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April 21 - May 7, 2025
The Eisenhower administration, by then far more committed to the war effort than were the French themselves, actively considered intervening with military force—perhaps with tactical nuclear weapons, in a heatedly debated secret plan ominously code-named Operation Vulture—to try to save the French position, and came closer to doing so than is generally believed.
An intelligent and courageous patriot, Diem was the only major non-Communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 even remotely able to think disinterestedly of his country’s future, of constructing a political framework, or of challenging the Communist leadership in the north on something approaching competitive grounds.
Over time, Diem’s shortcomings as a leader—his rigidity, his limited conception of leadership, his easy resort to political repression—became more and more obvious.
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.
Before World War II, French control over some twenty-three million Vietnamese could be maintained by twelve thousand French soldiers plus perhaps three or four times as many native troops, assisted by a very efficient secret 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.
American prestige in Vietnam had risen dramatically since U.S. forces began the reconquest of the Philippines some months before and affirmed that Filipinos would soon achieve their independence. Many Vietnamese believed that the sounds of gunfire and explosions on March 9 meant that the Americans had arrived. 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.
the Vichy-Japan détente allowed the ICP-dominated Viet Minh to launch attacks on France’s colonial rule without being labeled as profascist or hostile to the Allied cause. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia where such agreements between Tokyo and the colonial power did not exist—notably in Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines—Communist parties were not so lucky.
analysts estimated that one million people had died in Tonkin, and another 300,000 in Annam. In later years, the estimates would climb higher still, to two million deaths in a five-month period in 1945. Even if one adopts the lower figure of one million for Tonkin, the implications are appalling: 10 percent of the population in the affected region died of starvation in less than half a year.
But too much should not be made of this attitude, for he nevertheless favored an American policy that had as its aim keeping France from reclaiming control.
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.
“Political situation in Hanoi worse than we could have foreseen,” Sainteny cabled Paris not long after arriving, acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh was the most popular figure in all the
In the final days of August, the first advance units of a 150,000-strong Chinese army under Lu Han, a warlord of Yunnan province, crossed the frontier into Indochina. With them were an American military advisory team, under the command of Brigadier General Philip E. Gallagher.
A detachment of about fifty Chinese soldiers marched into the home of Duong Van Mai Elliott’s family. “They herded us upstairs and took over the ground floor,” she remembered. “The peasant soldiers were not used to urban amenities and at first [her brother] Giu had to teach them how to turn on the electric lights and ceiling fans. They were so pleased that they would stand by the switches, turning them off and on and staring in wonder at the effect.”
Nor did Ho raise objections when Lu Han, upon arriving in Hanoi on September 14, unceremoniously took over the Governor-General’s Palace from the Sainteny team.
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.
They faced stiff challenges from the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects (the former an exotic mixture of spiritualism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Catholicism; the latter a fundamentalist Buddhist splinter group) that had achieved popularity in various parts of Cochin China since the prewar period. And they had to confront several Trotskyite groups, who had a sizable presence in the south.
Until early September, order was maintained, despite grumbling from the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Trotskyites over Tran Van Giau’s decision to negotiate with French representative Jean Cédile (the latter having parachuted into Cochin China on August 22).
The troops’ orders were to disarm the Japanese and to maintain law and order. 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.
Thus Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin could tell the Chinese ambassador in September: “We naturally assumed that Indo-China would return to France.”
One French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in metropolitan France.
In 1943, he had joined the OSS and led a paratroop unit that parachuted into southern France and helped organize the French underground. Along the way, he developed a reputation for uncommon physical daring. In 1944, he was a member of one of the legendary Jedburgh teams that parachuted into occupied France to conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare, at great personal peril.
Peter Dewey was the first of nearly sixty thousand Americans to be killed in Vietnam. His body was never found, and the French and Viet Minh accused each other of being responsible for the murder. Washington reacted to the killing by scaling back the OSS presence and activities in Saigon. Before he left for the airport on that final day, Dewey had summarized his thinking in a report: “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”54
This latter figure did not include a sizable number of Japanese—somewhere between one thousand and three thousand—who deserted their units and fought on the side of the Vietnamese (meaning that in some engagements Japanese fought Japanese).
As 1945—the year historian David Marr has called the most important in modern Vietnamese history—drew to a close, most French officials concerned with Indochina, far from seeing major obstacles ahead for the objective of reclaiming control of the colony, saw reasons for optimism.
More than anything, though, it was the presence of one man, a brand-new arrival in Vietnam, that ensured the failure of any French move to an early political settlement.
They need not have worried. For the high commissioner who set foot in Saigon on October 31, 1945, quickly showed himself to be a warrior monk. His policy decisions in the year that followed would set the conditions and the course for the outbreak of a full-scale war.
Whatever the cause, by the early weeks of the new year, the high commissioner had a well-earned reputation for unwavering firmness in his dealings with Vietnamese nationalists.
This matters enormously in the story of 1946 in Vietnam, because as the year began, Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi had reached a sobering conclusion: He had no option but to seek a negotiated settlement with France.
Ho reiterated his conviction that the first order of business was to be rid of the dread Chinese. “As for me,” he told aides, “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
Ho seriously exaggerated the weight of left-wing opinion in France. The hoped-for support from the Socialists and Communists never materialized, notwithstanding the gushing praise that the respective party newspapers heaped on the Vietnamese.
