Even before the British reoccupied the Malay peninsula they were planning a strike to the east against Japanese forces in French Indo-China, the territories that are today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The main target was the headquarters in Saigon of the ageing and ailing Field Marshal Count Terauchi, who had suffered a stroke earlier in the year. The British intervention in Indo-China is almost forgotten now, but it was to have major repercussions for the whole of Southeast Asia during the period of the Cold War. Why did British politicians and commanders commit forces to what might have appeared to be the sideshow of a sideshow, when everyone was worried about ‘imperial overstretch’? Why not leave it to the Chinese nationalists with American assistance, as happened in Hanoi and the northern region?
War brutally exposed the limitations of empire, but to the imperially minded it also offered tantalizing glimpses of further expansion. Up in the heights of Simla in 1943, Dorman-Smith had been in correspondence with Leo Amery, secretary of state for India, and the foreign secretary Anthony Eden about not only the recapture of Burma but also the establishment of a new British protectorate in Thailand. In 1945 most British politicians saw no reason to doubt that Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong would remain theirs. For empire to be re-established, however, it was imperative to set it amid friendly powers, and in Asia in the mid 1940s this meant imperial powers. Certainly, this was what Winston Churchill believed. Quite apart from this, the prime minister felt obligated to the Free French and Dutch regimes that had been his strong allies during the war and which showed no sign of wishing to give up their colonial territories in Indo-China and Indonesia. Churchill had several spats with Franklin D. Roosevelt about this in 1943 and 1944. The US president, brought up on British and Dutch history, heartily detested French imperialism and was keen to install a United Nations protectorate in Indo-China after the war. Then, at a stroke, the political scene was unexpectedly transformed. FDR died and his successor, Harry S. Truman, seemed prepared to give the British their head in southern Indo-China and Indonesia, provided that Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese nationalists, now close allies of the USA, were allowed a controlling influence in the north. Shortly afterwards Labour came to power in Britain, ostensibly committed to policies of colonial independence. On the ground Mountbatten had established good relations with Indian and Burmese nationalists.
It could not be assumed, therefore, that the British would take the line that they did. This was effectively to restore the French and Dutch empires in Indo-China and Indonesia at the very time that they were coming to realize the limitations of their own tenure in India and Burma. In Indo-China in particular the consequences were momentous. In 1970, at the height of the American war in Vietnam, George Rosie, a radical journalist, wrote The British in Vietnam:how the twenty-five year war began. Rosie built up a formidable case against General Douglas Gracey, commander of the 20th Indian Division, which intervened in Indo-China in September 1945 on the orders of South East Asia Command. Gracey, the book argued, had greatly exceeded his orders. While claiming that he would not intervene in the politics of Indo-China, Gracey purposely allowed the French to rearm and stage a coup against the communist-led Viet Minh national front government in Saigon on 23 September 1945. He then used the Indian Army and surrendered Japanese forces to suppress a legitimate nationalist rebellion. Rosie concluded that the British ‘as a nation, bear some measure of responsibility for the tragedy of Vietnam’.7 Now that official and private papers are open, it is possible to consider anew many of Rosie’s assumptions and also to show how the beginning of the brutal war in Indo-China impacted on Britain’s policies in Southeast Asia more broadly.
Indo-China had been conquered piecemeal by the French after 1850. In the deltas of the Mekong to the south and the Red River to the north, their rule was direct and intrusive, even though they maintained the fiction of Vietnamese sovereignty in the form of a client emperor, based at the old royal city of Hue. By the 1930s French land companies owned much of Cochin China (southern Vietnam) and Vietnamese labour was exploited on rubber and coffee estates across the country. In the hills and forests away from the river valleys, in Laos and Cambodia, the French allowed more authority to native rulers. The Depression had a devastating effect on the Indo-Chinese countryside. Hardship fuelled peasant risings. The French had suppressed mainstream Vietnamese nationalism. Inevitably, clandestine communist movements filled the vacuum. French forces carried out savage punitive campaigns during the 1930s. But the shadowy communist leadership, headed by Nguyen Ai Quoc, ‘Nguyen the patriot’, alias Ho Chi Minh, slipped to and fro across the Chinese border and infiltrated the homelands of the Moi, the tribal peoples of the northern hills.
