Thirty-six years ago the United States took a major, if now almost forgotten, step toward commitment to South Vietnam and entanglement in the Second Indochinese War.
On 8 August 1954, Donald Heath, our ambassador in Saigon, informed the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, the new premier of Emperor Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, that the U.S. Navy would assist the French in evacuating northern Indochina. The Geneva Accords of the previous month permitted freedom of movement for Vietnamese civilians. Those who wished to leave the north or the south had until May 1955 to make the journey from one side of the 17th parallel to the other. Diem, and then the French, had asked for our help.
At first, hardly anyone in Saigon except Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, at that time a shadowy but influential Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) adviser to Diem, expected many refugees. Diem himself thought only about 10,000 would come, an estimate he shared with officials from the Agency for International Development (AID). The French were planning to airlift 30,000. But Lansdale believed as many as two million would flee.1 During July thousands of refugees flooded Haiphong, the port city of Hanoi, and an estimated 200,000 were there by mid-August.2 All the predictions were wrong, but Lansdale’s was the most prescient.
I was a lieutenant (junior grade) serving as intelligence officer on the staff of Captain Walter C. Winn, Commander Amphibious Transport Division 13. At the beginning of August we were engaged in landing operations with Marines on Okinawa, our third exercise since deploying to the western Pacific six months earlier. I had been briefing Winn regularly about Indochina. For a time in early spring we were sure the United States would go to war there. But in May, Dien Bien Phu fell, the Geneva peace talks ended two months later, and in a few days the final cease-fire would take effect. Any direct U.S. involvement seemed behind us.
Without warning, on 8 August, Commander Naval Forces Far East canceled the exercise and ordered us back to Japan. Our division, with its attack transport and cargo ships, was to join Task Force 90, Rear Admiral Lorenzo S. Sabin, Commander (CTF 90), in evacuating the north. Upon arrival at Haiphong on the Cua Cam River, Winn would leave the division and become Commander Task Group 90.8, for the embarkation phase of the operation. It was called Passage to Freedom.
By 15 August we were at sea en route to Indochina vainly trying to outsmart a typhoon. Two days later in the Haiphong area a Navy attack transport, carrying 1,924 refugees, departed for Saigon.3 When we arrived in the Baie d’Along off Haiphong on 23 August, Winn had selected five officers and ten enlisted men to be the nucleus of his staff.
We transferred to the USS Cavallaro (APD-128), a small destroyer escort converted to transport frogmen and Marines on amphibious operations. She became the first of several station ships and home of many of the staff that grew to about 130 officers and enlisted at one time. Later a tank landing ship (LST) came upriver to the buoys to provide extra billeting space and act as a platform for the Marine helicopter. Because of Geneva restrictions, only our staff medical officers could live ashore, in a decaying hotel in Haiphong.
The Cavallaro, piloted by a Frenchman, raced up the reddish waters of the Cua Cam. Sometimes on the river’s low banks we saw small concrete block-houses, each flying the tricolor. It was hot and humid. Everyone was edgy because CTF 90 had warned that hostilities could break out at any moment. We arrived at Haiphong without incident and moored to buoys a short distance upriver from the small French naval base.
The Cavallaro lowered an armed boat to provide a 24-hour patrol around the ship. But soon someone wondered how effectively a Vietminh sapper could swim in a five-knot current and Winn stopped the patrols. The boat crews, who had to work in harsh physical conditions, were elated.
Winn took command on 24 August and we began our work as the embarkation group. Dredged to about 20 feet, the Cua Cam Channel limited shipping to vessels of no more than 10,000 tons displacement. As a result, we needed lighters to carry refugees to the larger ships. Wetook smaller ships that could beach—LSTs and medium landing ships (LSMs), for example—and loaded them at river’s edge for the trip to the anchorage in the Baie d’Along. There, they would go alongside large Navy transport, cargo, and service ships, and the crews would move the refugees over, usually with difficulty.
