Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Not coincidentally, Roosevelt’s hostility to a French return to Indochina increased as Charles de Gaulle’s position strengthened. His animus against the general was deep and unrelenting—bizarrely so, in hindsight.

Instead, he and Churchill placed their bets on Henri Giraud, a stiff and formal French general whose most compelling calling card appeared to be that he had escaped from German prison camps in both world wars. Giraud, it soon became clear, had movie-star looks but not much else; he had neither the brainpower nor the charisma to be effective.

Welles needed little convincing. A key presidential adviser—he often enjoyed closer access to the president than did his boss Cordell Hull, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Hull—the urbane and articulate undersecretary spoke frequently of the surging nationalism in the colonial world and of the folly of attempting to deny Asian peoples’ demands for independence. “In various parts of the world,” Welles said in extolling the trusteeship idea, “there are many peoples who are clamoring for freedom from the colonial powers. Unless some system can be worked out to help these peoples, we shall be encountering trouble. It would be like failing to install a safety valve and then waiting for the boiler to blow up.”

The trusteeship concept bore a close relationship to Woodrow Wilson’s post–World War I mandate system. Roosevelt conceded that very few nations had actually evolved from the mandate system, but he insisted on its essential soundness. Under his plan, the mandate name was dropped in favor of trusteeship, so as to not have the stigma of the moribund League of Nations; this time the enforcement mechanism would be a greater degree of international accountability. As before, the core principle was that a colonial territory is not the exclusive preserve of the power that controls it but constitutes a “sacred trust” over which the international community has certain responsibilities.

Eden grasped that this was old wine in new bottles, and he didn’t like the taste. He and others in the Foreign Office suspected the Americans of seeking to use trusteeships to their own economic advantage—the “international supervision of colonies” would simply be a smoke screen by which America could facilitate access to the economic resources of the colonies and spread her influence globally.

This was anathema to Eden and his colleagues, who promptly set about trying to modify the trusteeship formula. They said they would accept an advisory role for other nations but no more. When FDR proved unbending, they switched to a policy of avoidance, eluding U.S. attempts to take up the issue.

He shared FDR’s view that colonialism in Asia played into the hands of Japan, and he had vague notions—encouraged by Roosevelt—of participating in the departure of the British from India.

But the budding Sino-American romance did not last. The two leaders failed to hit it off at their only wartime meeting, in Cairo in November 1943. At the Mena House Hotel, in the shadow of the pyramids, Roosevelt sought Chiang’s support for his trusteeship scheme, but Chiang resisted, expressing a preference for outright independence for Indochina and other Asian colonies. To FDR’s claim that he supported the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Chiang said he would have no reply until the president first discussed the colony’s future with the British.

The “Cairo Declaration” called for Japan’s unconditional surrender and her expulsion from territories “taken by violence and greed.” All Chinese territory “stolen” by Japan would be returned. Overall, though, Roosevelt found the Chinese leader weak and indecisive, and he left Cairo less confident that Chiang could play his assigned role after the war. No doubt the president’s judgment was affected by the growing drumbeat of despair among American observers in China, who in late 1943 grew steadily more critical of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. They spoke of widespread governmental corruption and venality, low morale, and a general unwillingness among military leaders to fight the Japanese.

Stalin concurred that Indochina should not be returned to France and said he supported independence for all colonial subjects. “The president,” wrote a note taker, “remarked that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before.”

As the meeting drew to a close, they agreed there was no point in discussing the India matter with Churchill.23

Over dinner that same day, with Churchill also in attendance, Stalin again said he opposed a French return to Indochina. Roosevelt seized the opening to extol international accountability through trusteeships, carefully limiting his examples to French territories (New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Dakar on the west coast of Africa) so as to avoid offending the prime minister. Churchill was unimpressed. He pledged that Britain would seek no new territory after the war, but since the Big Four would be charged with maintaining postwar stability, they should be given individual control over certain strategically valuable areas. After Roosevelt took ill and retired for the night, Stalin continued to press Churchill on the need to keep France from reclaiming her empire. His concern was not the Indochinese people per se: He cared little about Southeast Asia, and his mistrust of Ho Chi Minh, dating back to their encounters in the 1920s, had not disappeared. Rather, he saw his stance as a means to weaken the European colonial empires more generally, and to ensure that the France that emerged from the war was a minor player on the world stage.24

“Were the French any more ‘hopeless’ than we in Malaya or the Dutch in the East Indies?”

Quietly, London officials stonewalled American efforts in early and mid-1944 to negotiate on the colonial issue. Roosevelt continued to push his trusteeship plan and his opposition to a French return to Indochina, but with less urgency as 1944 progressed.

Simultaneously, Roosevelt heard arguments that another of the policemen, the Soviet Union, might be less than cooperative after the war.

indifference to our interests and have shown an unwillingness even to discuss the pressing problems.” Harriman warned that the Russians were becoming “a world bully wherever their interests are involved.