When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in 1941–2, they preserved the rule of their French Vichy ally while clamping down hard on any sign of restiveness among the large French expatriate populations of Hanoi and Saigon, which numbered nearly 100,000. But the French settlers offered relatively little resistance; it was the Vietnamese who really suffered. There was the usual face-slapping and brutality on the part of the Japanese. As the Japanese lost control of the air, Allied bombing made impassable the difficult roads which brought rice from the south through the central hills to the food-deficient tracts of the north. In 1943 and 1944 scarcity degenerated into full-scale famine. Tens of thousands died of starvation; today older people still remember pushing the dead bodies of victims away from their doors each morning. The Vichy regime nevertheless gave the Indo-Chinese peoples a new sense of identity as they attempted to counter Allied propaganda, while the Japanese stimulated national feeling across Vietnam in the same way they had done in Burma and Malaya. The French language was discouraged while Buddhist and Confucian rites flourished. Vietnamese youth was mobilized through the Buddhist Vanguard movement and martial arts associations.8
As long as pro-Axis Vichy rule lasted in France the French in Saigon and Hanoi had offered little opposition to the Japanese. Even after the fall of Paris to the Allies in 1944, local French administrators collaborated fully with the Japanese, helping to put down local Chinese and communist revolts and tracking Allied special forces. Paul Mus, a French special forces operative and sociologist who had been brought up in Indo-China, prepared a report for the Free French authorities in Calcutta in March 1945. In it he deplored the lack of effective ‘resistance’ among the French expatriate community. But as Burma fell to the 14th Army, the settlers and the local French forces began finally to refuse Japanese orders and make secret contacts with the special forces. At this stage, the Japanese were still expecting to hold their perimeter in southern Indo-China, Tenasserim and Malaya. They were in no mood to compromise and on 9 March 1945 they reacted with ruthless efficiency, ousting and imprisoning the former Vichy regime overnight and clamping much tighter controls on the hitherto largely untouched French settler lifestyle.
There were 60–70,000 Japanese soldiers in southern Vietnam and another 30,000-odd north of the 16th parallel. It was impossible for them to control this large and complex domain without Vietnamese help. Very late in the day, therefore, they instituted the sort of local government that had existed in Burma since 1943, installing in Hanoi a regime of moderates under Tran Trong Kim, some of whom were secretly sympathetic to the Viet Minh. Indo-Chinese members of the former French armed forces signed up with the new state. In Saigon, capital of the southern province, huge parades were held at which the motley collection of local political parties and religious groups handed out leaflets asking civilians to show their gratitude to the Japanese. A large placard proclaiming ‘Vietnam’ was erected outside the city’s cathedral. At first the new regime, though nationalist, was technically responsible to the Bao Dai emperor in Hue, the old client ruler of the French. But its writ did not run very far. In the countryside, armed bands of communists and followers of local religious sects ruled the roost along with bandit gangs.
Before the Japanese surrendered in August, their last political act was to recognize a more radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the balcony of Hanoi’s baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent invective against the French: ‘They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood… To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.’9 For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power, organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which jostled for power with other armed popular groupings.
The nationalists in Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: ‘You are defeated, now it is our turn to fight the white imperialists.’10 Terauchi refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon’s twin port city, French and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like organization called the Binh Xuyen. Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the Japanese, who held power. Inside Cholon, the large French population was restive. Colonel Jean Cédile had parachuted into the country and represented Free French authority until the arrival of a French commissioner. He established strained relations with the Viet Minh authority, which was itself split between moderates who were prepared to co-operate and radicals who wanted an immediate attack on the returning colonialists. When the surrendered Japanese representatives visited the British headquarters in Rangoon in late August they said frankly that they could not control the population of southern Vietnam.