The journey south took almost three days. At first Saigon was the drop-off point but overcrowding there later made Cap St. Jacques on the South China Sea coast the preferred landing site. The trip was trying for passengers and crews. To adapt the ships, sailors jury-rigged special berthing, feeding, washing, and toilet facilities and then taught the refugees how to use them. The human waste on the ships was particularly vexing. Refugees knew nothing about toilets and urinated and defecated when they had to—in living spaces, passageways, and on open decks. Sailors had cut oil drums in half to make troughs, lined up abreast, for the passengers to use as heads. Sailors pantomimed and used mimeographed drawings to try to demonstrate how they were to be used. But the voyage south did not last long enough for us to come up with a real solution to this problem.
The ships had to carry large quantities of such unfamiliar supplies as Asian rice, chop sticks, rice mats, four-quart buckets, and thousands of extra life jackets. Although the heat, crowding, disease, filth, and smell were awful and there was a deep, well-founded fear of contagion, most of the sailors overcame their natural aversions and treated the refugees kindly.
We moved on the river from Haiphong on an ebbing tide with enough time to ensure offloading in daylight at the anchorage. Night operations were out of the question because of heavy swells, frequent rain squalls, and the refugees’ terror. The Baie was only 13 miles away by shipping channel, but the trip took about four hours. The river made captains cautious, and once they were in the Baie they still had another 12 miles of water to cover before reaching the anchorage.
The Cua Cam shipping channel was narrow and winding and its swift current and lowered visibility during heavy rains made it hazardous. French pilots were few. Our amphibious ships, hard to handle in good conditions, had to manage the round-trip on their own. Winn announced early that unless a captain was drunk he would not be blamed for collision or running aground. Indeed, there were a number of river mishaps, but none, however, tainted with drink. Winn kept his word.
One LST skipper got off to a bad start with the commodore. The morning he beached for the first time Winn was standing with us at the landing site. The bow doors swung back to disclose six or seven sailors, bandoliers over shoulders, M-1s and Tommy guns at the ready. I am not sure what made Winn madder, the weapons or the way the men were dressed. Several wore swimming trunks, all were hatless and shirtless. Looking grim, he told me to pay his compliments to the captain and tell him to get rid of the “artillery”—that he had nothing to fear, no one was going to harm him. And to tell him that while we were loose about uniforms up here, “we are not that goddamn loose!” As I walked toward the LST he called after me, “Be diplomatic, Dan.”
Several trips later the same officer radioed one afternoon to tell us it had become too dangerous to come up without a pilot. Winn hotly ordered him to be at Haiphong the next day as scheduled. That evening we copied a message from the LST captain to Washington requesting his immediate relief. A few hours later he sent another canceling the first. Before dawn the Bureau of Personnel relieved him and ordered the convening of a board of inquiry. Winn’s only comment was, “Dumb bastard.” Besides refugees, we also had to take out large amounts of U.S.-supplied ordnance, much of which the French had never used. At the city docks in Haiphong scores of new jeeps, guarded by coal-black Senegalese soldiers, stood in the heat ready to be carried south. To carry cargo we used the smaller Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) and time-chartered merchant ships that could make it up to Haiphong. Limited dock facilities and a severe stevedore shortage continually plagued this side of the evacuation, but the Navy left nothing behind when it pulled out of the north in May 1955.
At Tourane (Da Nang), located on the coast almost halfway to Cap St. Jacques, CTF 90 established a logistics center. On the return to Haiphong, a ship could call there for replenishment and minor repairs. But the onset of the northeast monsoon disrupted the anchorage, and at the end of September logistics moved to the Baie d’Along.
To load most refugees, we used a site called La Briqueterie several miles upstream from Haiphong. Here a number of two-story and smaller yellow stucco buildings housed a unit of the French Foreign Legion that appeared to be made up largely of former storm troopers from Germany. CTF 90 had planned to use personnel of Naval Beach Group 1 to run the embarkation site. The French, however, interpreted the cease-fire agreement as permitting only 15-20 of us ashore in the Haiphong area on a daily basis. Instead of trained beachmasters, Winn had to make do with some of us at the site. And he made me embarkation officer.
