The Doomed City

For 90 minutes on Bastille Day last week, the French paraded 10,000 troops through the streets of Hanoi. Tank-led paratroopers, Foreign Legionnaires, red-capped Senegalese and elite Vietnamese outfits marched smartly past General Rene Cogny, while 15 French paratroopers jumped spectacularly from a low-flying C-47 into a lake in the center of town. It was a brave affair, perhaps the biggest military display the French had staged in their 70 years in Hanoi; yet its flamboyance could not obscure the drab reality: Hanoi (pop. 600,000) was doomed.

There was still no panic in the city, no discernible excitement around its shifting defense perimeter: the Viet Minh continued to harass as diligently as soldier ants; the French put on one or two counterattacks and claimed "appreciable" Communist losses. The artillery fire was all French--as it was at Dienbienphu before the Communists were ready. But the French and Vietnamese troops were now almost certain they would not be called upon to fight. "The gentlemen at Geneva have arranged it all," they would say. "Wait a few days. You will see."

A few gallant Vietnamese still tried to inspire defiance. Plump little Dr. Hoang Co Binh, head of the new Committee for the Defense of North Viet Nam, sent loudspeaker cars around the city "to improve the morale of the people" and he pledged himself to raise three new Vietnamese battalions; he also ordered all civil servants to sing the National Anthem every day. "The Viet Minh are not as strong as we have pretended they are," he told the Vietnamese who would listen.

But the erosion of faith went relentlessly on. One day last week, a pink-suited Vietnamese businessman flew back to Hanoi from comparatively safe Saigon, 700 miles to the south. "I have come back to stay,'' he proclaimed. "Some of my friends in Saigon asked me why. I know who is winning. I told them in Saigon, and it is not you, nor your Western friends. I am going to be with the winners." In some villages, the Vietnamese peasants were seeing their future the same way: they were greeting the Viet Minh as liberators.

"So Hanoi lies and awaits its end," cabled TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin, "with the gunfire rustling the tamarind leaves, and dogs barking through the night. Nanking fell to the sound of gunfire and the barking dogs upon such a quiet night one April, Shanghai one May, Pyongyang one December. No one knows when Hanoi will go too, but no one doubts that it will."

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