Into this minefield moved General Gracey’s 20th Indian Division, a crack unit of the 14th Army, with some trepidation and little knowledge. French Indo-China had never figured strongly in the British mental map of the East, even though it adjoined Burma and Malaya and was home to substantial numbers of Indians and the same southern Chinese communities who traded in Singapore and Rangoon. British minutes of 1945 waffled about the ‘Annamite character’ with its ‘ceremoniousness’ and ‘veneration for age’.11 Nor, apparently, were the British very interested in replacing these comfortable stereotypes with more solid information about the roots and nature of Vietnamese identity. Earlier in the year Paul Mus, the soldier sociologist, had been parachuted into Vietnam in an extension of Force 136 activities. In a rice field he had a sudden vision of a resurgent Vietnam in which Ho Chi Minh, bearded father of his people, appeared to him as a true representative of Vietnam’s ancient culture and long tradition of independence. Mus seemed to have understood before many of his compatriots that the Japanese had destroyed the illusion of French power and that it could never be repaired. He prepared an eloquent sociological minute on the issue for a British general in Calcutta. The latter dismissed it brusquely as ‘nothing important, just ideas!’12 The British therefore entered the country with fixed assumptions and simple tasks in mind. Their first objective was to secure Japanese forces attached to Count Terauchi’s Southern Army HQ in Singapore. They had to release Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. They had to arrest ‘black’ and ‘grey’ Japanese ‘war criminals’ and notorious French Vichy collaborators including local mayors, merchants and purchasing agents. They were to maintain the ‘writ of law’ in the south and this quite soon came to be seen as a French writ, not a Vietnamese one. This whole operation was to be carried out in isolation from events in Hanoi and the north where Chiang’s forces and their American advisers were much more inclined to respect the authority of Ho and the Viet Minh.
The first of General Gracey’s troops to arrive from Rangoon was a detachment of Gurkhas. They were accompanied to Saigon by a Polish photojournalist, Germaine Krull. She contrasted the banners welcoming the Allies, but pointedly not the French, with the empty streets where ‘a few sullen, stormy-eyed Chinese and Annamites [Vietnamese]’ watched them furtively. The French population mobbed them, seeking news of France. They had been out of touch for four years and reported that since March relations with the local population had become even worse. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this Annamite trash?’ someone asked.13 The Japanese still maintained the fragile truce. The 14th Army was well aware that the Japanese in French Indo-China did not regard themselves as a defeated army, even though they had received a direct order from the emperor to surrender unconditionally. As in Burma immediately after the dropping of the bomb, some local resistance was expected from ‘dissident units or individuals’.
One of Gracey’s first orders was to stop Japanese soldiers from wandering around in search of entertainment in the port city of Cholon as they had been wont to do. On the other hand, these were ‘surrendered personnel’ and not prisoners of war. As such they were to keep their own officers. The British took this point seriously. It was made quite clear that Japanese commanders from Count Terauchi downwards should maintain strict discipline. They were expected to provide men for ‘labour tasks such as reconstruction, rehabilitation and general maintenance, as required by commanders’.14They became in effect a huge coolie labour force. This was the reality of total defeat. Later, they were again required to risk their lives as frontline troops when the British war with the Viet Minh broke out. British commanders were advised to tell their forces to hold the Japanese at arm’s length. There was to be no camaraderie, drinking sessions or musing over the events of the Burma campaign. The Japanese were a defeated enemy and were to be constantly reminded of this until they were sent back to Japan at the expense of the Japanese taxpayer. All the same, a degree of tacit co-operation took place between British, Indians and Japanese, occasionally directed against the French. The Japanese did not regard the French as victors in war and ‘viewed them with veiled contempt’. In one incident Major Hagimura, a Japanese officer in control of medical stores, gleefully apprised his British opposite number that a French officer had come in search of stores: ‘French officer look stores. No authority. Me throw officer out.’15 Despite the British order against fraternization, there were cases where officers swapped memories of the great battles at Imphal and Kohima in the previous year.
The trouble the British expected from the Japanese or the French never came. Instead, it was the Vietnamese who caused them grief. The situation deteriorated even before Gracey had got much of his force on the ground. On 2 September the Viet Minh hopefully celebrated Independence Day. People listened to Ho’s speeches from the north and marched proudly down Paris Commune Street in Saigon. Suddenly shots rang out. The Vietnamese were convinced that French agents provocateurs had fired into the crowd.16 Whatever the truth, Vietnamese radicals beat up many French people in retaliation. Vietnamese wives or mistresses of Frenchmen were also targeted: ‘the enemy was yesterday’s houseboy and coolie seeking revenge on his former masters’.17 A French professor who had once sympathized with Vietnamese aspirations told Krull that his domestic servant had suddenly hit him over the head with a stick: ‘I would never have believed it possible. I can understand revenge, but not this blind, wild fury,’ he said.18 There was a serious riot in Rue Catinat at the elegant heart of Saigon. The head of the Viet Minh police tried to calm the situation by arresting people he deemed troublemakers, such as Trotskyites or members of the Cao Dai and other armed religious sects. But the French settlers were already dangerously on edge.
