Chapter 1

Ho Chi Minh and the French: National Communism? 1920–1946

THE NATURE OF FRENCH COLONIAL RULE

In 1885 France was in possession of a colonial empire which, in 25 years, had grown to three times its original size. For the time being, and for many this looked like the foreseeable future, she had at least defined the territorial limits and the constituent parts of Vietnam. Together with the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia Vietnam was now to be joined in the Indochinese Union although the country itself was divided into three parts. Cochinchina was a colony; Tonkin was a protectorate; while in Annam there was still an Emperor: with a French résident-supérieur at his shoulder who represented indirect but unmistakably sovereign French power. Now that traditional Vietnamese fortunes had fallen to their nadir, was there any chance that France could have transformed the country and diverted the course of Vietnamese history? That is to say, would ‘collaboration’ have been possible? Or was there something about the nature of French rule that made revolution inevitable? And that predetermined the nature of the revolution when it came? Perhaps the greatest danger for France lay in what has been called ‘the suppression of Vietnamese political life’, a theory expressed by Jules Harmand (French Commissioner General in Cochinchina whose ultimatum has already been recorded), in his book Domination et Colonisation (1910). The first duty of the conqueror, he wrote, ‘is to maintain his domination and to assure that it will last; everything is good which has the effect of consolidating and guaranteeing it, everything is bad that may weaken or compromise it’. And thus ended, in effect, the doctrine of ‘assimilation’, a Revolutionary principle asserted in the French constitution of 1795 which declared that colonies were integral parts of the Republic.

It was of course an argument that carried with it a certain invincible logic. Convinced, like the even more outspoken Gustave Le Bon, that ‘Out of a hundred Hindus educated in English schools, there are a hundred who are irreconcilable enemies of British power’ and that the export of democratic institutions would simply be a form of national suicide, for Harmand it was the lesson of Santo Domingo that counted: the Caribbean negro slave revolt of 1795 which, ten years later, led to the surrender of a French army. Given these premises, then, anything which allowed native populations to challenge the principle let alone the practice of assimilation was to be avoided; and the ultimate argument was that French culture would simply make the native ‘an enemy better armed against us’.

This was, of course, an extreme statement of the principles of French colonial policy and in practice it was impossible not to export French culture, including political culture, at almost every point at which French administration touched on the life of Vietnam. Nevertheless, simply to take one influential American book of the 1930s, Virginia Thompson's French Indochina, there are enough echoes to make one wonder whether Harmand's characterization was that much of a caricature. There is intensified in a colony, she said ‘the French state's perennial anxiety to keep control of every activity and its jealous husbanding of power. Ever in the presence of a potentially hostile population, the administration must perforce dominate: and the mechanism by which this is accomplished is the régime of decrees. The result is almost despotic power for the central government and this is as much resented by the colonials as by the natives themselves.’¹

While one may note that these are observations that may be drawn as much from first principles as from pragmatic induction, studies by other authors who are not averse to imperialism and all its works tend to convey an impression in Vietnam not only of pervasive French presence but of almost total control. Thus, for example, Duncanson:

Like the Gendarmerie, the Sûreté was a pan-Indochina service, owing loyalty to the state interests of France, not of the native sovereigns, of whose territories it had nevertheless a free run …. In practice the bulk of the work done by the Sûreté was not criminal investigation at all but political control … and its agents, not trained as professional detectives with clearly-prescribed answerability before a judicial authority, generally stood in low public esteem; they were never concerned with safeguarding the personal safety and private property of Vietnamese villagers and seem to have considered themselves primarily as a network of agents to watch over the interests of the French state. The scope for graft latent in many Asian societies was aggravated in Indo-China by the dependence of French police officers, in their almost universal ignorance of the native languages, upon the inquiries and operations of a class of Indian, Chinese, Eurasian, and other non-native informers whose venality became a byword. Worst of all, the Sûreté was not averse to operating for ‘reasons of state’ beyond the terms of the law itself and tended to bring the legal and judicial system of the French administration into disrepute as hardly preferable to the arbitrary Chinese system which it had supplanted. The system proved little suited to dealing with subversion through intimidation.²

Elsewhere, Duncanson tempers his wide-ranging criticism of French rule with strictures on the incompetence and dishonesty of the mandarinate in Tonkin and on the lack of civic virtue of the educated professional class of Vietnamese; but to this theme of what he calls ‘political disabilities’ Lancaster adds what are equally heavy economic burdens. When the energetic Governor-General Paul Doumer ended his five-year term of office the Vietnamese contribution to public expenditure had increased from an estimated 35 m. gold francs at the time of the French conquest to something like 90 m. In the course of economic development there were, as one might expect, some outstanding French achievements. For example, by the time the Mekong had been drained the excavations were comparable to the construction of the Panama canal and in the sixty years before the Second World War there were 4½ m. acres of new land brought into cultivation and correspondingly prodigious increases in the exports of rice. Nevertheless, the cost of providing an economic infrastructure was one which seemed to bear heavily upon the people and, as far as the rural communities were concerned, it may be argued that the French occupation brought little positive benefits. The peasant, says Lancaster, would thus seem to have paid a high price for protection from foreign invasion and for increasing immunity from epidemics: which probably represented the principal benefits derived from the French occupation.³

In terms of long-range revolutionary potential it was what Lancaster calls the progressive pauperization of the countryside which would have the most ominous consequences, with a rural indebtedness in Cochinchina alone rising from 31 m. piastres in 1900 to 134 m. piastres in 1930. By the following year, as a result of mortgage and foreclosures, the manifest favouritism shown to French squatters and the pressures of population, peasants in Tonkin were having to feed themselves on average from the product of just over one-third of an acre of padi per head: in some localities barely a fifth.⁴

For the moment, however, and on the assumption that peasant-based revolution takes years of quiet combustion before the fire breaks out, the number of flashpoints increased as the cities grew. For example, as Duncanson points out, in the public services there was the principle that natives could not aspire to higher posts whatever their technical qualifications. Thus Indochinese with top marks from the Grandes Écoles in France returned home to serve under Frenchmen with much lower qualifications, or none at all, on a salary which was approximately a fifth of what would be paid to a European doing the same work. There were in fact three times as many Frenchmen employed in 1937 to run Indochina, with 30 m. inhabitants, as there were Britons to run India which had more than ten times the population. At the same time, as late as 1938 there were still only 2,500 Vietnamese who had acquired French citizenship in the whole of Vietnam, three-fifths of them in Cochinchina. The fact that the Minister of the Colonies had to examine each application personally suggests a degree of caution that verged on the obsessive.

Nevertheless conditions in which limited but often intense urban nationalism would flourish were being created and would provide a catalyst of future revolution; although for a long time fears that educated Vietnamese would rise up against their French masters were certainly not encouraged by the numbers of children in school. In the mid-1920s only a little over 1 per cent were receiving a formal education. Higher education was available at the University of Hanoi where some Vietnamese students were introduced to revolutionary nationalism/national communism: although many more were able to ingest ideology and political doctrines in France itself. In Vietnam, other complaints centred on the lack of industrial development, the stranglehold of French companies and, especially, of the Banque de l'Indochine – a consortium of Paris banks which had a monopoly of banking services – but while one may say that the nature of colonial development or colonial repression in itself created the necessary conditions for revolution or national liberation, it is obviously time to consider how these, and other, factors influenced the forms of Vietnamese resistance. Here one may note that while, eventually, it was France who not only defined Vietnam but also the character of Vietnamese resistance, it can also be argued that in the impact of the first two revolutionary events of the 20th century experienced in Vietnam, the inspiration came from Asia itself.

The extraordinary achievements and transformation of 19th-century Japan, at least as a model for other parts of Asia, had to some extent been tarnished by her conflict with China and her consequent appearance in the ranks of the imperial powers. Victory over the disintegrating Manchu dynasty was perhaps to have been expected; victory over Imperial Russia was quite sensational. On its fateful journey from the Baltic the Russian battle fleet had, fortuitously, anchored in Camranh Bay. Nothing like this concentration of naval power had ever been seen in Vietnam; and we know that it was at least inspected by Vietnamese nationalists who may also have tried to make contact with Russian sailors. The annihilation of the Baltic fleet a few days later in the Straits of Tsushima was almost unbelievable and was the first defeat of a great power in modern history by an Asian state and for that reason alone Japan's success might have been an example for Vietnam.

