Bernard B. Fall

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2007)

Fall eating with US Army troops in Vietnam

Bernard B. Fall (November 19, 1926 – February 21, 1967) was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved to France as a child after Germany's annexation and fought with the Resistance. In 1950 he first came to the United States for graduate studies, returning and making his residence there, where he taught at Howard University for most of his career.

Early life

Born in Vienna, Austria, to Jewish parents Leon Fall and Anna Seligman, Bernard Fall and his family migrated in 1938 when he was a child to live in France, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. After France fell to Germany in 1940, Leon Fall aided the French Resistance. Leon Fall was tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Seligman was deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

In 1942 at age 16, Bernard Fall followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the French Resistance, after which time he fought the Germans in the Alps. As France was being liberated in 1944, Fall joined the French Army, which he served in until 1946. For his service, he was awarded the French Liberation Medal. Following World War II, Fall worked as an analyst for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, in which capacity he investigated Krupp Industries.

Academic career

From 1948 to 1949, Fall studied at the University of Paris. From 1949 to 1950, he attended the University of Munich. After completing his studies in Europe, Fall traveled to the United States in 1950 on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he studied at the University of Maryland for a time. In 1951, Fall attended Syracuse University, where he received a masters degree in political science in 1952. Fall then took classes at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, where he was encouraged to study Indochina. Fall took the idea to heart.

Not content to study Indochina from afar, Fall traveled to Vietnam in 1953, where the First Indochina War was being waged between French Union forces and the Viet Minh. While in Vietnam, Fall, due to his French citizenship, was allowed to accompany French soldiers and pilots into enemy territory. From his observations, Fall predicted the French would fail in Vietnam. When the French were defeated in the critical Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Fall claimed the United States was partly responsible for France’s loss. Fall believed that the United States had not supported France to a sufficient extent during the First Indochina War.

In 1954, Fall returned to the United States and married Dorothy Winer. In 1955, he earned a doctorate from Syracuse University and became an assistant professor at American University in Washington, DC.

In 1956, he began teaching international relations courses at Howard University, also in Washington. Fall became a full professor at Howard in 1962 and taught there intermittently until his death.

Never losing his interest in Indochina, Fall returned to the region five more times (in 1957, 1962, 1965, 1966, and 1967) to study developments there firsthand. Fall was given a grant by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to study the development of Communism in Southeast Asia. He used it to document the rise of Communist activity in Laos. Fall was particularly interested in the tensions between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. While teaching at the Royal Institute of Administration in Cambodia in 1962, Fall was invited to interview Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh told Fall his belief that Communism would prevail in South Vietnam in about a decade’s time.

Fall was a political scientist, but one who had been a soldier and who spoke the soldier’s language and lived the soldier's life at the front line. He obtained his data on the war while slogging through the mud of Vietnam with French colonial troops, with American infantry, and with South Vietnamese soldiers. He combined the usual academic analysis of Indochina with a perspective of the war from the soldier’s point of view.

Vietnam War

Fall himself supported the American military presence in South Vietnam, believing it could stop the country from falling to Communism. However, Fall was highly critical of Ngo Dinh Diem’s American-backed regime and the tactics used by the United States military in Vietnam. As the conflict between the American forces and the Communists in Vietnam escalated throughout the 1960s, Fall became increasingly pessimistic about the U.S.’s chances of success. He predicted that if it did not learn from France’s mistakes, it too would fail in Vietnam. Fall wrote extensive articles detailing his analysis of the situation in Vietnam, and lectured a great deal about his ideas on the Vietnam War. Fall’s research was considered invaluable to many U.S. diplomats and military officials, but his negative opinions were often not taken seriously. By 1964, Fall concluded that the U.S. forces in Vietnam were losing. Fall’s dire predictions caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which began to monitor his activities.^{[citation needed]}

Death

In February 1967, while accompanying a platoon of U.S. Marines in Vietnam, Fall stepped on a land mine and was killed, along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron G. Highland, a U.S. Marine Corps combat photographer. He was dictating notes into a tape recorder, which captured his last words: "We've reached one of our phase lines after the fire fight and it smells bad- meaning it's a little bit suspicious... Could be an amb--". Fall left behind his wife and three daughters. ^[1]

Books

• The Viet-Minh Regime (1954)
• Street Without Joy (1961)
• The Two Vietnams (1963)
• Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66 (1966)
• Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1966).
• Last Reflections on a War (1967), published after his death.
• Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960-1961 (1969).

See also

• Autrefois, Maison Privée

References

External links

• Website for biography, Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, includes first chapter ("The Last Departure") and 48 photographs [retrieved January 28, 2007]
• "A Casualty Of War and Then of Love", David Chanoff, The Washington Post, October 3, 2006; Page C02.
• "The unquiet Frenchman", an interview with Dorothy Winer Fall by Sarah Stillman, October 6, 2006