When Gracey’s main force arrived the city was draped with nationalist banners proclaiming ‘Welcome British and Americans, but we have no room for the French’.19 On 17 September the Viet Minh closed down Saigon and Cholon with a strike. This was an impolitic move since it gave the green light to bandit elements in Cholon to stage further attacks on French property. Gracey bluntly declared that the ‘Annamite government was a direct threat to law and order through its armed Police Gendarmerie and its armed Guard Civile’. On 21 September he issued a draconian declaration of martial law, warning wrongdoers that they would be ‘summarily shot’. This applied not simply to Saigon but to the whole of southern Indo-China. Mountbatten was especially shocked by its harshness. Gracey also closed down the Vietnamese press, which he believed was being stirred up by communists, announcing that ‘all newspapers at present published in Saigon–Cholon in any language will be suspended immediately’. This was more drastic than the press restrictions imposed on frontier areas in India at the height of the war. It grated with the many European and American journalists in Asia who had been under the impression that the war had been fought for democracy and free speech.20
The Viet Minh were enraged, rightly feeling that they had lost everything gained over the previous months and that their legitimate authority was being swept aside. They immediately made plans for armed resistance. But Gracey outmanoeuvred them. On the prompting of Jean Cédile, the Free French representative, he surreptitiously armed more than a thousand French POWs and internees and stood back while they staged a coup against the Viet Minh People’s Committee. On Sunday 23 September 1945 the French suddenly moved. Vietnamese guards were shot, committee members were imprisoned and some were hanged. Many nationalists were savagely beaten, while one French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in mainland France. Germaine Krull was disgusted by the violence of the disorderly mob of non-uniformed French soldiers who ‘wandered through the streets as if celebrating 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their lips’.21 On Rue Catinat she ‘saw soldiers driving before them a group of Annamites bound, slave-fashion to a long rope. Women spat in their faces. They were on the verge of being lynched.’22 This meant war, she thought.
The violence achieved little other than to inflame the situation. Cholon witnessed a counter-massacre of French residents and looting of their businesses by the bandit Bin Xuyen. At least 150 French men, women and children were brutally murdered there and in Saigon, setting in train a pattern of vicious French revenge. A British journalist reported that the terrified French population of one part of Saigon retreated to the Continental Palace Hotel as sniper bullets flew through the streets. The Vietnamese cooks and servants had run away so some Dutch former POWs, who had been imprisoned in Saigon by the Japanese, undertook to give the refugees a meal: ‘Hot soup and stew was provided for hundreds of people in the hotel. As there was no light except a few candles the scene with crashing rain outside was ghastly and rather dramatic.’23 Soon French, Indian, British and Viet Minh forces were engaged in scattered firefights across southern Indo-China. Still weak in numbers, the British rearmed and deployed their erstwhile enemies, the Japanese, against what most Vietnamese saw as the legitimate forces of a national government. General Philippe Leclerc, the French commander, wired his government that ‘any signs of weakness or lack of agreement [among the Allies] would play the game of the Japanese and lead to grave consequences for the future of the white races in Asia’.24 Leclerc was the tough Free French general who had liberated Paris from the Nazis along with General de Gaulle the previous year. Leclerc and other French officers believed that the Japanese were still surreptitiously aiding the Viet Minh. Though there is little evidence that this represented any kind of policy of Terauchi or his commanders, some Japanese deserters were probably fighting alongside the Vietnamese.25
Fighting went on until early in the new year of 1946, by which time most Viet Minh resistance in the south had been driven underground. There were several attempts at negotiation and several truces, all of which broke down. One of the first was made by the irrepressible Tom Driberg, who decided to spend a weekend in Saigon before flying back to Britain for the new parliamentary session. He quickly sized up the situation. The French, he wrote in Reynolds News, had behaved with ‘maximum ineptitude and considerable cruelty’.26 Not only had their municipal police fired on the local population amid ‘disgraceful scenes of vengeance against helpless Annamites’, but ‘equally trigger-happy French degenerates haunt the opium dens’. Driberg later boasted that he had nearly prevented the Vietnam War. What he had actually done was to use his old London communist connections to try to arrange a meeting between the British authorities and the Viet Minh. Driberg had written to Mountbatten about this but the letter had reached South East Asia Command in Singapore only after Mountbatten had left for London. Driberg was convinced that Gracey had deliberately held it back.27 Over the next two years Driberg continued to argue the case of the Vietnamese nationalists in Parliament, in the press and even in Paris.28 Through Vietnamese connections in Paris he contacted Ho Chi Minh. But he could do little to influence events.