The French refused to allow us ashore armed, again blaming Geneva. They did promise the Foreign Legion would protect us whenever we loaded at main site, at postes on the river, or at nearby Hongay, a coal-producing center. They kept this promise. But we had one complaint: our defenders often disappeared down the road in their trucks a lot sooner than we wished. Once they left four of us waiting for a boat at a lonely poste far upriver from the station ship. After the Legionnaires vanished, a fire fight opened up near us; we could hear it but, fortunately, could not see it. We were pleased to see the boat coming up river an hour after the mortars, automatic weapons, and small arms sputtered out.
In the early days the boarding area was always muddy from the rain that drenched the Delta day and night. Sometimes the rain thundered down for hours, pounding heavily on head and shoulders. As soon as it stopped the fierce heat was back with a rush. Rain or shine, you were always wet. Many times I stood in the downpour, eating cold C-rations that tasted like they had been packed before Pearl Harbor (the first time I lit a C-ration Lucky Strike it flared in my face), mud to the top of my shoes, rain and green dye from the oversized French army raincoat I wore running into my shirt, marveling at the life of an officer in the amphibs.
At first the staging point, a cleared area about the size of a football field leading down to the river’s edge proved too narrow for orderly operations. French tanks hemmed in the space on both sides. Winn had a frustrating conversation with a haughty major general who flabbergasted us when he said he had to get clearance to move his tanks back about 20 yards on each side. After about an hour Winn persuaded him that 20 yards did not require calling General Navarre in Saigon, and in a few days got him to withdraw the tanks. Even then La Briqueterie had a crowded look because of large green medical tents, parked vehicles, and always lots of people.
Every morning trucks jammed with refugees would arrive from Camp de la Pagode, the main refugee center four miles outside Haiphong on the dirt road to Hanoi. Shouting, “Allez . . . allez vite,” Legionnaires herded them forward, prodding them with rifles. The refugees were always silent and frightened. After all, the Vietminh had been dinning the fear into them that we would take them to sea and dump everyone overboard except the females we planned to sell to brothels in the south. Experience had taught the refugees not to trust the French soldiers at all. And to make the situation more ominous, few of them had ever been more than a mile or two away from where they and their ancestors had been bom.
Most of the refugees were dressed in loose black tops and trousers, many adults wore yellow palm-leaf cones or thick black or white cloth bands on their heads, and some had rosaries around their necks. Mostly women, children, and old men, they shuffled barefooted between wooden control barriers in white clouds of DDT dust. The first time you got close to them you gagged, the smell was so bad.
Undaunted, the corpsmen moved among them, giving what help they could. It was not always accepted. One wet day a woman in labor frantically waved two corpsmen away from her, gave birth in the mud, bit the chord in two, washed the baby in the loathsome river, and walked aboard a French LSM.
After the refugees had been deloused, a ship waited for them at water’s edge, bow doors open, ramp down. As they passed me in single file, looking straight ahead, never smiling, a bosun clicked them off on his counter. We never got used to the disease and poverty we saw every day as thousands passed by, holding their few belongings tightly or carrying them on the bamboo balance pole, bundles and baskets dangling from each end.
The refugees squatted on the dimly lit well decks of the landing ships. Some tried to light cooking fires in braziers; crewmen had no trouble putting them out. At times a small fire would go undetected until the caramel smell of burning opium alerted sailors. Opium not only posed a real fire danger, but its presence panicked skippers into sending frantic messages asking what they should do. CTF 90 ordered the ships to confiscate the drug until debarkation, when it was to be returned. The French did not control opium in Indochina so the Navy was not about to throw it overboard.
The well decks were crowded and hot. We tried not to separate families or villagers. Once, when we had only a single LST available, we boarded about 3,000 refugees.4 This made for a tough ride to the Baie, but it did keep everyone together as requested by the village chiefs and Catholic priests.
The Tonkin Delta is beautiful; the Baie d’Along spectacular. Its turquoise waters are speckled with hundreds of dark limestone eruptions, some 500 feet high, many partially girded with narrow strips of golden sand. Unfortunately, the climate is tropical. Temperatures always seemed to be around 100° or higher, and the humidity was terrible. Even the temperature of the Cua Cam was 96°. On the station ship berthing spaces were like saunas, making real sleep impossible. So even though there was not enough space to sleep on deck and it rained every night, people tried it anyway.