Over lunch in July, the veteran socialist leader Léon Blum assured Ho, “I will be there at difficult moments. Count on me.” That too would turn out to be false.
Schoenbrun marveled at the self-assured language. “But, President Ho, this is extraordinary. How can you hope to wage war against the French? You have no army, you have no modern weapons. Why, such a war would seem hopeless to you!” “No, it would not be hopeless. It would be hard, desperate, but we could win.” History offered many examples of ragged bands defeating modern armies—think of the Yugoslav partisans against the Germans or, further back, simple American farmers taking on the mighty British Empire! “The spirit of man is more powerful than his own machines.” The Viet Minh, Ho stressed,
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The question looms: Did Ho’s Paris sojourn in mid-1946 represent the great lost chance for a genuine and far-reaching accord, one that could have defused the growing crisis before it devolved into large-scale war, one that could have prevented thirty years of indescribably bloody and destructive war on the Indochinese peninsula? What if the French had really put Ho’s conciliatory words to the test? He was not staking out a maximalist position, after all—he was not demanding full and complete independence. He sought compromise and indicated a willingness—maybe even a desire—to maintain an
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The opportunity was missed, but it was never close to being seized. Instead, the failure of the Fontainebleau talks allowed hard-liners on both sides to dig in, rendering a compromise settlement more remote than ever.
As Ho Chi Minh departed this country he loved, he had no illusions: The war clouds were gathering fast.
Meanwhile, those rival nationalist groups that had depended on Chinese support—notably the VNQDD and Dai Viet—now found themselves squeezed by both the Viet Minh and the French. Giap, seizing the opportunity, used scattered guerrilla outbreaks as an excuse to mercilessly crush these groups, often with French blessing. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-Communist rivals were killed.
Haiphong was the scene of the first major clash. The port city was key to French hopes in the north, as its harbor serviced the needs of the Red River Delta—and, d’Argenlieu suspected, brought crucial contraband (weapons, motor oil, gasoline) from China to Giap’s forces, in exchange for rice. In Paul Mus’s apt phrase, Haiphong was “the lungs of Tonkin.”
On December 17, Léon Blum became premier of France at the head of an all-Socialist cabinet—the same Blum who, earlier in the summer, had assured Ho, “I will be there at difficult moments. Count on me.” Could this be the development that the advocates of a political solution needed? There were grounds for hope. Just a week earlier Blum had written in the Socialist paper Le Populaire that French policy in Vietnam was bankrupt. “There is one way, and one way only,” he wrote, “to maintain in Indochina the prestige of our civilization, of our political and spiritual influence, and of our legitimate
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Blum presided over a weak government, a kind of stopgap regime meant to serve out the final weeks of the Provisional Government until the constitution of the Fourth Republic would go into effect. He was in no position to quickly reverse the aggressive Indochina policy that had taken shape over the previous months.
The next day Valluy issued an ultimatum that no additional obstructions be erected in Hanoi, and he further announced that, beginning two days thence, French units would assume control of public security in the city. In response, Ho Chi Minh ordered preparations for an assault on French installations the following day, December 19.30
An early casualty was Sainteny, who was seriously hurt when his armored car hit a mine.
As leader of the Free French, he had possessed the power in 1944–45 to foil the plans of his country’s colonial lobby; he did not do so. Indeed, the general’s policy during and after World War II had been to reclaim Indochina for France, on the grounds that French grandeur demanded it. The choice of Admiral d’Argenlieu for high commissioner had been his. He, no one else, instructed d’Argenlieu and Leclerc to be uncompromising in their dealings with Vietnamese nationalists and to prepare to use force.
African troops were as yet few in number. In May 1945 Charles de Gaulle had prohibited their use in Indochina on the grounds that they might be unduly influenced by Vietnamese nationalist discourse and might seek to implement these ideas upon their return home. He also worried that their presence could sharpen American anticolonialist critiques of French imperialism.
Most legionnaires in Indochina in 1947 were indeed Germans in their midtwenties who had gone into the Wehrmacht young and knew no occupation but war, who had helped conquer France in 1940, and who bore scars from wounds suffered in Russia, Poland, or Romania.
When the situation demanded, the cadres reinforced education and propaganda with terror tactics, including assassination of village leaders.11 The terror had to be carefully calibrated, Giap understood, for it was a double-edged sword. There were just so many bombs you could toss into homes and theaters, only so many throats you could cut. If you went too far, if you killed too many village notables, you risked a vigilante reaction, in which people rose up and declared, “To hell with it. We’re going to get killed regardless; we might as well band together and take a few of the gangsters with
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In time it would become clear that Giap had formidable advantages that the French, in seven years of war, would never overcome.
But this truism is also misleading, for even in daylight hours the Viet Minh in mid-1947 controlled as much as half the territory of Vietnam.
The French were lords of the towns and the main roads; the Viet Minh of the countryside, the remote villages, and the walking trails.
Which points to a more fundamental problem confronting the colonial power: the strong anti-French and nationalist feelings among the vast majority of Vietnamese.
Most of the time the French High Command could read, on charts and maps prepared by its various intelligence sections, the full order of battle of Viet Minh units, with an accuracy that was often greater than, and rarely less than, 80 percent. Almost never did the Viet Minh initiate an operation of major significance that had not been anticipated by these services. At the lower levels, however, battalion commanders and detachment commanders were often victims of the most brutal surprises—in the form of road mines, ambushes, and grenade attacks. When a French Union patrol would enter a village,
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