Later attempts by the British to end the fighting were equally unsuccessful. On 10 October, for instance, Gracey and his commanders attempted to explain themselves to Dr Pham Ngoc Thach and ‘Mr Kien Cong Cung’, who called themselves the ‘heads of the civilian resistance’. ‘The British have no interest in the politics of the country as between you and the French,’ Gracey stated. But he went on to threaten the rebels with ‘armed cars, guns, mortars and aircraft’, adding that the British troops ‘are today the finest trained troops in the world… You are fools if you think your troops can oppose them successfully.’29 In response ‘the Annamites said (with some justification) that, although we say we have no political interest in this country and are impartial, we are in fact being used to cover the concentration of large French forces’. The next day a Viet Minh spokesman said that the nationalists had no wish to impede the British in their laudable aim of disarming and repatriating the Japanese. ‘Our only purpose,’ he added, ‘is to forbid French people or soldiers to get out of the region of Saigon or Cholon. So we beg you not to mix in your army any French soldiers, who after returning back to your bases, would occupy by force our towns and villages, as they did some days back in Saigon.’
On this occasion, Gracey claimed that the Viet Minh broke the truce. They staged marches and ‘PT [Physical Training] parades’ in the city. He admitted that the demonstrations were peaceful and that when they encountered massed British forces the demonstrators did little more than salute and turn about. What really concerned him was the possibility that armed insurgents were moving back into the city under the cover of the civilians who were slowly returning from their villages following the panic induced by the French coup. Gracey’s letters give the impression that, while these events were unfolding, he was concerned above all with the lives of his own soldiers and then with the security of the European population of the city. These practical concerns apparently drove his actions from the declaration of martial law through to the final withdrawal of the 20th Indian Division in early 1946. But his hard line against the Viet Minh also had a doctrinaire aspect to it and this became clearer as he pondered the operation after it had finished. He saw himself very much as a representative of ‘the Allies’, not just a British commander, and ‘the Allies include the French’, as he told the Viet Minh. A new France ‘had fought gloriously to free their own country’ and this was unknown to the ‘Annamites’. Indo-China was without ‘legal writ’ and the only legality at hand was that of the French. He considered the extremist and hooligan reaction sparked off by Viet Minh demonstrations as barbaric and was soon asking for permission to ‘bump off’ – after summary trials – the perpetrators of ‘flagrant’ cases of murder.30 He was also enraged that Hanoi Radio was broadcasting more and more anti-British and anti-French propaganda. He tried to get General Wedemeyer, the American commander of the Chinese forces in the northern sector, to have the nuisance stopped.
Mountbatten’s position is clearer than when George Rosie wrote his diatribe in 1970, though his private papers – now open to researchers – are not particularly revealing. Mountbatten was clearly taken aback by Gracey’s declaration of martial law on 21 September, above all by its catch-all character. He also rebuked Gracey for making the proclamation apply to the whole of southern Indo-China and not simply Saigon. He resented the fact that Leclerc had apparently gone back on his personal undertaking to him that he would not attack the Viet Minh without authority. Mountbatten was, however, a realist. He had always given his local commanders such as Slim and Leese a good deal of room for manoeuvre. He was aware that the 20th Indian Division was heavily outnumbered by resentful French and Japanese. To intervene and attempt to rein in Gracey might actually result in a sharp deterioration of the situation on the ground and lead to the loss of British and Indian lives, and the tying down of soldiers who were badly needed in Malaya, Borneo and India itself. Ultimately, he resolved, ‘since you have taken this line and you are the man on the spot, it is my intention to support you’.31 Moreover, Mountbatten had his doubts about the Viet Minh. They were probably communists, he thought, stirred up by the Chinese. They had been put in power by the Chinese nationalists and Japanese respectively. They had not fought against the latter as had the Burma Independence Army. There was, at least in southern Vietnam, no Aung San equivalent, only a group of distant and inscrutable politicians whom the French regarded as bandits.
