Siege of Tourane

In 1857 the Vietnamese emperor Tự Đức executed two Spanish Catholic missionaries. This was neither the first nor the last such incident, and on previous occasions the French government had overlooked such provocations. On this occasion Tự Đức's timing was terrible. France and Britain had just despatched a joint military expedition to the Far East to chastise China, and the French had troops to hand with which to intervene in Vietnam. In November 1857 the French emperor Napoleon III authorised Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly to launch a punitive expedition to teach the Vietnamese a long-overdue lesson. In the following September, a joint French and Spanish expedition landed at Tourane, whose fine, sheltered harbour would make it a good base of operations for a campaign against Annam.

Rigault de Genouilly's flagship was the screw-powered 50-gun frigate Némésis. He was accompanied by the screw-powered 12-gun corvettes Primauguet and Phlégéton, the steam-gunboats Alarme, Avalanche, Dragonne, Fusée and Mitraille, and the steam transports Durance, Saône, Gironde, Dordogne and Meurthe. The Spanish navy was represented by the armed despatch vessel El Caño.[Note 1] The transports carried a landing force of two overstrength battalions of French marine infantry (1,000 men), a marine artillery battery and 1,000 troops drawn from the Spanish garrison of the Philippines (550 Spanish troops and 450 Filipino light infantry, mostly Tagalogs and Visayans, known to the French as chasseurs Tagals).[2]

Tourane lay on the southern shore of the Bay of Tourane. Its main defences were sited on the Tien Cha peninsula, on the eastern side of the bay. The Vietnamese had built five major forts along the sheltered western side of the peninsula, covering the approaches to the town (see map). These forts were known respectively to the French as Fort de l'Aiguade, Fort de l'Observatoire (Observatory Fort), Fort du Nord (Northern Fort), Fort de l'Est (Eastern Fort) and Fort de l'Ouest (Western Fort). Several shore batteries were deployed between these forts.[3]

These were potentially formidable defences:

The bay was defended by several forts. Some of these dated from the period of Pigneau de Béhaine and Olivier de Puymanel, but they were all in good condition, 'very superior', said the admiral, after visiting them, 'to anything we saw in China'. The cannons, of large and medium calibre, were mounted upon modern gun-carriages, the powder came from Britain, and the infantry was armed with good rifles, made in Belgium or France. Their arms, in the hands of trained soldiers, would be capable of sinking the entire naval division, and we were expecting the defenders at the very least to put up a serious resistance to it.[4]

Tourane was defended by a Vietnamese garrison of 2,000 men under the command of the mandarin Le Dinh Ly.[5]

Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly (1807–73)

Map of Tourane (Da Nang) found in the home of a mandarin of the Vietnamese military in 1859. The map itself is at right, with annotations in Sino-Vietnamese script; a legend is at left, written in French.

The translated Vietnamese version of the above Tourane 1859 map.

The allied expedition arrived off the entrance to Tourane Bay at nightfall on 31 August. At dawn on 1 September the warships took up positions facing the five Vietnamese forts on the Tien Sa peninsula.[6]

During the morning of 1 September Admiral Rigault de Genouilly summoned the Vietnamese to hand over the forts within two hours. The summons was taken ashore by a French staff officer and laid at the entrance to the Fort de l'Aiguade. No response was received within the stipulated period, and the French admiral ordered the allied flotilla to open fire, hoisting a French flag at the main mast of Némésis and a Spanish flag at the mizzen mast.[7]

The warships of the allied flotilla soon dismounted the guns in the northern group of Vietnamese forts. The Vietnamese response was feeble, and none of the allied ships suffered any damage. Rigault de Genouilly then put ashore the landing companies of Némésis, Primauguet and Phlégéton, under the orders of capitaine de vaisseau Reynaud. The sailors captured their first objective, the Fort de l'Aiguade, with little trouble, charging into the Vietnamese positions with cries of 'Vive l'Empereur!' Rigault de Genouilly's summons was found on a table inside the fort, unopened. The attackers also overran a Vietnamese shore battery a little to the west of the fort. While this attack was being made, French soldiers went ashore in their turn.[8]

The southern objectives, Eastern Fort and Western Fort, were also taken without difficulty. Two French gunboats and the Spanish despatch vessel El Caño anchored off the entrance to the Da Nang river and bombarded Western Fort and Eastern Fort. A shell burst inside Eastern Fort as the attackers approached and the survivors of the Vietnamese garrison abandoned their positions forthwith, as did the defenders of Western Fort.[9]