The French water barge came alongside three times a week. But what was safe for Frenchmen to drink was not necessarily safe for us, therefore the doctors added so much chlorine that the water tasted as if it were drawn from a swimming pool. Strict water rationing was the rule, and a near-crisis occurred when the ship’s store ran out of deodorant. Everyone suffered from heat rash, the worst case being the ship’s baker, who had to be evacuated because his entire body was covered with it. The extra people on board intensified the normal town-gown friction between crew and staff. And, to make matters worse, we never got any mail.
Morale was terrible. In a letter in late September I wrote that I was still in Indochina—“the land of no mail, no liberty, no nothing.” Not only were living conditions bad, but we could not offset them with liberty. Even after the French allowed more of us ashore, the morale problem remained. CTF 90 permitted liberty in Saigon and Tourane, but not north of the 17th parallel. Apparently, he considered Haiphong too dangerous. As a result, only a few of us were ashore every day—the embarkation party, the medical unit, and a few people in Haiphong on business. The rest were prisoners on board the station ship and the LST.
After senior petty officers began to show signs of stress, something had to be done. To everyone’s relief, an officer came up with what might be called, “the Work Party Solution.” If liberty parties were barred, why not put work parties ashore? Winn went along, and at 1000 hours the next morning an officer took 15 men to the naval base wearing their work clothes—dungarees, blue shirts, and white hats. He briefed them on the real dangers of Haiphong, emphasized their obligation to make the plan work for all, told them to have a good time and meet him back at the base at 1500 hours.
The morale problem was over. In all the “work parties” that followed, no one ever embarrassed Winn and only one sailor failed to return on time. Two Marines and I went over that evening to find him. Using the ship’s radio jeep, we visited every bar in Haiphong. All were dives—only one still stands out: a tiny room, dirt floor, flickering candlelight, a few Legionnaires and Vietnamese women drinking silently at a table in the smoky gloom, staring at us in the doorway as I asked in French had anyone seen a tall American sailor.
We should have started at Le Sphinx, the army brothel. But we knew he had visited it around noon and assumed he would not hang around there even if he had returned. Of course, just before curfew Le Sphinx was where we found him, drunk and happy. He sang and talked loudly all the way back to the ship. Until I told him to calm down, one of the Marines kept asking, “Should I deck him, Mr. Redmond?”
Haiphong, located about 50 miles east of Hanoi, was once a city of beauty. You could see traces of it in the French part of town and its handsome colonial buildings set amid tropical shrubbery and trees. Faded pastel yellow seemed to be the favorite color and the tall windows were flanked by dark green shutters. But if you looked closer, the paint was peeling, even on the mayor’s large house. Haiphong was dilapidated, and signs of war, neglect, and apathy were everywhere. Yet it still held out a hint of the Mediterranean.
The rest of the city was a vast slum of about 100,000 people living in unbelievable hovels or crowded into flimsy boats on canals. Haiphong’s littered sidewalks were crammed with mothers, barebottomed children, hideously deformed beggars, street vendors squatting with forearms on knees, and behind them, open one-room shops. Pedicabs vied with military and civilian vehicles for the right of way. And all over the city walked French, Vietnamese, German, Algerian, Moroccan, and Senegalese soldiers looking for something to do.
The streets were crowded except from 1200 to 1500 hours, when siesta emptied them of all but us. Walking alone in the heat on the deserted me de la Marine brought to mind the old Noel Coward song about mad dogs and Englishmen. Siesta also intensified the strange atmosphere in the city. In mid-September I wrote a friend, perhaps in an overwrought manner no doubt induced by youth and the heat:
“Did you ever get the feeling of death—I mean, of something dying all around you? I have that feeling every time I go into town. . . . A torpor hangs over this French colonial city; soon it will be communist and everyone seems to be hanging on, waiting patiently the final movement from the area. Quite a feeling to be in on the final scene of a national tragedy—the finis of the drama of French colonialism.”