Mountbatten was not happy, though. Always acutely aware of how events might be interpreted, he deprecated Gracey’s uncompromising tone. He must have worried not only about the radical British press but also about the distant fulminations in Tokyo of his alter ego, Douglas MacArthur, against the perfidious English and the brutal French. He chided Gracey: ‘I must say that it would be most indiscreet for a British Commander to put on record [as Gracey had done] that “tanks, ships, aircraft and guns” are massed against virtually unarmed people and that “useless misery” might ensue.’ He was also ‘distressed to see that you have been burning down houses, and in congested areas, too! Cannot you give such unsavoury jobs (if they really are military necessities) to the French in future?’ Gracey replied with characteristic bluntness that he had to maintain ‘a proper standard of British prestige’ and that force was necessary because the Viet Minh had not the slightest intention in practice to make any distinction between British and French troops. British and Indian lives were at stake, so the threat of overwhelming force was appropriate. As for burning down Vietnamese houses, ‘getting the French to help would result in the complete destruction of not 20 but 2,000 houses and probably without warning to the inhabitants’. Mountbatten’s objections became more muted after this exchange. It is clear, though, that he remained frustrated and continued to see himself as the friend of national liberation movements. On 4 October he wrote to Driberg: ‘I can assure you that if I was left as free a hand in French Indo-China as I was left in Burma, I could solve both problems by the same method’, that is bringing the Viet Minh into a national government. The problem, he believed, was that the French, like the Dutch in Indonesia, were intransigent and refused to give any ground whatever to the nationalists.32 Driberg used this letter along with his own observations on the ground when he attacked Paris and The Hague in Parliament later in the year. Mountbatten also benefited from the gamble of taking Driberg into his confidence. While he remained in Singapore or later as viceroy of India, he could always count on the arrival of detailed and gossipy letters from the roving correspondent about the state of parliamentary or popular opinion.
The muted argument continued among the British in Saigon, Rangoon and Singapore. Slim told his superiors in London mildly but firmly that their orders were ‘somewhat contradictory’.33 Later, a report of the Saigon Control Commission up to 9 November went the rounds of the commanders for comment. One note, not in Gracey’s handwriting, recorded that the Saigon situation was ‘an almost exact parallel with Burma. If only the French would promise progressive sovereignty to be complete at a very much earlier date (say two or three years) AND the Annamites would be equally ready to meet them, the situation might clear up.’ One note said simply ‘Good’. Another hand, possibly Gracey’s, added, ‘Waffle’. Perhaps this was the British officer who had dismissed Mus’s reportage as ‘just ideas’. More perceptively, someone had responded to a comment that it was ‘inevitable that the French should re-establish control’ with the query: ‘Can they control any better than Annamites?’34
Despite the parallels that some wished to draw, the Indian Army soldiers faced quite different problems in Saigon and the surrounding countryside from the ones they encountered in the newly reconquered cities of Burma and Malaya. The French settlers, the ‘colons’, were extremely ambivalent about them. As Mus pointed out, there had been little resistance to the Japanese and the population had embraced Vichy and ‘Pétainisme’ with complacency. Relatively speaking, the colons had suffered little from the war even during the scarcities of 1943 – 4. They wanted French troops back and, after the coup that Gracey sanctioned, they had arms themselves. The British were merely unwelcome birds of passage. Gracey had to fire off a letter to General Leclerc, the French officer commanding during the British occupation, insisting that he tell the settlers and French forces some home truths. The Indian Army had come to their rescue. As for arming the Japanese and putting them back on the streets, if the Japanese had not faithfully carried out Gracey’s orders, ‘there would have been a disaster of the first magnitude in Southern French Indo-China with a massacre of thousands of French people and the destruction of vast amounts of French property’. What irked Gracey particularly was the attitude of some of the French to the Indian troops. He insisted that Leclerc explain the ‘camaraderie’ that existed between the white officers and the Indian and Gurkha soldiers: ‘Our men of whatever colour are our friends and are not considered “black” men. They expect and deserve to be treated in every way as first-class soldiers, and their treatment should be, and is, exactly the same as that of white troops.’ In treating such men as ‘black’, the French had misunderstood ‘our Indian Army traditions’.35 This was an interesting reflection on differing racial attitudes in the two colonial systems. French settlers did not always subscribe to France’s racially blind ideal of a civilizing mission among the non-white races. The French in Indo-China had been humiliated by Asians twice over, once by the Japanese and then by the Vietnamese. Many were not prepared to concede equality of any sort to Indians. Yet British attitudes were only superficially liberal. However friendly working relations appeared to be within the Indian Army, eating and socializing away from the front were still racially segregated activities. Indian officers had had to struggle hard to achieve a degree of equality with their white counterparts. Gracey, though, was sincere. He personally was little concerned with race and it was this that made Chacha (‘Uncle’) Gracey an acceptable commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army after independence.