French authorities picked up on this schism in U.S. decision making and sought to exploit it. All too aware of the Americans’ preponderant power in the Western Pacific—“Nothing will or can be done in Indochina without their agreement, at least tacit,” one senior official reminded his colleagues—they stepped up their efforts in 1944 to reestablish France’s claim to Indochina, and to do so before Washington settled on firm policy. Most important, de Gaulle reasoned, would be to get French troops involved in the campaign to liberate Indochina.

The urgings of the conservatives in Washington, combined with the pressure from the British and French, chipped away at FDR’s resolve. But only partly. His dislike of French imperialism and of de Gaulle personally were undiminished, and he clung to the belief—or at least the hope—that the general would soon be a spent force.

When de Gaulle arrived in Washington in July 1944 for three days of meetings, Roosevelt made an outward show of respect and admiration, but behind closed doors he stuck to his position. In the postwar world, he told de Gaulle, France would be reduced to the status of a spectator. The Big Four of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China would be predominant, and Western Europe would recede in comparison to other parts of the world.

Even then Roosevelt half-expected some unknown leader to emerge from the liberated territories and claim the legitimacy of the government of the republic. But it was de Gaulle the French people wanted. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, grasped this reality and moreover had none of Roosevelt’s personal dislike of the general. To FDR’s consternation, Eisenhower allowed de Gaulle’s Free French forces the honor of entering Paris first.

Eisenhower would not have put it in those words, but he grasped the essential point: This was de Gaulle’s moment. But if the Allied commander’s tact and diplomatic skill in handling the Frenchman won him admiration from observers at the time and historians since, this also placed Roosevelt in an embarrassing position. The new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, along with army generals Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, told the president there was only one way to go: He had to accept de Gaulle as president of the Provisional Government of France. The State Department drew up plans for formal recognition. Roosevelt let them sit on his desk for several weeks before finally relenting and signing on October 23.

Some weeks later Churchill allowed French military personnel to participate in activities of South East Asia Command (SEAC); he should have sought Roosevelt’s approval before doing so but was content to merely get the okay of American military officials.38 Although FDR disavowed Churchill’s action when he learned of it, and also rejected a plan to provide materials to resistance groups inside Indochina, the mere presence of the French personnel had great symbolic importance.

These officials may have taken their cue from the president. Over the final weeks of 1944, his steadfastness on the issue of France’s return to Indochina had begun to falter, due mostly to British intransigence and perhaps also to his own rapidly failing health. London officials wanted explicit presidential approval for a new plan to use French commandos for an operation inside Indochina aimed at destroying Japanese communications. Roosevelt at first denied the request, but on January 4, 1945, he agreed to look the other way while the saboteurs were deployed. He may have believed that the operation would yield a significant payoff in the war effort, and that the French deployment was too small to make a meaningful difference to the French effort to reclaim control over Indochina. But it’s also possible he had shifted his position and was now prepared to entertain the possibility that France could return to Indochina if she promised to implement sweeping reforms and set a firm timetable for independence.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this, as some historians have done, that the start of 1945 was some kind of watershed moment in which the United States abandoned her anticolonial impulses and supported a French return to Indochina.43 Roosevelt had not slackened in his belief that the imperialist system was bankrupt and decolonization inevitable, and that the United States needed to be on the right side of history.

Charles de Gaulle, notwithstanding the frosty interpersonal relationship, offered a moving tribute: “I am more shocked than I can say. It is a terrible loss not only for our country and me personally but for all humankind.” On his order, France observed a national day of mourning, an honor never before accorded a foreigner.

In his final months he moderated his Indochina policy in important ways, but he never retreated from his belief that the continued existence of European colonial empires undermined the peace of the world.

Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance.

Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell.

Accused later of cowardice, Mordant would claim he had hurt his leg in climbing over the wall to the Citadel and would not long have eluded the Japanese by foot, and that he intended to offer the Japanese his life so they might spare the lives of others. There is no evidence he made any such offer.

It proved an impossible task, in the face of relentless Japanese pursuit, severe supply shortages, and plummeting troop morale. Paris sent no money, and Sabattier’s store of piasters and opium was almost gone. With the Americans offering only medicines, he saw no option but to seek sanctuary in southern China. In April and May, about 5,700 Indochina Army soldiers, including 2,400 Europeans, straggled across the frontier at various points, in wretched condition. They were promptly disarmed by the disdainful Chinese.8

THIS WAS A PIVOTAL MOMENT FOR FRANCE IN INDOCHINA. THE MARCH coup dealt a blow to imperial authority from which it would never fully recover. Colonial rule had been based on the notion of European cultural and military supremacy, and though France had offered little more than token resistance to Japan in 1940, only now did most Vietnamese fully grasp how hollow was the French basis of power.