The most immediate and exuberant assumption, that of Prince Cuong Dé, pretender to the throne and a descendant of Emperor Gia Long, was that the Japanese army would help him to recover his throne and his country; but the example of Japan gave rise to different interpretations. Was it an example which showed that the power and position of France had first to be destroyed? Or was it to be an example of ‘self-strengthening’, of, essentially, successful reform? The alternative inferences are usually associated with the nationalist expositions of two contemporary Vietnamese ‘scholar patriots’. The first, Phan Boi Chau, believed that the French had to be removed – and that this could only be achieved through armed struggle. The second, Phan Chu Trinh, did not believe in violence. Instead, he believed in a sort of reverse assimilation by which Vietnam would emerge as a modern nation assisted, or at least not impeded, by a beneficent France. Vietnam's weakness was, he believed, endemic to the people and its society, and the first task was to remove the feudal structure so that Vietnam could emerge as a modern state. Essentially an admirer of France, he exposed the Achilles heel of a French republic founded upon revolutionary principles: but he did not strike at it. This was an attitude which, long afterwards, was to put him in second place to Phan Boi Chau in the opinion of the Communist Party which, although stressing the patriotism of both men, especially Phan Boi Chau, declared that Phan Chu Trinh had mistaken the principal enemy. Bourgeois, even liberal, France, would never have given up without a fight. Reformism could never have succeeded. In any event, in colonial Vietnam reformists did not fare much better than revolutionaries. Phan Boi Chau had been sentenced to death. Phan Chu Trinh was sentenced to life imprisonment. Neither sentence was carried out and, ironically, both of them ended their lives as virtual pensioners of the French colonial government.

THE INFLUENCE OF JAPAN AND CHINA ON VIETNAMESE NATIONALISM

Of the two Asian models for Vietnamese independence, China and Japan, China was always more immediate and when at last the Chinese Empire fell to pieces and the Manchu dynasty ended in 1911, the impact of this revolution was full of promise for Vietnam. Not least because of the assumption that the conditions were approximately the same – modernization and foreign domination – and that China might once again be in a position to affect the course of Vietnamese history. Up until the eve of the First World War resistance and insurrection, although limited, had persisted particularly in the wild hill country of the Sino-Vietnamese border and when the war began in 1914 and the reserves of power available to France, both French and Vietnamese, began to be drained off there was at least a local opportunity for revived resistance. In the hope that deteriorating wartime conditions in Vietnam would spark insurrection, a liberation army of sorts was being formed on the border; but when the attack went off at half-cock (leaders executed or arrested and followers dispersed) another threat to the French position was removed and it must have become clear that the only credible threat to French power lay in France itself, at least until the forces of nationalism were able to attract some effective outside sponsorship or else embed themselves in the people to the point where they became an organized national resistance.

Of the ‘scholar patriots’ perhaps one can say that, instead, they helped to awaken the national consciousness; and in the evening of his life Phan Boi Chau, in a moving analogy in which Vietnam was likened to an orphan child which by this time should have learned to walk and France to a tutor who felt that the child was easier to control when he was unable to run, talked of a people whose traditional values had been destroyed and who were thus a generation of uprooted people on their own soil. It was no wonder that the Vietnamese, he said, were willing to turn to anyone who offered them a helping hand; and for the time being, for him and perhaps for most Vietnamese, it was China, and the Kuomintang, not surprisingly, which exerted the greatest influence on the development of Vietnamese nationalism: and especially a Kuomintang which still included communists as well as nationalists.

Phan Boi Chau ended his life wondering whether the Vietnamese people understood communism any more than he did himself; but even if, in the 1920s, they did not, and if international communism at least did not understand the Vietnamese people all that well either, one could argue that at a time when the prospects for Vietnam were still fairly evenly balanced between peaceful reform and revolution and even though, in 1924, a government of the Left had taken office in France, the failure of a constitutional Party helped to turn political forces in Vietnam in the direction of a radical nationalism. At one point, in December 1925, with a liberal Governor-General in Vietnam, the Vietnamese were told that they could aspire to a fuller and higher life to become one day a nation; but a few months later it was predicted that, while an independent Vietnam (in the indeterminate future) was a possibility, the bonds between it and France would become sufficiently strong so that nothing would ever break them.⁵ It was obvious that France was determined to keep the lid on. It was becoming equally obvious that, with the build-up of pressure, some sort of explosion was likely. The original explosion had come in Petrograd in 1917. After this it was, for Bolsheviks, a moot point whether revolution in Europe would mean independence for the colonies, as Trotsky believed; or whether, as Marx had originally argued and Stalin now suggested, colonial revolution, particularly in Asia, could hasten the overthrow of European capitalism.⁶ When the Second Congress of the Communist International met in 1920 the basic query, says McLane, was how much attention was to be paid to the East. And whether it was to be considered more important than the West. As rapporteur of the Commission which was considering national and colonial questions, Lenin made it clear it was essential to achieve the closest alliance of all national and colonial liberation movements with Soviet Russia: indeed the former were learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lay in alliance with the revolutionary proletariat and in the triumph of Soviet power over world imperialism.⁷ And yet, on the matter of whether the colonial or the metropolitan revolution had priority, the statement was equivocal. On the one hand it was essential to try to make the peasant movement more revolutionary in character by uniting the peasants and all the exploited, wherever possible, into Soviets; on the other, the obligation to render the most active assistance to revolutionary-liberation movements rested in the first instance with the workers of the country on which the backward nation was colonially and financially dependent. Making concessions to Lenin's Indian and ‘Asia-First’ opponent, M N Roy, the Commission had, throughout the theses, replaced ‘bourgeois-democratic’ by ‘revolutionary’ and the result was, as one may see in the sixth thesis, that the revolutionary-liberation movement in backward countries or among backward nationalities was invited to determine what forms this alliance should take. Specific targets were to include landlords, large-scale landholders, the reactionary and mediaeval influence of the clergy and Christian missions, and all manifestations or survivals of feudalism.

HO CHI MINH

Even though, by 1920, the world revolution was notably behind schedule the prospect for revolutionaries, national or communist, of alliance with Soviet power in the struggle against world imperialism was dazzling. And for the self-styled Vietnamese patriot, reading these theses in Paris in the French Communist paper l'Humanité, it amounted, in his own account, to a religious conversion. It also approximated, in time, to the formation of the French Communist Party, of which Ho Chi Minh was a founder member, and one may, conveniently and conventionally, present him as a communist from 1920 onwards. The nationalist goes back much earlier, even though, as one of his biographers says, ‘Everything that touches on his life until 1941 is fragmentary, approximate and controversial.⁸ Born, apparently, in 1890 in Nghe An province of central Vietnam, Ho's father was at least an acquaintance if not friend of the veteran nationalist Phan Boi Chau. His uncle, sister, and brother can all be described as nationalists and although Ho seems to have been attracted at one point to the China of the 1911 Revolution, he chose instead to make his way to France where, having led an intellectually enriched but materially impoverished existence in Paris, he achieved some fame, or notoriety, among his fellow expatriates by attempting to present a list of Vietnamese grievances to Woodrow Wilson and the European statesmen who had gathered in 1919 at Versailles. When he made what may be argued were his next intellectually significant appearances, in 1923 at the Peasant International and in 1924 at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, he had moved on from the French Communist Party and was now accepted in Russia as a revolutionary of considerable promise. But the matter of priorities had still to be settled and Ho threw his weight unmistakably behind the primacy of colonial revolution. He told the delegates: ‘All of you know that at present the poison and vital capacity of the imperialist viper are concentrated in the colonies rather than in the metropolitan countries.’ And yet, he said, hearing the speeches of comrades from France and Britain he had the impression that they all wanted to kill the serpent by beating its tail.⁹

As Ho and other communists noted, amongst the European proletariat the issue of colonial emancipation was very much an also-ran in the 1920s; and even after a bona fide Vietnamese communist party had been formed, it was just as irksome to them to have to accept the tutelage of the French Communist Party. It was not in fact until ten years after Ho's conversion to communism that the Indochina Communist Party itself was formed in 1930. In the meantime Ho's contribution to the cause continued to be made from outside Vietnam and most effectively, from Canton. His appointment to the staff of the Borodin mission to the Kuomintang in 1924 brought him into contact with hundreds of young Vietnamese for whom Canton was the centre of Chinese nationalism; and communism which, at this time, was still included in the Kuomintang.

When the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League was formed by Ho in 1925 its nucleus consisted of Vietnamese terrorists, the Tam Tam Xa, who had already attempted the assassination of a French Governor-General on a state visit to Canton, and Canton became a staging-post for the return of young Vietnamese revolutionaries who might now declare themselves to be Marxists as well. What Ho himself understood by Marxism at this stage can perhaps best be seen in the first Vietnamese Marxist revolutionary text: The Road to Revolution, published in 1926. While the idea of the two-stage revolution: liberation first, communism later: could be described as primitive Leninism, it may be seen that Ho's approach to Communism was also two-track: town and country: not necessarily in that order: and his Revolutionary Youth League also functioned on two levels: the mass nationalist party and the inner core of Tam Tam Xa hotheads who were to be the nucleus of a future communist party.¹⁰ In its promotion of conjoint nationalism and communism the League resembled the Kuomintang at this time: and it lasted only as long as the Kuomintang managed to contain the two movements.