Saigon and Cholon were elegant and prosperous cities fallen on hard times. Even after the French estaminets and cinemas reopened, there was little entertainment for the troops. Narain Das, a local Indian merchant, opened an Indian Other Ranks Club at the Cercle Hippique. A Canadian social worker from northern India, Mr Love, set up two YMCA clubs, one each for British and for Indian personnel. The more friendly of the French residents allowed British officers into the Cercle Sportif Saigonnais. But time hung heavily on their hands in the tense atmosphere of the city. The men began to amuse themselves in other ways. The French army and civilians had never had much of a problem with prostitution. There were no anti-vice leagues or distant fulminations by the Archbishop of Canterbury to close down brothels as there had been in India. The French organized them for easy access and checked the women’s health regularly. But during the Japanese occupation the medical inspections had stopped. Indian and Gurkha troops began to contract VD in significant numbers. British medical officers tried to trace the source of disease. The men were deliberately vague about where they had picked it up, mumbling disclaimers such as ‘in the Punjab four years ago’. The French were unhelpful, except ‘in one way’, as a medical officer put it sardonically: ‘their troops so often filled the brothels that ours could not get in’.36
Infection of a political sort threatened the Indians and Gurkhas. During October and November Viet Minh and communist cadres tried to win over Indian Army men to their side. English and Vietnamese leaflets appeared denouncing the British: ‘Indian Soldiers, You are our friends because your country is under British imperialism. You and your countrymen are struggling for independence as we are doing. Why are we struggling against each other?’37 Indian and Vietnamese nationalism were the same emotion, one broadsheet explained lyrically: ‘Viet-nam has once been brilliant and sparkling beneath the Asia-sky with its heroic and everlasting history.’ Vietnamese would soon throw off the French yoke. Why were Indian soldiers spending their blood for ‘evil capitalists’? Another, more politically astute message told the Indians that the San Francisco Broadcasting Station had reported that one ‘Mr Nonon’ had wired Prime Minister Attlee objecting to the use of Indian soldiers in the suppression of the Vietnamese people.38 The ‘Nonon’ in question seems to have been a composite of Nehru and Menon. Both were indeed trying to rouse international public opinion against British and French actions in Vietnam and Indonesia. American opinion was receptive. General Douglas MacArthur called British and French action in Indo-China a betrayal of trust. Gracey was not too worried. He believed that the propaganda had little effect on his men, many of whom expressed their disgust at the communists’ brutal attacks on the French and on Vietnamese women associated with them. But Gracey may have been over-confident. Tom Driberg recorded that some Indian soldiers were indeed worried at having to put down resistance among another Asian people, and particularly resented the use of Japanese troops to restore order.39
One side effect of the appearance of Indian soldiers in Saigon was the deterioration of relations between local Indian civilians and the Vietnamese. These had previously been quite good, though Indian moneylenders had come under attack in the 1930s. Whereas in Malaya, and particularly Burma, large and growing Indian populations had sparked resentment among local people who felt they were losing their jobs and livelihoods to them, this had not happened in French Indo-China. The 2,000-odd Indian residents here were grouped in the major cities, especially Saigon–Cholon, where they formed a quiet and prosperous merchant community. On the whole, they did not bring their families with them, unlike their contemporaries in the British territories and Thailand.40 They stood out less as a community, partly because they were fragmented into local religious groupings. This absence of a single community identity had frustrated the Japanese during the occupation, when they had tried to foster branches of Bose’s Indian Independence League in Saigon and Hanoi. When one finally did appear, it seems to have functioned chiefly as a protection racket, siphoning off funds from the big merchants, Chettiyars from southern India, into the pockets of the League’s officers. But the local Indians’ relative anonymity evaporated when Gracey arrived with the 20th Indian Division. Vietnamese resentments bubbled up when Indian soldiers appeared to be helping the British and, through them, the French to regain power. Half a dozen local Indians were murdered during the September outbreak and nearly seventy were kidnapped by militants. Indians presented huge compensation claims to the British authorities against the Vietnamese rioters, to add to their numerous headaches.41
