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Thomas’s analysis was wrong, or at least incomplete. If the Viet Minh stood for independence and against French repression, their core leadership that summer also remained staunchly Communist. But Ho in particular among top strategists wore the ideology lightly, so much so that even Soviet officials questioned his Communist credentials. In Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party too, analysts wondered where the Viet Minh, should they win the right to rule a free Vietnam, would take the country.
To a remarkable degree, he made a winning impression on these Americans, who invariably described him as warm, intelligent, and keen to cooperate with the United States.43 As a sign of friendship, they named him “OSS Agent 19.”
Surely he understood that the road ahead would be a difficult one for him, even treacherous, but with the Japanese facing total defeat and the Americans making welcome noises, he had reason to feel a measure of confidence.
Away from Tonkin, however, and away from the freewheeling atmosphere in Kunming, American policy was moving in a very different direction. Roosevelt’s death on April 12 had brought to power a new administration, one with a markedly different assessment of what ought to happen in Indochina and in the colonial world generally. Harry S. Truman, thrust into the presidency at a time of global war, had almost no international experience.
Whereas Roosevelt seldom made a decision until forced to do so, Truman often acted on impulse; while FDR could be described by associates as “sphinxlike,” Truman tended to tell people precisely what he thought; whereas Roosevelt saw the world in various shades of gray, for his successor it was often black-and-white.
Thus came to the fore sharp internal differences among U.S. analysts, differences that had been kept muted so long as Roosevelt was alive.
Moreover, the French Communists were destined to emerge out of the war as the most powerful political party in France and thus had to be handled carefully. Blocking French efforts to recover Indochina would probably enhance the Communists’ advantage by discouraging partnership with the West.47
Though termed a compromise, the recommendation in fact marked a sharp departure from previous U.S. policy. As such, it stands as a pivotal moment in the long history of American involvement in Vietnam.
“The recommendation,” historian Ronald Spector has written, “was a long step away from Roosevelt’s unwavering insistence on creating a trusteeship.”48
The differences, to be sure, did not go away. As we shall see, there were still those in Washington who were convinced that the United States was on the wrong side of history in supporting French colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia. At the field level in Indochina itself, that conviction was even more widely held. But the thrust of high-level policy was now plainly going in a new direction, which is evident in hindsight but was perceived as well by many at the time. When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not
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Perceptive French analysts understood that they still faced potential problems with the Americans—Washington had not indicated any active support for French efforts in the Far East, and even the new administration seemed annoyingly sympathetic to the pleas of nationalists throughout the colonial world—but they were relieved nonetheless.
The general thrust of U.S. policy on Indochina was confirmed when American, British, and Soviet leaders convened in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam in July. Nazi Germany had surrendered in May, and the Allies now gathered to determine the postwar order and to clarify and implement agreements made previously at Yalta. De Gaulle was not invited, despite his persistent efforts to gain representation. He had earned Washington’s and London’s ire for sending French troops to the former French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, both of which had recently established their independence,
Yet in a different sense the Potsdam agreement worked against French aims and in favor of Ho Chi Minh’s, though this would become clear only in time.
Among many Vietnamese intellectuals, meanwhile, the conviction would take hold that France’s exclusion from the conference constituted further proof that she had become a second-rate, expendable power.
The Pacific War ended before Leclerc’s force had a chance to intervene. On August 15, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. The Japanese, whose actions since 1940 had done so much to transform French Indochina, now promised to create more upheaval, this time by leaving the scene. There would be a vacuum of power, all informed observers could see, and the question was who would fill it. Charles de Gaulle, for one, seemingly had little doubt. On August 15, he sent a message from “the
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“There, hovering over a thousand years of culture and glowing with easy riches, what the peasants see is the halo over Hanoi, and they are still leaving their villages for it!” Once there, some became willing collaborators with the colonizers; others became disillusioned and returned to their villages; most sought merely to eke out an existence for themselves and their families. Over time, however, as we’ve seen, many joined the movement for independence, which took a great many forms but which was always centered in the urban areas of Vietnam. More than any place, it came to be centered in
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It was a heady time for Ho Chi Minh and his comrades, the critical stage of what would become known as the August Revolution. Things had moved rapidly since news reached Tonkin of the atomic bombings and Japan’s collapse. Already on August 11, as rumors circulated that Tokyo was about to surrender, members of the Indochinese Communist Party regional committee began to prepare for an insurrection to seize Hanoi from the Japanese.
Much more than they would later acknowledge, Viet Minh leaders rode to power on the wave of suffering in the north, caused by the famine that had hit earlier in the year and further strengthened by the overthrow of the French and the defeat of the Japanese.6 In official Vietnamese historiography, this dimension is largely absent; Ho and his colleagues are depicted as the masters of events, directing developments from the top. Their decisions and actions were important, but there is no question that they were beneficiaries of an upswell of protest from below.
