engineering for political purposes.51
Colonel Lacheroy’s “lessons” from the war spoke of a very different conflict from the much more conventional recommendations of Nemo and Ély. Communist ideology pervaded his work, and while his more intimate understanding of that organization certainly enhanced his knowledge, his insistence on mirroring the enemy’s strategy
50 Although controlling the body in order to control the soul may sound superficially post- structuralist, I am not aware of any connection to post-structuralist thought. Lacheroy, Action Viet-Minh et Communiste en Indochine, 19-20.
probably blinded him to its faults as well. Lacheroy's report may have been uniquely influential. Despite much critical reflection about the war, only limited evidence speaks to how widely the French command may have disseminated the “official” post-conflict reports. Though little is known about the legacy of Ély’s and Nemo’s reports, Lacheroy’s paper remained in the canon of the French army’s Center for Instruction in Pacification and Counter-Guerrilla War until at least as late as May 1959.52
Two other reports are known to have reached wide distribution within the army: one that covered combat in the last 70 days of battle following the May 7, 1954, defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and another that examined aerial support to ground forces in the last two years of the war. The first report, of most interest here, concluded that although Dien Bien Phu was not a negligible defeat, “the cease fire was not imposed by a military situation sufficiently degraded to impose an immediate suspension of arms.” The report credited the enemy’s guerrilla actions with undeniable successes, but associated the victory more directly with the Communist ability to mobilize people toward the clear goal of liberating the country and “absolute faith in final success.”53 The French army in Algeria would experience an eerily similar situation in 1962, as the French army’s intelligence reported the rebel army to have been at one of its weakest points, but the political situation, which supported negotiating a peace with the FLN, ultimately prevailed.
52 Centre d’Instruction Pacification et Contre-guerilla, CIPCG Training Documents (Arzew: Centre d’Instruction Pacification et Contre-Guerilla, May 1959), 1H 1115, SHAT.