In addition to their ideological training, many Vietnamese also attended the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton where they were instructed by, among others, Chiang Kai Shek. By the time Chiang fell upon his Chinese communist rivals and destroyed the Canton commune in the spring of 1927, and thus terminated the League's existence also, it has been estimated that something like 200 ‘graduates’ of Ho's Canton course had returned to Vietnam and although many of them were arrested, it was a significant infusion to be added to what might be called the natural sources of discontent. In Tonkin it has been suggested that the majority of young revolutionaries belonged to the working class: but that the party machine generally was composed predominantly of teachers and intellectuals.¹¹ If this is so then it was probably less of a proletarian organization than its principal rival, the Nationalist Party, or, in its fuller title, the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang. This was a party which, created in 1927, reckoned to be the Vietnamese counterpart of the Chinese Nationalists who were now untainted by communist membership of the Kuomintang. To confuse the issue, however, the VNQDD was apparently conceived ‘as a vanguard party, an adaptation of the Bolshevik model in Indo-China, and to that extent it reflected the impact of Marxism’.¹² As a party it is described, variously, as characterized by its insurrectionary mentality and always hovering on the brink of insurrection. As a vanguard, in spite of one or two sensational assassinations, it was not going to get very far unless and until it managed to co-ordinate widespread resistance to the French. To some extent both it and its communist rivals were able to take advantage of increasing misery and frustration once the effects of the world economic depression were felt. Wages fell; export markets collapsed; and, perversely, because the Vietnamese piastre was now linked to the metropolitan franc, the cost of living rose. The VNQDD as well as the communists had already been involved in fomenting strikes but on the whole they do not seem to have attached themselves to any cause other than nationalism and, while they were particularly active in attempting to subvert the army, when they finally and out of desperation, having been heavily penetrated by the Sûreté, attempted to begin their armed struggle, many of the Vietnamese riflemen in the battalion, which was induced to mutiny, rallied instead to their French officers.

ABORTIVE REVOLUTION

The Yen-Bay mutiny did not, as it was intended, form part of a co-ordinated attack on the French position in Vietnam and in the event it turned into disaster for the VNQDD. French repression, including aerial bombardment, was unsparing and as a result of wholesale arrests and executions they were practically wiped out. Almost incredibly a month later, the Communist Party attempted a repeat performance. Or, at least, it attempted to capitalize on similar conditions in other parts of the country. It was, now, a single if not entirely united party. It had been born out of a clandestine meeting in Hong Kong in February 1930 at a time which there were in fact three communist parties in Vietnam. The unifying factor was Ho Chi Minh, acting as agent of the Comintern, and while it would not manage to suppress its nationalist tendencies indefinitely it was for the moment clearly identified with the Vietnamese working class. Who they were, and whether the party's appeal should be confined to the quarter of a million or so who might be described as ‘proletariat’ was something that had yet to be defined. In the meantime, in the turmoil of Vietnam in 1930 and perhaps remembering Lenin's rather ambiguous call for soviets, the Party committed itself to what was essentially an agrarian revolt.

The Soviets of Nghe-Tinh are, obviously, one of the first landmarks of Vietnamese communism. There was a ‘worker’ element but for the most part it was a peasant revolt, described in James Scott's study of rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia as one of the ‘Depression rebellions’ of 1930.¹³ But if not initiated by the Communist Party it was at least orchestrated by them although, as Scott notes, the destruction of land and tax records was virtually a peasant tradition in colonial Vietnam. A simple cause was the fact that, in the words of one observer, ‘For two years the land has produced nothing’. This, plus tax demands and a steady loss of communal land to corrupt mandarins and village notables, would seem to have been enough to produce this peasant revolt in whose heartland both Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh had been born. The aftermath was even worse than Yen-Bay; 2,000 dead and the virtual destruction or disintegration of the existing party apparatus. From Ho Chi Minh, however, it was a matter on which apparently no opinion was ever recorded and it may serve to illustrate the dangers to which communism in Vietnam was exposed when decisions and even understanding were subject to foreign direction. By its insistence on the generalized imminence of revolution – more an article of faith than a result of pragmatic observation – the Comintern was at least partly responsible for the Nghe-Tinh disaster. Conceivably, if the revolt had spread to take in substantial parts of the country then, to anticipate Maoist precepts of the future, the countryside would have surrounded the cities; but at this time not only were there no ‘sympathetic detonations’ in other parts of the country but there was practically no challenge whatever to French power in the cities. And although he was not directly involved in the Nghe-Tinh débâcle, one may assume that, Ho, too, had ‘overestimated the capacity of the communist leadership to transform spontaneous revolt into a nationwide uprising, and had underestimated the ability of the colonial régime to quell any challenge to its authority’.¹⁴

Whoever had taken the decision to commit the party to armed insurrection in 1930, what was now to be called in question was whether the party had any right at all to make such decisions for itself. During his time in Paris Ho Chi Minh had discovered that the French proletariat was not totally committed to the cause of Vietnamese independence: indeed the problems of France's colonies were much less immediate than their own. Nevertheless, it was the French Communist Party which had been given the task of encouraging communism in Vietnam; and, it appears, where necessary, correcting its faults. In this it may have been little more than a mouthpiece for a Russian directorate but in an article, which, says Sacks, amounted to a reading of the riot act to the ICP, one finds this clear and unmistakable instruction in the French journal Cahiers du Bolshévisme:

If they [the Vietnamese comrades] find that certain points in the programme do not fit the concrete situation of the country, they can ask the Comintern to add or subtract something. But if they allow themselves to correct the Party programme of action elaborated by the Comintern without asking its opinion, such action is incompatible with the principle of democratic centralism, with iron discipline, and with the Comintern.¹⁵

Similar advice was apparently given by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, i.e. that ‘the gate to victory is a disciplined and powerful Bolshevik Party’ and it goes without saying that in Stalin's Russia deviation by small and not exactly successful communist parties abroad was not encouraged. On the whole, during what Duiker has called ‘the Stalinist years’, this was something that was accepted by the Vietnamese Communist Party but one can imagine that it was not always so easy to accept the advice which came to them from their French comrades. Thus, the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez explaining that, while French colonies of course had a right of self determination, they did not need to exercise it. Calling on Lenin for support he claimed that the interests of French colonies, including the Indochinese, were best served by a ‘free, trusting and paternal union with France’.¹⁶

When the Popular Front, including the French Communist Party, came to power in France in June 1936 there was at least the hope that, by their actions, significant improvements, political as well as economic and social, might be achieved in Vietnam. But if, as Thorez implied, the Vietnamese and French Communist Parties should work together, would it not mean that the campaign for national liberation would have to be abandoned? Moreover, not only would Vietnamese interests be subordinate to those of France but the French Communist Party in turn was expected to follow a policy which was subordinate to that of international communism: in a word, Comintern policy. If the Comintern, too, decided that the anti-fascist coalition would be weakened in Vietnam by national independence, itself something of a bourgeois concept, and if the Indochina Communist Party followed suit, no matter how reluctantly, it would at a stroke lose a very significant part of its political appeal. Not that the national cause formed the only basis of the Party's support and it seems that by 1937 or so something like 600 action committees had been formed to organize the workers in Cochinchina, principally in the Saigon-Cholon area. Ironically, it was here, says Sacks, that he Trotskyists were most active and most effective and their significant increase in strength may at least in part be attributed to a sense of frustration and anger with the ICP who had, willingly or not, abandoned the cause of independence. Nevertheless the Trotskyists themselves split, on the issue of whether or not to co-operate with the ICP, and, just as the VNQDD had been destroyed as a competitor with the Communist Party by French repression after Yen-Bay, so the French colonial government, shortly after war had begun in 1939, rounded up virtually the entire leadership of the Trotskyist International Communist League, as it was then called: a coup from which the movement never recovered.¹⁷

PATRIOTISM AND THE PEASANTRY

From the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, it would appear that there was nothing overwhelmingly certain about the success of communism in Vietnam or, at least, about the success of the Indochina Communist Party. But the French had not managed to divert or to accommodate the forces of nationalism. The nationalists as a party capable of national leadership – that is to say the VNQDD – had admittedly been destroyed but while the ICP was not much better off the difference was that the VNQDD never really recovered from French repression. The ICP did. Their resilience and in part fortuitous revival may have been due to the slightly more permissive policies of the Popular Front government in Paris – thousands of political prisoners were released although thousands more remained in gaol – but much more seems to have been the result of the ability to rebuild an organization from the bottom up even though the advice and instructions they received from international communism meant acquiescence in policies which did not give them pre-eminent appeal as a revolutionary party. In all of this Ho Chi Minh is to be seen bobbing about like a cork on the tides of international communism, sometimes lost from sight for long periods, surviving life in Stalin's Russia and the manifest uncertainties of the purges and, when war broke out, still remaining as an experienced if not entirely successful figure in the communist world and a distant although still immanent leader of Vietnamese communism.