The Vietnamese people do not want, and cannot abide foreign domination or administration any longer,” Bao Dai wrote in a letter to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. “I implore you to understand that the only way to safeguard French interests and the spiritual influence of France in Indochina is to openly recognize Vietnam’s independence and to disavow any idea of reestablishing sovereignty or a French administration here in any form. We could understand each other so well and become friends if you would stop pretending that you are still our masters.”9
To the few Americans in the audience, Ho’s next words were stunning. “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.… All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free.” These were “undeniable truths,” Ho continued, and had been accepted as such by the French people themselves since the time of the French Revolution. Yet for eighty years, France had abused these truths in her treatment of the Vietnamese people—Ho singled out
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They understood what every other observer of the international scene understood: that the United States was emerging from the war as by far the strongest nation in the world, as the only real superpower, and therefore uniquely able to affect the course of events in the developing world.
The question suggested uncertainty, and the evidence is considerable that he held in this period a dual vision of the United States. On the one hand, as a bastion of capitalism, America could be an opponent of the future world revolution; on the other hand, her leader for most of World War II had been Franklin Roosevelt, a major world voice for the liberation of colonial peoples in Asia and Africa and the principal figure behind the Atlantic Charter. As a foe of European colonialism, the United States could thus be of enormous help to the Viet Minh cause, but not if serious tensions arose
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Not long before his arrival in Hanoi, Ho wrote his friend Charles Fenn a plaintive letter, expressing his satisfaction that the war had ended but disappointment that “our American friends” would be leaving him soon.
In other parts of Vietnam too, nationalists of all stripes hoped for American support. To a degree difficult to appreciate today, with our knowledge of the bloodshed and animosity that was to follow, admiration for the United States was intense and near universal that summer. It was a Rooseveltian moment.
Ho expressed displeasure that Sainteny was now in Hanoi through the good offices of the Americans, and he warned Patti that the French team’s aims went well beyond looking after prisoners of war. France sought to reclaim control and would get support in this goal from Great Britain, Ho told him. The Chinese, meanwhile, would sell out Vietnamese interests to achieve objectives of their own.19
One is struck in retrospect by the bond that seemed to develop between the two men, and by the extent to which Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues devoted their energies during these crucial days to Patti. At each encounter, Viet Minh officials pressed Patti regarding U.S. plans for Indochina. The list of tasks they faced as the leaders of a new government was as long as it was daunting—to build a legitimate army; to bring food to a populace still suffering from the effects of the famine; to neutralize competing Vietnamese nationalist groups—but none loomed as large as securing international help
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“From what I have seen these people mean business and I am afraid the French will have to deal with them. For that matter we will all have to deal with them.” The French, he concluded in another dispatch, had little chance of reasserting lasting control. “Political situation critical … Viet Minh strong and belligerent and definitely anti-French. Suggest no more French be permitted to enter French Indo-China and especially not armed.”
France, however, was already on her way, and with tacit American blessing. At almost the same moment that Archimedes Patti’s airplane touched down in Hanoi, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French Provisional Government, arrived in Washington, D.C., for a much-anticipated set of meetings with administration officials. No less than his nationalist rival in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, de Gaulle considered the United States the single most important player in the emerging Indochina drama, the main potential obstacle to his plan to once again tie the tricolor to the mast in Saigon and Hanoi.
But the Washington meetings nevertheless carried great importance for de Gaulle, and he made a studied effort to please. Upon landing in the American capital, he offered a glowing tribute to the United States in halting but tolerable English,
In Manhattan, de Gaulle toured the city perched precariously on top of the backseat of a convertible, cheered by hundreds of thousands.23
Whether France could ever recover fully was doubtful: To aides, the president said the French showed none of the “bulldog” tenacity exhibited by the British during the war. To the British ambassador, he said that whereas the rural people in Belgium were getting down to the work of recovery, their French counterparts were listless and content to wait for outside assistance to save them.24
On Indochina, administration officials sought to dispel any apprehensions on de Gaulle’s part regarding French sovereignty over the area. They did not object when, at a press conference on the twenty-fourth, he said that “the position of France in Indochina is very simple: France means to recover its sovereignty over Indochina.” And when de Gaulle remarked privately—and ambiguously—that Paris would be prepared to discuss eventual independence for the colonies, Truman replied that his administration would not oppose a return to French authority in Indo-china.26
hung in the balance, when the future course of the French imperial enterprise in Indochina was anyone’s guess. The energies of Truman and his top foreign policy aides may have been directed elsewhere that month—to the paramount tasks in postwar Europe, and to securing Japan’s formal surrender—but savvy French and Vietnamese leaders were not wrong to attach so much importance to American thinking.
