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

by Fredrik Logevall

Civilian leaders, meanwhile, in Paris as much as in Washington, boxed themselves in with their constant public affirmations of the conflict’s importance and of the certainty of ultimate success. To order a halt and reverse course would be to call into question their own and their country’s judgment and to threaten their careers, their reputations. Far better in the short term—always the term that matters most to the ambitious politician—to forge ahead and hope for the best, to ignore the warning signs and the contrary intelligence and diplomatic reports.

Well before the climax at Dien Bien Phu, Viet Minh leaders considered the United States, not France, their principal foe.

From 1887, a single ruler, the Paris-appointed governor-general of the “French Indochinese Union,” dominated all three sections of Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, from his palace in Hanoi.

Saigon, the colony’s capital and commercial center, became known variously as the “Pearl of the Far East” and the “Paris of the Orient.”

In relatively short order, there emerged an affluent Vietnamese bourgeoisie centered in Saigon, its wealth based on commerce and absentee landlordism.

when these Vietnamese agitated for increased political influence and economic benefits, they generally did so within the confines of the French colonial system.

Voltaire’s condemnation of tyranny, Rousseau’s embrace of popular sovereignty, and Victor Hugo’s advocacy of liberty and defense of workers’ uprisings turned some Vietnamese into that curious creature found also elsewhere in the empire: the Francophile anticolonialist.

In late 1912, he crossed the Atlantic aboard a French vessel, visiting Boston before taking a job as a laborer in New York City. Manhattan’s skyline astonished him, and he was impressed that Chinese immigrants in the United States could claim legal protection even though they were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. He expressed admiration for Abraham Lincoln’s leadership in ending slavery and preserving the Union. But Ho also saw the grim realities of America’s current race relations as he mingled with blacks in Harlem. It dismayed him that America could espouse such idealistic principles yet subject blacks to segregation, to blatant discrimination in all areas of public life, to lynching.

early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.

ICP was but one of a plethora of entities within the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

capitals scattered throughout Vietnam, anticolonial elements began to form clandestine political organizations dedicated to the eviction of the French and the restoration of national independence. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party—or VNQDD, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang—was the most important of these groups, and by 1929 it had some fifteen hundred members,

1930,

On February 9, Vietnamese infantrymen massacred their French officers in Yen Bai. The French swiftly crushed the revolt, and the VNQDD’s leaders were executed, were jailed, or fled to China.

identity, these parties were plagued almost from the beginning with deep factional splits and the absence of a mass base.

party leaders tended to adopt a nonchalant attitude toward the issues vital to Vietnamese peasants, such as land hunger, government corruption, and high taxes.

In late 1939, however, after Moscow signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, French authorities outlawed the ICP and forced its leaders into hiding.

A few thousand French officials could maintain effective control over some twenty-five million Indochinese, a reality that casts doubt on the claim by some historians that colonial control (not merely in Indochina but all over the empire) was in the interwar period already drastically undermined.

as the 1930s drew to a close, only the most optimistic Vietnamese revolutionary—or pessimistic colonial administrator—could believe that France would soon be made to part with this Pearl of the Far East,

mid-June 1940, France stood on the brink of defeat at the hands of invading Nazi German forces. Japan, on friendly terms with Germany and sensing an opportunity to expand southward, prepared to seize French Indochina. And Ho Chi Minh, meeting with associates in southern China, said he saw “a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it.”

no one had imagined that the defeat of la belle France could ever occur so swiftly, so completely. The turn of events may have seemed especially dizzying in Indochina and elsewhere in the empire,

“Overnight, our world had changed,” recalled Bui Diem, a young French-educated Vietnamese in Hanoi who had breathlessly followed news accounts of the fighting. “Mine was the third generation for whom the universe had been bounded by France, her language, her culture, and her stultifying colonial apparatus. Now, in a moment, the larger world had intruded itself on our perceptions. Our ears were opened wide, straining to pick up signals from the outside that would give us some hint as to what this might mean.”

Three years into a war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican China, the Japanese had long been bothered about American weapons and other Western supplies reaching beleaguered Chinese armies via the railway that ran from Haiphong to Kunming.

Indochina could provide imperial Japan with significant supplies of rubber, tin, coal, and rice—all

Indochina could serve as an advanced base for operations against the Far Eastern possessions of the other Western colonial powers.

Ho and his colleagues formalized their plans at what would become known as the Eighth Plenum of the Indochinese Communist Party, which convened at the Pac Bo camp for nine days in mid-May 1941. The delegates sat on simple wood blocks around a bamboo table, and out of their discussions a new party came into being. Its official title was Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam—or, for history, the Viet Minh. Dang Xuan Khu, alias Truong Chinh (“Long March” in Vietnamese),

The longing to be free from foreign domination was the most potent force in Vietnam, Ho reminded his colleagues, which meant that the Viet Minh had to be a patriotic, broad-based movement, directed against both French colonial rule and the growing Japanese presence in the country. Women would play a vital role in the effort, and should be given equal rights. The result, notes historian Huynh Kim Khanh, was a “radical redefinition of the nature and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution,” away from the class struggle and toward national liberation. This emphasis on patriotism can be seen in the organization’s name, which not only stressed the issue of independence but replaced the word Indochina with the singular Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh and his five colleagues around that table in the cave in Pac Bo were Communists, convinced that Marxism-Leninism represented the best path of development for their country. But it was their country. They saw no contradiction between their Communism and their fervent desire to make Vietnam Vietnamese again. “By founding the Viet Minh,” historian Pierre Brocheux writes in denying any contradiction, “Ho Chi Minh brought together—or at least into synergy—the dynamism of nationalism and that of international communism.”