None of us fully relaxed in Haiphong, or on the river, especially in the early weeks of the operation. In town military patrols were on the streets by 2100 hours, getting ready to enforce the strict curfew that began in an hour; concertina wire was everywhere and chicken wire draped the fronts of cafes and shops; the occasional boom of an explosion always jolted you; the Vietminh were murdering Catholics and other enemies, or trying to; and on the streets wild-looking Vietnamese stopped you to ask for weapons and money to fight Ho Chi Minh. Despite the cease-fire it was as if the war continued on a somehow less belligerent level, breeding an unease that made you quick to imagine danger.
One night our communications officer and I went over to town to show Commander Julius M. Amberson, the senior doctor, an All-Navy message announcing his selection as captain. Rue Paul Bert, Haiphong’s main avenue, was well lighted and crowded with cafes and pedestrians. The hotel in which the doctors lived was about two blocks off Paul Bert. We were well into the first block when all the lights went out. We stopped, looked wildly at each other, and without a word took off running back toward Paul Bert, certain we were about to be murdered.
Racing out of the darkness we had to leap aside as jeeps careened into the street. The French were raiding a Vietminh house on the block, and someone had thrown the lights to help Ho’s people escape. We heard the jeeps stop, shouts, windows breaking, doors rapidly opening and closing, shots, and silence. Sheepishly we gave it ten minutes, then walked to the hotel and Amberson, who bought us a few beers to celebrate his captaincy.
Several times I had to go to the Baie to brief merchant skippers on conditions in Haiphong. It was a ten-hour round-trip in an ungainly vehicle and personnel landing craft, a crew of three, food and drink limited to cold C-rations and warm canteens, everything on board reeking of diesel fumes. Sitting aft in the open on the engine canopy near the coxswain, you sometimes had a fleeting sensation that along those banks someone was getting ready to zap you. It did not happen and the feeling would fade, only to return when you least expected it. And on the return leg if you were on the river when night surprised you—its abruptness always did—there was a risk of running into a dead water buffalo or some other large object coming at the boat out of the dark in the five-knot current. No one was fond of these trips.
In the early days CTF 90 put out a call to western Pacific commands for volunteers, especially interpreters. Sailors and Marines arrived from all over the Far East. The volunteer interpreters were mostly from Louisiana or of Canadian descent from New England. Unfortunately, in Haiphong anyway, only one of them could really speak French—the staff division’s leading petty officer, Marine Technical Sergeant Rene Nadeau. He spoke French beautifully, if archaically, having learned it as a boy in New Hampshire from a very old aunt who had taught the language in her native France. The rest spoke a patois that had little to do with France. At first it was amusing to watch a baffled-looking Frenchman trying to understand a sailor from Thibodaux, Louisiana; then it became embarrassing. Winn told Lieutenant Bob Athow, the chief of staff, to find other work for the “interpreters” until we could return them to their units.
On 25 August CTF 90 activated the Preventive Medicine and Sanitation Unit at Haiphong. Headed by Commander Amberson, it had three doctors (one of them Lieutenant [junior grade] Thomas A. Dooley of later Southeast Asia fame, a Medical Service officer) and four corpsmen. Dr. Amberson was to coordinate medical matters relating to the evacuation with the French and Vietnamese and assist the refugees.
Disease was widespread and appalling. Cholera, malaria, trachoma, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, worm infestation, fungi, yaws, tuberculosis, dysentery, beriberi, rickets, conjunctivitis, pneumonia, measles, impetigo—all were common at Pagode and the beaching site. Refugees died there and on board the ships. Infant mortality was unspeakable and life expectency a bad joke. One of the doctors said in modern medical terms we were seeing an 18th-century disease mise en scene. To us, France had been indifferent, or worse, to the medical needs of the people it had been exploiting for a hundred years.