For at the occasion of Japan’s surrender, the United States had an extraordinary political power in Asia of a kind never seen before (or since). For tens of millions of Asians that summer, the very remoteness of America added to her allure, to her perceived omnipotence. In the words of journalist
this power to engage in a colonial power grab; on the contrary, she sought to relinquish territorial control, as evidenced by her formal commitment to granting independence to the Philippines.27
In Indochina, military action had proved unnecessary, as coercive diplomacy had been enough to beat down the French. In each of these places, the indigenous populations, with rare exceptions, had either welcomed the invaders, or stood by passively, or cleverly sought to exploit for their own gain the rupture between the colonialists. Everywhere Tokyo officials had proved unable to consolidate whatever initial support they received, thereby underscoring—in the minds of nationalists all over Asia—the degree to which colonial or colonial-type control would thenceforth be unsustainable.28
The United States, after all, was not like the other great powers, or at least it differed from them in key respects; whereas the British, the French, and the Dutch were wholly to be mistrusted, Americans could be believed, if not completely, then at least substantially. Ho Chi Minh, being more farsighted than most, had his suspicions on this score, as he revealed in his August letter to Charles Fenn, but even Ho held to what he thought was a well-founded hope that the Atlantic Charter’s principles would animate the postwar world.
France had made her intentions clear, and the administration did not dare defy a European ally that it deemed crucial to world order, for the mere sake of honoring the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
But even on its own terms there are reasons to question the logic of the administration’s policy. Was it in fact logical, given the unquestioned importance of ensuring a strong France in Europe, to support her hard-line posture against a formidable nationalist movement in the far reaches of Southeast Asia? The looming conflict in Vietnam was sure to drain French strength away from Europe, to consume resources that all Paris officials knew were scarce to begin with, perhaps ultimately compelling Washington to in effect pay twice—once to bolster France in Europe, once to strengthen her in
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Sainteny’s frustration built as his team’s isolation continued, but he took comfort from the boisterous greeting he received whenever he came into contact with French civilians, who at this point numbered about twenty thousand in Hanoi.
The problem for France was how to get sizable numbers of French forces to Indochina in short order. The Pacific War had in effect ended too quickly, before Paris could dispatch forces to the region.
For Ho Chi Minh, the ragged appearance of the Chinese troops was less important than their ultimate aims. Officially they were there, as per the Potsdam agreement, to oversee the surrender of Japanese troops and preserve law and order north of the sixteenth parallel until a new administration could assume control.
(The Frenchmen, embarrassed and angry in equal measure, were forced to relocate to a much smaller villa downtown.)
HAD THIS SITUATION PREVAILED IN THE WHOLE OF VIETNAM, THE long and bloody struggle for Vietnam, so injurious to all who took part, might have been over before it began. In the southern part of the country, however, which the Chinese soldiers did not enter, the situation was more fluid and much more favorable to French prospects. At the moment of Ho’s proclamation of independence in Hanoi, Cochin China was fractious, divided. A multiplicity of rival political and religious groups, some of which had collaborated with the Japanese or the French, competed with the Viet Minh for supremacy.
More broadly, though, British officials, in London as well as in Saigon, saw their task as facilitating a French return. Unlike in the Middle East, where France was a rival to British interests, in Southeast Asia she was a de facto ally, a partner in preserving European colonial control in the region.43
Other British analysts expressed similar concerns. But the course to be traveled was never in doubt. A failure to bolster the French in Vietnam could cause chaos in the country and also spur dissidence in Britain’s possessions—two very frightening prospects indeed. Hence the fundamental British objective: to get French troops into Indochina as quickly as possible, and then withdraw British forces with dispatch.44
The man assigned to this task, Major General Douglas Gracey, commander of the Twentieth, has been described by historians as miscast for his role, in view of his pro-French bias and his paternalistic philosophy that “natives” should not defy Europeans. An unreconstructed colonialist, born in and of the empire, Gracey had spent his whole career with the Indian Army. “The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French,” he said before leaving for Vietnam. “Civil and military control by the French is only a matter of weeks.” But if Gracey was unusual for his forthrightness, his
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Still, it cannot be denied that Gracey by his initial actions in Saigon exacerbated an already-tense situation. His nickname was “Bruiser,” and it fit.
On the twenty-first, following more unrest, Gracey proclaimed martial law. He banned public meetings and demonstrations, imposed a curfew, and closed down the Vietnamese press—even as he allowed French newspapers to continue to publish.
That night Krull “realized only too well what a serious mistake we had made and how grave the consequences would be.… Instead of regaining our prestige we had lost it forever, and, worse still, we had lost the trust of the few remaining Annamites who believe in us.