The Japanese diplomatic victories in 1940–41, important though they were in many respects, had not appreciably altered everyday sociopolitical relations in Indochina—French officials thereafter still governed in the countryside and the villages, where Japanese officials seldom if ever set foot. Now, however, in the space of a few days, French colonial authority had disappeared, in plain view of Vietnamese in both urban and rural areas. Even de Gaulle’s modest hope that a token French military presence could be kept in northwestern Tonkin—he quite logically reasoned that such a presence would make it much easier to reassert French authority once the Pacific War was over—had been dashed.

police. Very soon after the coup de force, it became clear that such minimal numbers would thenceforth be insufficient, that any French attempt to reclaim control would demand vastly larger numbers. The woeful response to the coup made that abundantly clear. Although few Vietnamese felt any kinship toward Japan, they had expected the Americans, not the French, to liberate them.

The reality was otherwise, but a key point remained: In the hour of extreme danger, the French had shown themselves wholly outclassed by an adversary that was itself perilously close to defeat in the larger world war.10

If an Allied victory in most theaters seemed all but certain in March 1945 and highly likely even in the Far East, for Ho Chi Minh—and for other nationalist leaders in Asia and Africa—the continued viability of the colonial empires was anything but assured, committed though Europe’s leaders might be to that objective.

For the Paris government, indeed, the March coup in Indochina, however disastrous militarily, was something of a political godsend, since it allowed de Gaulle and other leaders to say that France had spilled blood in the defense of her own territory. What’s more, the coup removed the political embarrassment that was the collaborationist Decoux regime; thenceforth Indochina would be squarely in the fight against Japan.

The chamber erupted in shouts of support. Some assembly members were seen wiping away tears. For them, as for most of their compatriots in 1945, it was self-evident that the colonies were essential to the pressing task that lay ahead: restoring France to her central place on the international stage.

The colonies would not be mere appendages of metropolitan France but would be developed in accordance with their own interests. Self-government would not happen, however—federalism was indeed designed to head it off—and the international community would have no say in how France conducted her colonial affairs. Any changes would be made within the family, much as the United States might decide to alter the status of Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands.18

In reality, it was anachronistic even before the ink on it had dried. Drafted largely before the Japanese takeover, it seemed blind to the new realities on the ground in Indochina.

Thus while the French press—including Communist and Socialist newspapers—praised the proclamation, Indochinese groups in France excoriated it for its vagueness on the all-important matter of Indochinese autonomy and freedom.

And indeed, Ho Chi Minh’s importance to the revolutionary cause in this period would be hard to exaggerate.

1943. During his incarceration, he kept in touch with his closest colleagues via letters written in disappearing ink, and upon his release, he stepped up his efforts to form a broad united front to drive the French and the Japanese from Indochina.

But he cautioned his more militant comrades to move carefully and to avoid launching a premature insurrection. Japan’s defeat was inevitable, he told them; why not wait until the fruit was ripe to be picked?

Though the Japanese action would not produce a truly independent Vietnam, it would take time for the public to come down from its postcoup euphoria. Hence the party should bide its time and work to expand its base of support and introduce the Viet Minh flag and doctrine to the people. Eventually these efforts would culminate in a general uprising, “for example, when the Japanese Army surrenders to the Allies or when the Allies are decisively engaged in Indochina.”

In these provinces, and indeed throughout Tonkin and Annam, the perception became widespread that the Japanese and especially the French were to blame for the disaster with their inhumane policies, and that Bao Dai and his ministers had been feckless in responding to the crisis.32

The Kim government in Hue, meanwhile, was completely ineffectual. Widely perceived to be a vassal of the Japanese, its leading members were competent professionals—doctors, lawyers, professors—who faced near-impossible odds. Not only did they have to heed the wishes of the army of occupation; they also had to deal with the sorry state of the country’s infrastructure after years of war.

As spring turned into summer and the certainty of Japan’s defeat in the war became more and more apparent, many members of Kim’s cabinet grasped the essential futility of their situation: The government was irrevocably linked to a hated occupier whose days were numbered.

THE GROWING PRESENCE OF THE VIET MINH IN TONKIN WAS NOT lost on American officials in the Pacific theater, who saw important implications for the war effort.

New directives from Washington gave these U.S. units more flexibility, allowing them to seek cooperation with any and all resistance groups provided that such actions did not interfere with planned operations.

The essential features are simplicity, desire to make everything clear, remarkable self-control. Knows how to keep a secret. Neat, orderly, unassuming, no interest in dress or outward show. Self-confident and dignified. Gentle but firm. Loyal, sincere, and generous, would make a good friend. Outgoing, gets along with anyone. Keen analytical mind, difficult to deceive. Shows readiness to ask questions. Good judge of character. Full of enthusiasm, energy, initiative. Conscientious; painstaking attention to detail. Imaginative, interested in aesthetics, particularly literature. Good sense of humor.