The almost immediate effect of the outbreak of war in 1939, following the almost entirely unexpected Nazi-Soviet pact, was that the Communist Party, in France as in Vietnam, announced its opposition to the ‘imperialist’ war and, in both countries, this was followed by swift government repression. Even before the collapse of France in June 1940 was to provide the Vietnamese communists with their golden opportunity, the Sixth Plenum meeting in November 1939 was looking towards national liberation in the foreseeable future as France's efforts and resources were obviously being diverted to maintain her position in Europe. Once again the Party was preparing for armed struggle and the stunning German victory of 1940 would have appeared to many Vietnamese to be ‘the moment of great opportunity’. In the event, when insurrections were attempted both in the area of Lang Son, on the Chinese border, in September, and in Cochinchina in November, they were repressed with little difficulty by the French colonial government which still deployed enough effective power to ensure that these were rather rash, forlorn, and certainly premature insurrections. The following year, however, the Party took what was perhaps its most momentous decision in the mountains a few miles south of the Chinese border. In the history of the Vietnamese communist movement, as Duiker says, the Eighth Plenum is traditionally regarded as the moment when nationalism and a rural strategy of people's war became identified as the two pillars of Vietnamese revolutionary doctrine.¹⁸ It is no less important in that it marked the return of Ho Chi Minh to Indochina after an absence of 30 years. Ho and the Indochina Communist Party had literally, and once again, found each other.

Since about 1938 Ho had been in China, first at the communist headquarters in Yenan then, apparently, with Chinese Nationalist forces, finally in Kwangsi and Yunnan which were close enough for him to attempt to resume contact with the Party inside Vietnam. At about the same time the Party was attempting to make contact with him and finally did so in the persons of two of its eventually outstanding members, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong. Now, at Pac Bo, under Ho's chairmanship, the Party cleared its ideological decks and prepared to take advantage of the even more extraordinary opportunities that would be presented to it by the Second World War.

This, in fact, was the theme of the Eighth Plenum: to prepare for the thoi co, ‘the moment of great opportunity’.¹⁹ Instead of class analysis and the more obvious communist objectives the Party was to advance on a broad front as the dominant power of the League For The Independence Of Vietnam: the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh or, in its more memorable form, the Vietminh. Ho's appeal in his ‘Letter From Abroad’ was comprehensive: ‘rich people, soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, employees, traders, youth and women who warmly love your country!’. National liberation was the most important problem and the opportunity had come. It was time ‘to follow the historic example set by our forefathers in the glorious task of national salvation’.²⁰

If the patriotic appeal was designed to be all-embracing, the platform of support was obviously narrower. In its flight from the French security services once the war in Europe had broken out, the Party had, if only inadvertently, operationalized its interest in the peasantry; if only for the fact that, in leaving the towns, they were now living amongst them. Hitherto it had largely been a matter of intellectual interest and the best-known example was the study of the The Peasant Question (1937–1938) by two of the Party's foremost members, Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The inference that was clearly to be drawn from their study was that land reform/land redistribution was the critical factor in the peasant problem: even if the peasants' lot could be improved by less drastic means.²¹ When it was first published in 1937–38 the authors had suggested points in the colonial government's peasant policy which might have been reformed – ‘landlord rent oppression’, the seizure of peasant land, heavy taxation – but the French response, apparently, was to ban the work after the second volume had been published. In class terms the peasants were identified as part of the rural petty bourgeoisie: generally speaking, not members of the proletariat because they usually owned some means of production to support themselves. In spite of an apparent natural distaste for many of the customs and superstitions of peasant society the most important discovery was of their revolutionary potential.

Whenever they become conscious, or organized and have leadership, they are an invincible force. When they are ready they will flatten any obstacle to their progress and that of the nation. The whole problem is consciousness, organization and leadership.²²

Essentially, the long-term problem of mobilizing the peasantry, as of mobilizing Vietnam with its 90 per cent peasant population, was one on which the success of the Vietnamese revolution would eventually turn. In the shorter term, the kaleidoscope of the Second World War was going to accelerate the process and would present opportunities both for independence and revolution. To begin with, however, the moment of opportunity that was presented in Vietnam by France's defeat in 1940 was taken by the Japanese; and although Ho might conceivably and eventually have been right in his optimistic assertion that ‘if the entire people were united and single minded they would certainly be able to smash the picked French and Japanese armies’, the vicissitudes of war and politics would ensure that, for a while at least, they would not be required for such a formidable task.

Having been engaged in an undeclared war with China since 1937 Japan took advantage of the French defeat in 1940 both to close one of China's last remaining links with the outside world, the Haiphong—Yunnan railway, and to begin her advance into Southeast Asia. Those of the French, the majority, who at least implicitly gave their allegiance to Vichy France, were prepared for a wary collaboration with the Japanese and as Admiral Decoux, the French Governor-General appointed by Marshal Pétain, always maintained, they were determined, no matter what happened in France, to preserve the French position in Indochina. Implicitly, it may be argued, this turned them into collaborators with the Japanese; although the latter, for their part, were content to maintain the superstructure of French administration even if, as events were subsequently to show, the realities of power were theirs. Did this mean therefore that in some way France had forfeited her position in Indochina and was she to be treated as an opponent rather than an ally? The question at the time, in May 1941, when the Vietminh was founded and Ho was talking bravely about taking on the combined French and Japanese armies in Vietnam was, of course, anachronistic: the two principal Allied powers had not yet entered the war. When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 and the war, for communists, abruptly changed its character, there was at least the prospect – in principle at least – of enhanced support for the revolutionary and patriotic cause in Vietnam; but until Russia had withstood the German onslaught this in practical terms meant nothing. In the meantime it was the Japanese attack on the US which would prove to have the most rewarding consequences as far as the Vietminh were concerned. One may indeed go so far as to assert that the Japanese occupation of Indochina was the key issue in the conflict between Japan and the US which led to the attack at Pearl Harbor²³; and after what was, initially, a rather lofty approach to the problems of Indochina and Southeast Asian security, America's final demand that Japan remove its forces from both China and Indochina (26 November 1941) was met with the equally final Japanese rejection which manifested itself at Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Southeast Asia.²⁴

American entry into the war had the effect of a second transformation. No matter what reservations Churchill might have entertained about the Atlantic Charter and whether or not freedom was meant to apply to colonial territories, the unworthiness of France to return to Indochina was soon to become one of Roosevelt's fixed ideas on colonialism and an issue that would bedevil relations between all the Allied powers in Southeast Asia with the possible and ironic exception of the Soviet Union. At least Churchill is on record that Roosevelt had been more outspoken with him on the subject of Indochina than on any other colonial matter: ‘I imagine it is one of his principal war aims to liberate Indochina from France’²⁵. And while Roosevelt was to some extent restrained by the State Department and, even more, after the US had recognized de Gaulle's government in October, 1944, by considerations of reconstituting France as at least a European power, there was, on the operational level, a situation developing in southern China, in which the US was involved, which would affect the fortunes of the Vietnamese revolutionaries, their appearance, their standing with other Vietnamese patriots, and their ability to influence future events.

Shortly after the US had entered the war Ho's personal fortunes had reached their lowest ebb. Having returned to China to work in and among the numerous but fragmented Vietnamese independence factions, Ho's position as an acknowledged communist in what was an essentially anti-communist Kuomintang was always precarious and for whatever reason he was imprisoned (in conditions of great hardship) it seems likely that he had been close to the point of death before he was released thirteen months later: Chen suggests because of communist sympathisers in the local Kuomintang hierarchy. As a matter of self-preservation, he changed his name from ‘Nguyen the Patriot’ (Nguyen Ai Quoc) to ‘He who enlightens’ (Ho Chi Minh): the name by which he is immortalized.

CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES: SPONSORS OF VIETNAMESE INDEPENDENCE

Part, at least, of Ho's enlightenment was the approximation and future projection of political power in Vietnam, the need to maintain the appeal to Vietnamese patriotism, and, most of all, a temporary but overwhelming necessity for Chinese support. By the time Ho had been released by the Chinese in September 1943 the US was beginning to make its major contribution to the war against Japan and various strategies were being considered for a drive on Canton or Hanoi. In either case principally Chinese armies would have been involved and, in the short run at least, Vietnam's political future seemed to lie in Chinese hands. The Chinese, for their part, needed reliable intelligence on conditions in Vietnam – some genuine Vietnamese support, too, if they could get it – but not simply that which was promised by emigrés who had lived in China for years and who had little or no contact with or contemporary knowledge of Vietnam. While he was in Chinese captivity, and apart from writing poems in classical Chinese (some of which, while they may not have been of the highest order classically, are nevertheless moving and rather beautiful) Ho had also translated Dr Sun Yat Sen's modern political classic the San Min Chu I into Vietnamese and this expedient flattery of China and Chinese continued after Ho's release. Although admitting to the Kuomintang General Chang Fa-k'uei that he was a communist, he apparently persuaded him that it would take fifty years for communism to work in Vietnam; and, in any event, it appeared that, of all the groupings of Vietnamese nationalists, patriots, emigrés and revolutionaries who were to be found in Southeast China, none of them was as dynamic as the Vietminh. When the Chinese made their first attempt, in preparation for the invasion of Indo-China, to bring the various Vietnamese factions together and create a Vietnamese Revolutionary League (abbreviated to Dong Minh Hoi) members of the ICP were specifically excluded. Eighteen months later, in March 1944, at a second Chinese-sponsored conference at Liuchow, Ho had not only manged to slip back under the nationalist umbrella of the Dong Minh Hoi but, as one of its representatives, was named as a member of a Provisional Government which was expecting to enter Vietnam in the wake of the ‘liberating’ Chinese armies.

At this point, then, the Chinese were the indispensable sponsors of Vietnamese independence and Ho himself is supposed to have assured them that he would work under their auspices and as a member of what might be described as the Vietnamese patriotic front. In China, at this time, Ho and his communist supporters were only one among rival groups of Vietnamese nationalists. In Vietnam, they were probably pre-eminent and could certainly lay the largest claim to ‘control’ of operational areas on the other side of the Chinese frontier in Tonkin even though their simultaneous claim to the status of ‘resistance’ forces needs to be looked at more closely.

In August 1944, having enlisted Chinese support, Ho crossed the border into north Vietnam to make contact once again with the Vietminh forces who, by this time, and in the absence of any other administrative control or military power, were extending their influence in the mountains of northern Tonkin in the area known as the Viet Bac. Revolutionary armed forces were supposed to be growing and there was apparently enough revolutionary enthusiasm to support the idea of launching another insurrection from there within a couple of months.²⁶ Ho, cautiously, turned down such a premature example of left-wing adventurism and instead, and as a bridge between the political and military phases of the revolutionary struggle, the first armed propaganda unit was set up in the mountains of Cao Bang – and was to have primarily political duties.²⁷

THE JAPANESE COUP

At the time Ho was discouraging thoughts of instant insurrection on the part of the Vietminh it was obvious that as far as French fortunes were concerned the wind had changed. Rather ingenuously it appears that, with the liberation of Paris, the French in Vietnam asked for Japanese permission to celebrate the event; and it must have been obvious to the Japanese, too, that the uneasy but de facto alignment between them and the French was liable to break down sooner or later. For de Gaulle, apparently, the sooner the better and, although this may be straining the comparison, on the analogy of Badoglio's Italy, the French in Vietnam might at least have been allowed to work their passage towards the status of a fully fledged ally rather than endure the uncomfortable ambiguities of a compromised position. According to his memoirs de Gaulle willingly envisaged that hostilities would commence in Indochina: ‘French blood shed on Indo-Chinese soil would give us an important voice … since I did not harbour the least doubt as to Japan's ultimate aggression, I desired that our troops should fight, no matter how desperate their situation.’ When, however, the hostilities did begin, for most Frenchmen they ended, ignominiously, with imprisonment by the Japanese while for those in the north who together with their Vietnamese riflemen fought the Japanese with exemplary heroism, dying in beleaguered garrisons or making a fighting retreat to the Chinese border, their fate precipitated the most unpleasant or at least the most unfortunate disagreement between the Allies.

By the time of the Japanese coup on 9 March 1945 the US had already become an important actor in the play that was to determine the future of Vietnam. A large part of the trouble lay in the overlapping and by no means clearly defined responsibilities for operations in Vietnam between US forces operating in support of the Chinese in the ‘China Theater’, and Southeast Asia Command: more particularly, the disagreements between the US General Wedemeyer and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. Although his attitude towards the French seemed to change somewhat before he died, Roosevelt had effectively delayed the French in their attempt to return to Indochina. Whether or not his opinions actually percolated down to subordinate commanders many of them seemed to share his beliefs about keeping the French out, or at least, in an interesting reversal of roles in the First World War, treating France as an associated rather than an allied power. Small numbers of French had been parachuted into Indochina under SEAC auspices before the Japanese coup but a much larger and perhaps more effective intervention by the French Corps Léger d'Intervention, a specialist unit of some five hundred men recruited and waiting in Algeria, was frustrated for various nominal reasons; the effective one being that the US, until the very last moment, was unalterably opposed to French units participating in the war against Japan, and especially, if this involved Vietnam.

The result, in the aftermath of the Japanese coup, was that immediate help to the French, who were now fighting the Japanese in Vietnam, was denied to them at a time when the US 14th Airforce in southern China could be seen by the French in Laos and Vietnam as they flew on their predetermined attacks on the Japanese elsewhere in Southeast Asia. It would, of course, be far fetched to compare the plight of the French fighting the Japanese in Vietnam with that of the Polish Home Army who had been destroyed fighting the Germans in Warsaw in 1944 although, in one respect at least, the failure of the proximate military power to lend assistance meant that others, who were more responsive to the plight of the Poles and the French, did what they could from a distance to help. Again, in the case of Vietnam, this was accompanied by bitter political acrimony, at least on the operational level, between the Americans on the one side, the British and French on the other, about whether or not the French fighting in Vietnam were to be regarded as allies and whether or not the French had any entitlement to resume their pre-war position in Indochina.²⁸

Although it was not appreciated at the time when the Japanese swept away the administration, the power and the remaining claims to sovereignty of the French in Indochina, the Second World War in Asia had entered its final six months. In this period, and before the events which may be described as ‘the August Revolution’, there were in retrospect, at least two others which assume a momentous character. The first was that on 11 March 1945, two days after the Japanese coup, the Emperor Bao Dai proclaimed ‘That from today the protectorate treaty with France is abrogated and that the country reassumes its rights to independence’. It was of course a somewhat limited independence with the government of Vietnam announcing its trust in the loyalty of Japan and considering itself to be part of Japanese Greater East Asia. It was also limited in the sense that the Japanese appointed a Governor of Cochinchina, a resident-superior of Tonkin and advisers to Annam, Cambodia and Laos. Nevertheless it had broken the thread by which the country had been tied to France and although it might be claimed that, as in Burma during the war or in Indonesia at the end of the war, it was a spurious independence and part of Japanese mischief making, nevertheless Vietnam was now in a formal sense independent if not exactly free.

The French, too, responded to the Japanese coup with a formal declaration of their intentions for Vietnam. To some extent perhaps they were the victims of their own official attitude to what was happening – as when the French Ambassador in London told Eden that a French civil and military resistance organization in Vietnam had the general support of the army and the civil population: whether this was the French or the Vietnamese population was apparently not specified²⁹ – but in their Declaration of 24 March 1945 the Provisional French Government implied that all the peoples of Indochina were fighting for a common cause; which was that of the entire French community. It was thus acquiring additional rights ‘to receive the place for which it is destined’ but instead of independence, there was the rather less exciting prospect of an Indochinese Federation which would ‘enjoy the liberty and the organization necessary to the development of all its resources’. Not only was France here, and on many subsequent occasions, unable to pronounce the word ‘independence’. On this occasion she did not even pronounce the name ‘Vietnam’. It would, by implication, be one of five constituent parts of the Indochinese Federation – which meant that Vietnam itself would be divided into three parts – and they, together with other parts of what were called the ‘French Community’ would form a French Union. The interests of the Indochinese Federation outside the Union would be represented by France. Inside the Federation, ‘in the interests of each the Governor-General would be arbiter of all’. (As Irving points out it was, frankly, anachronistic; more or less what Edouard Daladier had demanded after the disturbances in Indochina in 1930.)³⁰ In any case the interests of Vietnam – or, one might say, the non-interest in Vietnam – had been subsumed and constrained in France's Brazzaville Declaration of January 1944 which said, unequivocally,

Whereas the aims of the work of civilization accomplished by France in her colonies rule out all idea of autonomy and all possibility of development outside the French Empire; [therefore] the eventual constitution, even in the far off future, of self-government in the colonies is out of the question.³¹

As the most advanced part of the French colonial empire Vietnam in 1945 might, perhaps, by a sort of inductive leap, have been the first French colony to become independent. In hindsight, that is. At the time, however, in France it was practically unthinkable and one may surmise that while France itself might have recovered from the débâcle of 1940 there was added point to her recovery of Vietnam after the humiliation and tragedy of March 1945. One may also argue that the situation was increasingly beyond her control.

