On 29 January 1947, a month after the outbreak of full scale war in Indochina, High Commissioner Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu issued secret orders to begin military preparations to capture the headquarters of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) located in northern Vietnam. He followed this up on 17 February instructing military planners to use paratroopers and commandos to capture the enemy leadership by early March. The new high commissioner for Indochina Émile Bollaert maintained this operation, issuing directives on 19 May 1947 authorizing a commando operation to be launched against the north from September 1947 in order to harass the DRV and to cut its supply routes running to southern China. These were in effect the two main goals of what became known to the French as opération Léa or Bac Kan to the Vietnamese.
Opération Léa began on 7 October 1947, when Lieutenant Colonel Henri Sauvagnac landed with his paratroopers at the frontier village of Bac Kan while other commando groups parachuted into adjoining regions in a move to encircle the DRV’s leaders. The French operation numbered some 1,000 men at the outset and it almost succeeded in apprehending much of the Vietnamese leadership located there. Indeed, the DRV intelligence services were caught badly off guard by the French attack and the leadership only barely escaped capture. Some did not: paratroopers killed the well-known scholar and minister Nguyen Van To as he tried to escape. In the next ten days, the French would bring in some 10,000 men to take control of strategic points along the frontier running to Cao Bang. Though the French had failed to capture Ho Chi Minh, General Raoul Salan was happy to have deprived the DRV of its trading routes to southern China. The DRV would not regain access to China until 1950, when they inflicted a defeat on the French at Cao Bang. The French also launched Léa to “pacify” Tonkin. The operation ended in early November 1947.
Pacification, however, proved illusory as the DRV’s troops melted into the jungle, before reactivating a guerrilla war that would keep them alive until the arrival of Chinese military aid changed the nature of the war. The French high command, led by General Jean Valluy, had failed to wipe out the leadership and end the war in one final operation. See also AID, CHINESE COMMUNIST.