Most of the Vietnamese made their escape from the Tien Sa peninsula, but the defenders of Observatory Fort were unable to evacuate their positions in time. The French stormed the fort, and its defenders were either killed where they stood or taken prisoner.[10]

The allies followed up their victory by occupying Tourane and the Tien Sa peninsula.[11]

Admiral Rigault de Genouilly left Da Nang with the bulk of his forces on 2 February 1859, to launch an attack on Saigon. The French left only a small garrison of soldiers and sailors at Tourane, under the command of capitaine de vaisseau Thoyon, and two gunboats. Meanwhile, the Tourane peninsula had been placed under siege by a Vietnamese army under the command of Nguyen Tri Phuong. The siege lasted for several months, though there was relatively little fighting. The Vietnamese adopted a scorched earth policy, laying waste the countryside around Tourane in the hope of starving the French and Spanish out.[12]

In April 1859, in the wake of his Siege of Saigon on 17 February, Rigault de Genouilly returned to Tourane with the bulk of his forces to reinforce Thoyon's hard-pressed garrison. The French made two attacks on the Vietnamese positions later in the year. On 8 May Rigault de Genouilly personally led 1,500 French soldiers and sailors in a successful assault on the Vietnamese trenches. A number of Vietnamese earthworks were destroyed and several cannon were captured and brought back to the French lines. French casualties were 78 men killed and wounded.[13]

Capture of the Kien Chan forts, 18 November 1859

French order of battle (detail of a contemporary Vietnamese map).

In the autumn of 1859 Rigault de Genouilly, whose conduct of the war had come under criticism, was repatriated to France and replaced in command of the allied expedition by Rear Admiral François Page. Page disembarked in Tourane on 19 October, and immediately after his arrival offered peace terms to the Vietnamese: an end to the persecution of Christians, the installation of French consuls in Vietnam and certain commercial privileges. These were relatively moderate terms, but the Vietnamese did not accept them. Instead, they spun out the negotiations, believing that the French would eventually leave Vietnam empty-handed.[17]

Page thereupon ordered a third attack on the Vietnamese siege lines at Tourane. The attack was directed against the Kien Chan forts, to the north of Tourane Bay, which barred the route to Huế. Its chief purpose was political rather than military, namely to impress upon the Vietnamese that the French were not prepared to make peace at any price. On 18 November 1859 Némésis and Phlégéton (towed respectively by Prégent and Norzagaray, a despatch vessel recently bought at Manila), the gunboats Avalanche and Alarme, the transport Marne and the Spanish despatch vessel Jorgo Juan (which had replaced El Caño) anchored off the Kien Chan forts and opened a devastating bombardment. Before long the allied warships had wrecked the forts and dismounted their cannon. The casualties were not all on the Vietnamese side, however. Lieutenant-Colonel Dupré-Déroulède, the senior French engineering officer, was cut in two by a cannonball while standing on the bridge of Némésis. The same shot killed a French sailor, wounded several others, and spattered Admiral Page with blood. Once the forts were silenced a French landing force was put ashore and found that the Vietnamese had abandoned their positions. Once again the French had won a fine tactical victory, overwhelming the Vietnamese defenders and capturing the forts, but once again the victory had no strategic significance.[18]

The Tourane expedition had tied down French resources unprofitably and drained French manpower, and the eventual evacuation of Tourane was an embarrassing confession of failure. Tự Đức was immensely encouraged by the outcome of the siege, and had the news of the allied evacuation proclaimed throughout Vietnam.[20]

In the long run, however, the failure of the expedition made no difference to the course of the war. The military stalemate around Saigon was broken in 1861, when the ending of the war with China freed French military resources for action in Vietnam, by an important French and Spanish victory at Ky Hoa.[21] The allies now began to gain the upper hand. In April 1861, Mỹ Tho was captured.[22] In early 1862 the French captured Biên Hòa and Vĩnh Long.[23] These victories forced the Vietnamese to sue for peace in April 1862.[24] By then the French were not in a merciful mood. What had begun as a minor punitive expedition had turned into a long, bitter and costly war. It was unthinkable that France should emerge from this struggle empty-handed, and Tự Đức was forced to cede the three southernmost provinces of Vietnam (Biên Hòa, Gia Định and Định Tường) to France. Thus, the French colony of Cochinchina was born, with its capital at Saigon.[25]

• Chapuis, O., The Last Emperors of Vietnam: From Tu Duc to Bao Dai (Westport, Connecticut, 2000)
• Gundry, R. S., China and Her Neighbours (London, 1893)
• Thomazi, A., La conquête de l'Indochine (Paris, 1934)
• Thomazi, A., Histoire militaire de l'Indochine française (Hanoi, 1931)