Despite all this, the 20th Indian Division did not waver when, in late December and January, the Viet Minh tried one last push from Bien Hoa down towards Saigon. The poorly armed Vietnamese were mowed down by machine-gun fire as they encountered disciplined Gurkha and Indian soldiers. As the occupation came to an end, Gracey issued a ‘Divisional commander sahib ki paigam’. This was an eloquent Urdu address in which he praised his soldiers for their steadfastness and bravery, saying that the name of the 20th Indian Division ‘would shine throughout the world’ (20 Hindustani Division ka nam tamam duniya men roshan hai). But the end was near for the Indian Army as an instrument of British world power. In October 1945 Lord Wavell, viceroy of India, had urged that Indian soldiers should be withdrawn from Indo-China as quickly as possible as Nehru and Patel inveighed against their use abroad. As 1946 wore on it became apparent that the leadership of the Indian National Congress was emerging as a regional and even international power. Further British action against national liberation movements with Indian soldiers would be impossible. This began to limit severely British options in both Burma and Malaya.42
The year 1945 drew to an end amid antiquated but highly symbolic ceremonial. On 30 November Mountbatten, inspecting Allied forces in Saigon, accepted Count Terauchi’s sword as a formal signal of surrender. Earlier Gracey had worried that in the disturbed conditions of Indo-China this might seem to indicate that all authority had been abrogated. He urged instead that the ceremony take place in Singapore, where British power was fully re-established. Mountbatten also had had qualms: ‘I do not wish to drag an invalid man of sixty-seven through a humiliating ceremony.’ The Japanese field marshal was still suffering the after-effects of his stroke. Mountbatten concluded that the scale of Terauchi’s humiliation should be limited by inviting few guests and reporters. Yet the surrender must be completed. Mountbatten required one sword for himself and one for his king-emperor. Terauchi duly sent an aide to retrieve his finest swords from his home in Japan and transport them to Saigon. At the ceremony, a Times of Saigon reporter noted, they were ‘encased in draped boxes which according to Japanese tradition enhanced the act of presentation’.43 Terauchi died shortly afterwards in Singapore, where his ashes were interred in the Japanese cemetery.
The Times of Saigon was a cyclostyled broadsheet with an issue of 500 daily. On 15 January 1946 it published its last issue. This recorded one final, slightly bizarre ceremony that had taken place the previous day. General Gracey and General Leclerc took the salute in the shadow of Saigon’s French cathedral. The march-past took place to the music of the Dogra Pipe and Drum Band, a curious amalgam of Scottish bagpipes and the music of the Kashmir hills. The band’s favourite tunes included ‘Killiecrankie’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’.44 It was accompanied by a French military band playing the battle music of the French Republic. Then the two generals went off to Government House, where the British handed over two further surrendered Japanese swords to the French. These weapons had previously belonged to the deputy Japanese commanders in the area. One sword was accompanied by a scroll that proclaimed that it was 650 years old. It is clear from other correspondence that Gracey regarded the swords as the symbol of Japanese sovereignty over Indo-China by right of conquest. He was now symbolically handing back that sovereignty to France, which he believed held it according to international law.
Standing alongside Leclerc during these hybrid colonial ceremonies was Admiral Thierry D’Argenlieu, France’s new high commissioner for Indo-China. D’Argenlieu was a former monk. He followed General de Gaulle’s orders to the letter, believing that it was his mission to bring back Indo-China, with its substantial population of French, Eurasian and Indo-Chinese Catholics, into the fold of Christian civilization. One of his staff observed privately that he possessed ‘the most brilliant mind of the Twelfth Century’. Within a short time D’Argenlieu began an attack on the base of Viet Minh power in Hanoi and Haiphong to the north. This was to set the scene for thirty years of savage fighting which ended only with the fall of the American-backed government in Saigon in 1975. Douglas Gracey saw clearly what would happen. He had written to Slim on 5 November 1945 that the French troops moving out from Saigon had left a trail of atrocious destruction behind them. This would ‘lead to such resentment that it will be progressively difficult for them to implement their new policy, and, I am convinced, will result in guerrilla war, increased sabotage and arson, as soon as we leave the country.’45 Yet Gracey also believed that the restoration of French power was ‘inevitable’ and, no less important, necessary to protect the retreat of his own soldiers. He stuck to a politically barren doctrine of sovereignty and seemed unable to understand the post-war power of national liberation movements. Mountbatten and Slim were too distant to moderate his position. As Germaine Krull had observed back in September 1945: ‘The Annamites will win their independence because they are ready to die for it. We must recognise this inevitable fact.’46