“Throughout four dramatic years,” Decoux would write later of the Youth and Sports program, “all these young people, who were not our blood, and most often did not speak our language, gave the 25 million Indochinese a moving example of fidelity and obedience to our devastated fatherland.”35 The remark gives insight into Decoux’s attitude regarding his own position and the people of Indochina. Patterning his administration on Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian Vichy regime, which liquidated France’s democratic institutions and persecuted Communists, Freemasons, and Jews, he expected obedience and gratitude, in equal measure, from the Vietnamese, and he tolerated no nationalist agitation.

Events in Vietnam, so much a concern of a succession of postwar American presidents, and arguably the undoing of two of them, proved decisive here as well, in the last half of 1941, in making the United States a belligerent, and in joining the Asian and European conflicts into one world war.

Early on July 24, the White House received word that Japanese warships had appeared off Cam Ranh Bay, and that a dozen troop transports were on the way.

They grasped immediately the threat posed to the U.S. position in the Philippines and the British posture in Malaya and Singapore.

On the twenty-fifth, the administration froze all Japanese assets in the United States, imposed an embargo, and ended the export of petroleum to Japan.

seems most likely that the president himself did not intend to cut off all petroleum exports or mean for the freezing of assets to be permanent.

second-echelon officials in the State Department—among them Dean Acheson, later to be secretary of state under Harry Truman and an important player in our story—imposed a total embargo while the president was meeting with Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland. By the time Roosevelt returned to the capital on August 16, it was deemed too late to step back, for reasons political and diplomatic.

She could not survive a year of a thorough embargo—unless she seized British and Dutch possessions in Asia.

in November Tojo offered to move troops out of Indochina immediately, and out of China once general peace was restored, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline. Hull rejected the offer and repeated the American insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and abandonment of the Southeast Asian adventure. On December 7, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbor.

For Charles de Gaulle, the end result was now assured. “Of course, there will be military operations, battles, conflicts, but the war is finished since the outcome is known from now on,” he remarked. “In this industrial war, nothing will be able to resist American power.”

“The American people, born of an anticolonial revolution, are hostile to colonies by tradition,” read one typical Foreign Ministry report, noting that the hostility cut across party lines and class lines. As such, it was that rare issue “on which American opinion is not divided.” Moreover, the study continued, Roosevelt’s policy played into the American public’s “penchant for crusades”—his Wilsonian rhetoric allowed Americans to endow the sacrifices on the battlefield with ennobling purpose, in this case bringing self-determination to oppressed peoples. Then too, less lofty principles were involved. The report charged that American businessmen favored decolonization mostly in order to gain access to raw materials and markets, so as to maximize profits and to maintain production after the war. The basic aim seemed to be “an open door for merchandise as well as capital,” the authors claimed, and there could be no doubt who would emerge on top: “The open door would favor powerful Americans over European competitors.”

THE TURMOIL IN CHINA AND THE UNCERTAINTY ABOUT SOVIET INTENTIONS strengthened the hand of those in the foreign policy bureaucracy in Washington who argued for allowing Britain and France to retain their Asian territories after the armistice.

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.

The interagency discussion yielded, in late April, a State Department recommendation that the United States not oppose a French return to Indochina but merely seek assurances from Paris that it would grant more self-government and increased local autonomy to the Indochinese people. 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.

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.

Their decisions and actions were important, but there is no question that they were beneficiaries of an upswell of protest from below.

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 the division of Vietnam into three administrative units, the killing or imprisonment of patriots, the expropriation of raw materials and land, and the levying of “hundreds of unfair taxes.” France referred to herself as the “protector” of Vietnam, yet twice in the past five years she had sold the territory to Japan. Well, no more: “Today we are determined to oppose the wicked schemes of the French imperialists, and we call upon the victorious Allies to recognize our freedom and independence.”

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. The United States, recalled Bui Diem, later a top official in the South Vietnamese government, was the “shining giant” whose commitment to freedom was real, who would end forever colonial control.

In historical terms, it was a monumental decision by Truman, and like so many that U.S. presidents would make in the decades to come, it had little to do with Vietnam herself—it was all about American priorities on the world stage.

A decision by the Truman administration to support Vietnamese independence in the late summer and fall of 1945 would have gone a long way toward averting the mass bloodshed and destruction that was to follow.

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. We had showed them that the new France was even more to be feared than the old one.”

At dawn on the twenty-fifth, Vietnamese bands of various political stripes slipped past Japanese guards in the Cité Herault section of town and massacred scores of French and Eurasian civilians, among them many women and children.49 Thus began, it could be argued, the Vietnamese war of liberation against France.

September 23, 1945, may be as plausible a start date as any.