Amberson was an authority on tropical medicine; working with French, Vietnamese, and volunteer Filipino medical teams, his unit did everything they could to deal with the staggering problems. After shelter (400 large U.S. Army tents), clean water was the important priority. Amberson’s men used Navy water purification machines to make 12,000 gallons a day for Pagode. He always said half the diseases would disappear if the people had enough soap and clean water. The doctors also took care of our medical needs, which were minimal, and served the other Americans in the area—Military Assistance Advisory Group and AID personnel, the two remaining diplomats in Hanoi, and the pilots and crews of the Civil Air Transport Company, an airline we were all sure was a CIA front.
During the first week of September, Fleet Epidemic Disease Control Unit 2 arrived from the Yokosuka naval hospital to study the disease potential for epidemics in the camp and Haiphong. Rear Admiral Jean Querville, the always helpful commander of the naval base, whose compassionate wife never missed a day helping the refugees at La Briqueterie, gave Winn the use of a two-room warehouse. The Control Unit quickly turned it into an epidemiological laboratory. A refrigerator came with the building, and the doctors kept it full of blood samples, food, and an ample supply of Trente-Trois, the good local beer. The lab became the only place in Haiphong where you could get a cold one. The Control Unit stayed busy collecting rodents (the rats were brown, big, and vicious) and insects (the cockroaches were huge and the flies and mosquitoes an abomination), for ultimate delivery to Bethesda. One afternoon in the garden of the Continental Hotel I spent a hilarious hour with Dooley and a corpsman trying to capture a monkey for lice samples.
As the weeks went by and the weather improved, the operation slowed. Commander Naval Forces Far East started to return ships to normal training operations. By the end of October, except for some LSTs and the station ship, most of the Navy was gone from the Haiphong area. A small staff stayed on board the station ship and Dr. Dooley remained in Haiphong with five corpsmen. Refugees and cargo continued to depart on USNS and MSTS ships.
At the beginning of May 1955, Captain Winn, without any of his old staff, who were all back in the States, returned to Haiphong to supervise the end of the operation. On 18 May Navy ships left Indochinese waters. Two days later at Sangley Point in the Philippines, Winn shut down Passage to Freedom, which between August 1954 and May 1955 employed 74 Navy and 39 MSTS ships at a cost of $93 million to assist the French in evacuating the north. At the end of 1954 the United States also budgeted an additional $282 million to underwrite refugee resettlement in the south.5
By any standard the operation was a success. During the nine months we transported 310,848 refugees, including 17,846 military personnel, 68,757 tons of ordnance, and 8,135 vehicles from the north. Most of this was accomplished in the first three months of Passage to Freedom. Together the French and Americans evacuated about 800,000 people, including 240,000 by French airlift. According to Bui Van Luong, the former General Director of the Refugee Commission of the Government of Vietnam, another 140,712 went south on foot or by boat.6
And so an early Cold War naval operation ended. Nearly a million Vietnamese had fled their homeland for various reasons, including in most of them a fear of communist persecution of their religious beliefs. Not one of us could have predicted what would happen in Saigon in the spring of 1975, anymore than we could have predicted that the United States would be at war in Vietnam within a decade. But in 1954 Operation Passage to Freedom was a success, for we had helped thousands escape from the tyranny of a communist regime—at least for a time.
1. C. B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), p. 156.
2. Capt. J. M. Amberson, MC, USN (Ret.), “Operation Passage to Freedom (17 August 1954 to 19 May 1955),” Navy Medicine, Vol. 80, Nos. 1–2 (January–February/March–April 1989), p. 28.
3. E. B. Hooper, D. C. Allard, and O. Fitzgerald, The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict, Vol. I (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, Department of the Navy, 1976), p. 276.
4. Back in Washington and assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1955, I told this story to an officer at a cocktail party. To my surprise in a few days Admiral Arleigh Burke’s office called to get the details for a speech by the Chief of Naval Operations. Later I heard that 3,000 became the maximum human load for planning involving LSTs.
5. Hooper, Allard, and Fitzgerald, pp. 298–299; G. McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City, NY, 1987), p. 77.
6. Hooper, Allard, and Fitzgerald, op. cit., p. 299; R. W. Lindholm, cd., Vietnam: The First Five Years (East Lansing, MI, Michigan State University Press 1959), p. 60.