In Vietnam the loss of a small intelligence network to the Japanese had made it essential for operational purposes that it should be replaced and it is at this point that Ho Chi Minh and the American OSS found each other. The practical services rendered by each side to the other do not seem to have been all that large although there is still considerable speculation about the volume of weapons with which the Vietminh were supplied.³² Of equal importance, it can be argued, to the Vietminh cause was the half-dozen Colt 45s which Ho had obtained from US sources, together with a signed photograph of the US 14th Airforce Commander, General Chennault. Charles Fenn, the American OSS agent whose instructions were to disregard Franco-Vietnamese politics and re-establish an intelligence rescue network, reckons that the three months after the Japanese coup were perhaps the most significant in Ho's career.³³ Divergent political objectives notwithstanding, the obvious goodwill between Ho and the Americans, the limited but successful training teams that they provided for Vietminh guerrillas, and the obvious sympathy which many Americans – in particular, it seems the OSS – had for the cause of Vietnamese independence, not to mention corresponding doubts of the French title to Vietnam, all of these understandably encouraged the Vietminh in their political objective of the accomplished fact. As Truong Chinh is said to have told the ‘People's Congress’ in August ‘We must wrest power from the hands of the Japanese and their stooges before the arrival of the Allies in Indo-China, and, as masters of the country, we shall receive the Allies who come to disarm the Japanese.’³⁴

THE AUGUST REVOLUTION

In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, David Halberstam says that Ho realized what few others did: that it would all derive from August 1945. ‘For it was then that the Vietminh had in one quick stroke taken over the nationalism of the country, that Ho had achieved the legitimacy of power.’ The ‘nationalism of the country’ would seem to be an acceptable figure of speech but in practice it was centred on Hanoi. Twelve months earlier, when Paris had been liberated, communist members of the Resistance in France had wanted to strike before the French army and de Gaulle arrived and thus present them with an accomplished fact. Such a capture of French nationalism would probably have been impossible in Paris; but, in Hanoi, circumstances were combining to make it a reality. At least, in those extraordinary days between Hiroshima and the declaration of Vietnamese independence, hardly anyone, except the French garrison who were still imprisoned, first by the Japanese and then by the Vietminh, could be found to contradict this assumption of power and by the time it took place, or at least was claimed, another thread in the French connection had been broken. On 25 August 1945 the Emperor Bao Dai had abdicated. At the point of a gun, says one author³⁵ but not according to Bao Dai himself. ‘The people’, he said, ‘possess a very sure instinct which, in historic hours, conducts them towards those whose mission it is to guide them. The Vietminh had seemed to bring it off as if by a miracle. Was not their incontestable success the sign that they had received the mandate of heaven?’³⁶

Even before Bao Dai's abdication, his nominal government which had taken office after the Japanese coup, had resigned. Instead of government there were now centres of power; and it was to one of these, in Hanoi, that Bao Dai addressed his reply to the Vietminh. Not knowing their address, he says, he addressed it simply to ‘The Committee of Patriots’. For Ho Chi Minh, formerly ‘Nguyen the Patriot’, it was an accolade that corresponded to reality but of all the ‘objective circumstances’ which might be held to account for even a temporary communist victory in August 1945 at least the most striking and immediate was the political vacuum into which they moved. The general insurrection was proclaimed on 14 August by the Central Committee of the Vietminh. It was, they said, the moment for the people to rise up in arms and obtain independence, and even though this begged the question against whom they would use these arms, there was no doubt, as the Central Committee said, that it was a moment of exceptional opportunity.³⁷ A fortnight later they announced themselves as the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and a few days after that, on 2 September, as the climax to weeks of stupendous political demonstrations, Vietnam declared its independence. How had it been achieved? In what sense was it a reality?

Perhaps, and perhaps contentiously, it was because the general insurrection had not taken place at this time: at least not in the sense that it involved trial by battle. What had been happening was an assumption of power on the part of the Vietminh and the demonstration that a communist party could seize the opportunity to capitalize on the power of nationalism at a moment of unparalleled opportunity. Like Leclerc's forces waiting outside Paris in 1944, Giap's forces hurrying towards Hanoi in August 1945 discovered that the city was in the process of liberating itself. But the appearance of Giap's armed guerrillas marching in more or less regular military formation seemed to confirm that, already, the Resistance had won. The spectacle of tiny little Vietnamese dressed in boy scout uniforms, even though they may have been ‘Vanguard Youth’, carrying placards bigger than they were which said ‘Independence or Death’ was just another element in the enthusiasm which can equally well be described as revolutionary nationalism or national revolution. Was it, because it was orchestrated by the Communist Party, invalid? Certainly, there were examples of transparent deception: for example, when, as proof of their transcendental patriotism, the ICP dissolved itself and announced it had become the Association for Marxist Studies. It was also obvious that the Vietminh were running rings around the rather remote and ineffectual nationalist parties who had appeared, as it were, as returning emigrés in the baggage train of the occupying Chinese armies: although nominal partners in the great enterprise of securing national independence the nationalists were in reality excluded from any partnership in a coalition government. Much of the success, perhaps, was due to superb stage management, as in the organization of demonstrations, but the fact that the Vietminh emerged as leaders of Vietnamese nationalism may be attributed to their sheer ability as a revolutionary party.³⁸ Under this heading one must include a capacity for malevolent violence which, in Duiker's rather chilling and non-committal words meant that where power was seized, people's liberation committees were established and ‘class enemies were punished’.³⁹ In many places there were at least elements of spontaneity and although Duiker compares it with Trotsky's description of the Bolshevik revolution as, for the most part, being a ‘revolution by telegraph’, Khanh says that most places acted without instructions from the Central Committee. Where revolutionary committees existed much of their impetus reflected the organizing ability of the Party which, by capitalizing on the natural and man-made disasters of flood and terrible famine which may have left at least a million dead, and on Vietminh seizure and distribution of rice from guarded granaries, was able to discredit existing authority, both French and Japanese. The number of their supporters, if not activists, was enormously enhanced by the way in which the Vichy régime had mobilized the country's youth in patriotic but hitherto innocuous associations which now underpinned the revolution, perhaps even to the point where youth was as critical a factor in the Vietnamese revolution as it was, at the same time, in Indonesia.

Another factor of immense importance was the widespread availability of arms; but to understand how and why these became available one must first look, as Ho did, at the balance of international forces which had created this moment of opportunity. Here, as was done at Potsdam in July 1945, one may divide Vietnam into north and south. For Truman, Stalin, and Churchill it was an operational decision so that the Chinese armies could operate in the north and SEAC forces in the south. Hardly anyone had expected the Japanese to surrender quite so quickly and, when they did and for the moment. as far as the Allies were concerned, hardly anything happened. It was this temporal hiatus, as much as anything, which allowed the Vietminh to assume power, particularly in the north, but when the Kuomintang Chinese armies of occupation moved in, nominally to take the surrender of Japanese troops but in fact to remove almost everything of value that was portable, they existed side by side in fruitful collaboration. That is to say, although the Chinese did not recognize the new People's Republic, the Vietminh assumption of power was not challenged. It may be said, then, that it is China who again, and at this point, determined the fortunes of Vietnam. In exchange for large quantities of the only acceptable currency, gold, the Chinese armies also provided considerable quantities of their own weapons, presumably surplus to requirements, and were less than meticulous in their recovery of weapons from the Japanese armouries.

From all this, as from Potsdam and Yalta, the French were absent. To all intents and purposes, that is, because although the French garrison in Hanoi was still there it was imprisoned in the citadel and guarded, first by the Japanese, and then by the Vietminh. When, after notable delays, the first Free French representative, Jean Sainteny, arrived in Hanoi from Kunming he had apparently already been informed by his travelling companion, Major Archimedes Patti of the American OSS, that as the Postdam agreement made no mention of French sovereignty over Vietnam the French therefore had no right to intervene in affairs which were no longer their concern.⁴⁰ For the time being at least this was almost exactly how the French were regarded by the Americans in Vietnam: of little or no account and if not exactly in the ‘out’ tray at best their position was ‘pending’. In the meantime, genuine US sympathies for Vietnamese independence were much in evidence. As it claimed to be the functioning government of Vietnam it was hardly surprising that US officers, particularly OSS, maintained fairly close contact with the Vietminh and perhaps there was a genuine basis for the American—Vietnamese Friendship Association; and when the senior US officer, General Gallagher, was persuaded to sing at one of their meetings and, apparently, broadcast on Vietminh radio, this too was in itself a comparatively innocent exercise. Cumulatively, however, the aura of association with the US was of immense political benefit to those who called themselves a provisional government but who were still skating on the thin surface of political respectability and had by no means attained a state of acknowledged legitimacy. As is now widely known, when, on 2 September, Ho Chi Minh made his declaration of Vietnamese independence, his opening and acknowledged quotation was from the American original. What is less widely known is that at this moment two P-38 Lightnings, (distinctive, long-range US fighters) appeared, their star insignia clearly visible, and although it may have been coincidence even to the sophisticated in a crowd of some hundreds of thousands it must indeed have appeared that the mandate of heaven had assumed its newest form.

CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH

As Ho Chi Minh presented the case the people who had fought side by side with the Allies, as well as against the French for more than eighty years, were entitled to their independence. For the moment, in the north, it could be maintained by Chinese approval or at least complaisance and by keeping the French out. In the south, it was to be a different story and with Vietminh claims recognized neither by the British/Indian forces who arrived first nor by the French who followed not long after, and with Japanese forces for the most part under much tighter control, the reassertion of French sovereignty, at least in so far as this might be done through the possession of Saigon, did not have long to wait. General Gracey, who commanded the 20th Indian Division, has been presented as a no-nonsense sort of general. For example, he was unimpressed by Vietminh claims to be the de facto government and to have resisted the Japanese; and for a while at least he believed, mistakenly, that they were in fact Japanese puppets. He, no more than General Christison in Java, was able to operate in a political vacuum but at least the French in Saigon were treated as allies rather than as one-time enemies although, in the absence of sufficient numbers of Frenchmen, Japanese troops were required to fight Vietnamese who, as in Hanoi, were intent on the politics of a fait accompli.

Apart from taking the Japanese surrender and recovering Allied prisoners of war, General Gracey's third task was to maintain law and order; and in this he was to recognize the sole authority of the French. Unprepared for the circumstances which he would encounter he was assured by them that the Vietminh would not resist and that Cédile, the French Commissioner in the South, had tight control of his forces. Neither, unfortunately, was true. The southern Vietminh, no less than those in the north, were to resist both principle and practice of the French return to power; the French were unprepared for any alternative and Gracey's forces were effectively caught in the middle. On 17 September 1945, a fortnight after Gracey's arrival, the Vietminh attempted to paralyse Saigon by calling a general strike. On the 22nd Gracey's forces assisted the French in what, despite what was claimed at the time and subsequently, was an almost bloodless coup by which they occupied the Town Hall and other central points; and two nights after that about a hundred and fifty French civilians, including many women and children, were massacred by Vietnamese who burst into the Cité Heraud district past indifferent Japanese guards.⁴¹

Whether it was the Vietminh, the Binh Xuyen,⁴² or, most likely, Trotskyists, who were responsible, it obviously shattered any confidence that the restoration of French power could be achieved without such savage resistance.⁴³ On the British side there was a string of adverse comments on French performance and attitudes from newspaper correspondents; although the Daily Telegraph correspondent was not being particularly sensational when he reported on the unnecessary brutality of the French and concluded ‘The solution of the problem of rule in Indo-China will depend primarily upon French ability to exercise tact and conciliation’.⁴⁴ Much more remarkable, however, were Gracey's comments when it became obvious that his earlier hopes – ‘If only the French would promise progressive sovereignty … say two or three years and the Annamites would be equally ready to meet them …’ (an almost exact parallel, so he thought, with Burma) – stood little chance of fulfilment. General Leclerc's troops had shown great skill and speed, Gracey said, but much unnecessary brutality. A Divisional Intelligence Summary described the senior French officer as ‘small-minded, lacking in imagination and pig-headed’ and, more important, said that the Indian other ranks had begun to distrust both the French troops and the civil authorities.⁴⁵

In the preface to another intelligence report, the SEAC Assistant Director of Intelligence addressed himself squarely to some of the political problems which were being faced. For example, that it was hard to explain to the Vietnamese how large numbers of Vichy French were back in positions held during the war. Although he was convinced that there was conclusive evidence that Japanese intelligence organizations were behind the Vietminh and their revolt, he also said that throughout their handling of the situation the French appeared to lack every vestige of imagination but, ‘provided the French are prepared to deal with the Annamites as human beings and not as chattels for exploitation as in the past, there is every reason to believe that the leading Annamites will not only listen to them, but will help them …’⁴⁶

When the French and the Vietminh came face to face in the south there was, apparently, no room for compromise and conflict was almost immediate. On the rare occasions when French and Vietminh met and when local concessions might have helped at least to improve the atmosphere – for example the release of hostages taken by Vietminh – the Vietminh for their part denied all knowledge that any had been taken while violent incidents were either attributed to the forces outwith their control, which may well have been true, or else to the anger of the people which, again, may have been true but did not improve matters. Behind this, and the Vietminh demands for the complete restoration of their government and the disarming of French forces there was, as Dunn puts it, the insoluble problem: ‘The Vietminh wanted full sovereignty and the French delegates could not negotiate it.’ Furthermore, ‘Both sides were stuck – neither was empowered to negotiate without instructions’.⁴⁷ In the meantime fighting continued both in and around Saigon and, increasingly, as more and more French troops arrived, throughout Cochinchina. Gracey's British Indian forces eventually totalled over twenty thousand men; and by December 1945 the French had about the same number in Vietnam. Much of the fighting, however, involved the Japanese forces who were acting under Gracey's command but there were significant numbers, too, fighting for whatever reasons on the Vietminh side. Apart from armoured columns the French navy had joined in as well and on at least one occasion the battleship Richelieu was in action against land targets.

Whether it would have been possible against this background of practically continuous fighting in the south, more than a year before the first Vietnam war between France and the Vietminh is usually reckoned to have begun, for either side to have modified its objectives to the point where compromise could have been reached is obviously a question which is relevant to the origins of the Vietnam war and one must therefore look for the characteristics which, at least after the event, suggest a remarkably high risk of collision.

On the French side one may begin in Paris with the emotional response of the Consultative Assembly to the cable which de Gaulle read out on March 20 1945 from one of the French garrisons fighting for their lives in Tonkin. As the Assembly rose to its feet ‘amid shouts and tears’ few of them would have realized that it was sixty years almost to the day since the Assembly of the Third Republic had responded in much the same way to the Tonkin crisis of 1885. Then, it had produced the tide of feeling which landed France in Vietnam. Now, it was responding to what de Gaulle had called the solemn pact which was at the moment being sealed ‘in the suffering of all and the blood of the soldiers’ between France and the peoples of the Indochinese Union and to his belief that ‘not for a single hour did France lose the hope and the will to recover free Indo-China’.⁴⁸

FREEDOM AND THE FRENCH UNION

Of equal importance, perhaps, was the assumption that France would, as a matter of course, recover Indochina and, although it might be described as ‘free’, the status of Indochina or Vietnam or, as it happened, part of Vietnam, would, as the French saw it, be determined by its membership of the French Union. This was a concept that was formally introduced in the declaration of the Provisional French Government of 24 March 1945. And it was to be within that Union that ‘Indo-China will enjoy appropriate liberty’. A year later the issue of ‘appropriate liberty’ and indeed the nature of the French Union itself was still unresolved but by this time a Preliminary Convention had been signed between the Government of the French Republic and what was described, and recognized, as the Government of Vietnam. The Republic of Vietnam was accepted as a free state having its own government, parliament, army and finances. At the same time, it was recognized as ‘forming part of the Indo-Chinese Federation and the French Union’. As far as either side was concerned, were the two concepts of freedom and membership of the French Union compatible? And, most important of all, by freedom did one mean independence? If not, conceptually, was there any prospect of real agreement?

Almost everything about the French mood in 1945 suggests that unqualified independence was just about the last thing that anyone envisaged for any part of the French colonial empire. The pattern may look more obvious after the event, but it is worth pointing out that the French war in Vietnam in 1946 is sandwiched between their bombardment of Damascus and the eruption at Sétif in Algeria in 1945 and their violent repression of the nationalist revolt in Madagascar in 1947 after similar claims had been made for independence within the French Union. At the same time as they were re-establishing themselves in Vietnam the French were finally being evicted, as they saw it, from Syria and the Lebanon and while these were League of Nations mandates rather than parts of the French Empire proper, their loss was no less bitterly resented. An attempt was made, at least by de Gaulle, to link riots in Syria in May 1945 with what happened in Algeria on VE Day; but the scale of the French reaction in Algeria to the murder of over a hundred European settlers and associated atrocities left at least a thousand and perhaps as many as six thousand Algerian dead.⁴⁹ Although Algeria would later prove to be the scene of last-ditch French resistance to decolonization, in the mood of the country in 1945 independence for Vietnam was equally inconceivable. It seemed, as much as anything, to be a matter of principle. Not only was France a republic, one and indivisible, but so was the French ‘community’ which comprised France and its colonies. In any event, and no matter what reforms were contemplated, the issue that was posed by Marius Moutet, pre-war Minister for the Colonies in the Popular Front and shortly to become Minister for Overseas France, was whether or not France really considered herself to be a nation of 100 m. and whether or not she was to be a great power. Others, like Bidault or de Gaulle, had no doubt: but for this even to be approximately true the contribution of her overseas territories was indispensable.⁵⁰ De Gaulle, at Brazzaville in 1944, may have believed that France, of all the imperial powers, would choose nobly and liberally in a new era; on a more mundane level and on the same occasion it was also agreed that ‘access to the riches of all that bears the French name is the most certain measure of our country's return to grandeur’.⁵¹

It would seem from the record, therefore, that France was not prepared to dismantle her colonial empire. That is to say no French government and probably no French political party at this time was willing to concede the principle of secession; and the permanent loss of Indochina would obviously have made it harder to hold on to French North Africa and even to Black Africa. In Vietnam, however, after the war had ended, half of the problem was how to regain half of the country that was still under Chinese occupation and here one might argue, cynically, that the French Union was indispensable. And even if it was not it allowed both sides an extra nine months in which to strengthen their positions.

AGREEMENT OR DISAGREEMENT?

The agreement of 6 March 1946 reached between Jean Sainteny and Ho Chi Minh in effect postponed the basic disagreement between France and the Vietminh. The situation that produced it was comparable to that which was to lead to a similar agreement between the returning Dutch and those who had proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia: in both cases neither side was prepared, there and then, for all-out war when the last British forces left Indonesia or when the Chinese armies in Tonkin were finally persuaded to leave. In Indonesia a large part of the argument which led on two occasions to undeclared war turned on the federal nature of the new state. In Vietnam, it was the same argument, and with many of the same features, that underlay the nature of the French Union.

In so far as the French Union was a federation which would group Indochina, Black Africa, and North Africa it was, as Raymond Aron pointed out, a grandiose objective⁵² but at least in the original proposals of the drafting committee which included a former governor general of Indochina, Alexandre Varenne, it was to be a union based on free consent. To that extent it might in principle have been acceptable to the Vietminh government: but probably only to the point where, in practice, it was powerless to circumscribe the sovereignty of the Democratic Republic. In a memorable analogy the black African nationalist (and socialist) leader Leopold Senghor had said that the French Union must not be built like a cage that no one would care to enter; but in the Ho-Sainteny agreement the Vietminh were in effect being asked to take up the tenancy of a building that had not yet been constructed. Perhaps with a generous spirit on both sides some sort of accommodation might have been reached but before the possible constraints of the French Union became important there were more ominous developments, first in Vietnam, then in Paris, which would make a full-scale confrontation more likely.

The Ho-Sainteny agreement, momentous in that it allowed a temporary re-occupation of Tonkin by French forces, was nevertheless reckoned to be a preliminary. When the two sides met again at the hill station of Dalat in April 1946 it was obvious that the immediate disagreement was on the nature of the Indochina Federation and whether or not the Government of Vietnam, which the French had already recognized, was anything more than the Republic of Tonkin. Both sides had agreed that the unification of the three parts of Vietnam would be subject to a referendum. It was now becoming increasingly clear that the French were determined at least to hold on to the richest party, namely Cochinchina: or at least this was the unmistakable objective of the new French High Commissioner, the implacable Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu. As much if not more Gaulliste than de Gaulle, d'Argenlieu, a regular naval officer, was also the former prior of a Carmelite monastery. Practically unstoppable in pursuit of his ideas about France's place in Indochina, he was also, apparently uncontrollable, at least by the government in Paris. Although his actions were widely condemned at the time and subsequently, it is a more open question whether his objectives were so much at odds with those of his government.

When they returned to Cochinchina the French began by treating it as a restored colony and with Cédile, the French Commissioner in the South, and Moutet in Paris both anticipating, or frustrating, the results of the promised referendum there were increasing prospects that it would be retained for French economic interests in the form of a nominally autonomous government. The creation of such a ‘free state’ of the same order as the one which the French already recognized in Hanoi was bound to reflect on French good faith and again to call the unity of Vietnam into question. When the negotiations began at Dalat it was Giap who assumed the principal role on the Vietnamese side and while, as communists, they might have accepted a smaller but communist state that could conceivably have been free of the French, it was as nationalists that the Vietminh argued their case for indissoluble national unity. To lose Cochinchina, they said, would be like France losing Alsace-Lorraine; and with the French stepping up their efforts to create the impression of autonomy in Cochinchina the conference ended in total disagreement. In Cochinchina, as in Tonkin, French, Vietminh, and nationalist forces were in close proximity and as long as Vietnam's political future was in doubt clashes were almost inevitable. The Vietminh argued that the French in Cochinchina had never observed either the spirit or the letter of the Ho-Sainteny agreement. The French replied that the devastation and terrorism that continued was not all the fault of ‘dissident’ nationalist Vietnamese or bandits and although it might not have the status of an ‘official’ armed struggle the results were indistinguishable. And it was to restore order, as much as anything, that a nominally Vietnamese administration provided at least the façade of an ‘independent’ Vietnamese government.

Admiral d'Argenlieu, who regarded the Ho-Sainteny agreement as the equivalent of Munich, was temperamentally opposed to negotiation and was obviously ready if not anxious to put differences with the Vietminh to the test of battle. General Leclerc, as a soldier, was not, at least not to begin with, and believed not only that the reconquest of Tonkin, even in part, was impossible but that a negotiated settlement was essential even if it conceded independence.⁵³ For the moment, however, there was still an outside chance that when the nationalist and communist members of what was described as a good-will parliamentary mission from Hanoi – and Ho as President – arrived in the more liberal and relaxed atmosphere of Paris an understanding might have been reached. But by the time the delegation set out for Paris, the French Draft Constitution had already been rejected – and with it the principle of free consent on which the French Union was to be based – and while he was still en route to France Ho learned that a Provisional Government of Cochinchina had been announced.⁵⁴ By the time negotiations finally got under way at Fontainebleau, elections for the new Constituent Assembly in France had resulted in a victory for the Catholic MRP, with the Communists in second place, and heavy losses for the French Socialist Party. Neither d'Argenlieu nor Ho led their respective sides at Fontainebleau but an agreement seemed no more likely between their substitutes: Max André, with his interests in the Banque de l'Indo-Chine, and Pham Van Dong.

One, the friend of the new French Prime Minister, Georges Bidault, had apparently been told that he could not concede the fundamental issue of independence⁵⁵; for the other, who was to succeed Ho on his death, and for the large and varied delegation which came to Paris under the title of the Popular National Front (Lien Viet) everything, practically, turned on the question of Cochinchina. In what might conceivably have been the last chance of a diplomatic settlement, with the encouraging or surreal touches of a personally popular Ho walking up the Champs Elysées to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and standing beside Bidault on the Fourteenth of July, these were the fundamental issues. Perhaps, as Ho said later, all that was needed was for the French to pronounce one word: independence; but on both sides this was the most fraught and emotional issue. It was unlikely to be conceded by Bidault and the MRP; Thorez and the Communists were not particularly interested; and the only Socialist member of the French team at Fontainebleau resigned after two hours.⁵⁶

As at Dalat in April, the Fontainebleau conference failed entirely on substantive issues. Bidault, it has been said, leader of the Resistance in occupied France, may have been unaware how the world outside had changed during the war; but in any event distrusted Ho as a communist as well as a nationalist threat to France's post-war international position. Pham Van Dong in Paris, as well as Giap in Hanoi, had a comparable distrust of French intentions and, since elections of a kind had been held in January 1946,⁵⁷ the Vietminh had been busy consolidating communist power at the centre of a nationalist movement which, in its external aspect, impressed many observers with its moderation. Internally, it was a different matter where ultra-nationalist rivals and critics of even temporary accommodation with the French, as well as those who were suspected of favouring them, were being liquidated in purges which were probably as bloody as most in Eastern Europe and on some occasions it seems the former were killed as a result of Franco-Vietminh collaboration.⁵⁸ In most other respects, however, joint efforts, such as they were, to keep the peace, let alone to share the responsibilities of government, were coming to an end. In Tonkin as well as in Cochinchina both sides at best ignored the other as well as the general terms of their March agreement. Thus, and apparently removing all doubt about French intentions to dismember Vietnam, when d'Argenlieu convened another conference at Dalat on 1 August 1946 to discuss Indochinese problems, there were representatives of Laos, Cambodia, and Cochinchina as well as the dubious entities of ‘Southern Annam’ and the montagnards of the Southern Plateau – but no Vietminh.⁵⁹ This was to provide the occasion on the Vietnamese side for terminating the Fontainebleau exercise. After their return to Vietnam a Constitution was approved for the Democratic Republic which completely ignored the Indochina Federation and all mention of the French Union – but which affirmed that ‘The territory of Vietnam … is one and indivisible’.

Years later, when Sainteny returned to Hanoi, Le Duan recalled these words, which he attributed to Ho Chi Minh, and which may stand as his memorial inscription: ‘The Vietnamese nation is one and indivisible.’ As much as anything it represents the conviction which took the communist leadership of a proto-state into and through two cataclysmic conflicts with a tenacity and disregard of human life that has characterized religious, revolutionary and patriotic wars. It was opposed, on the French side, by virtually the same principle which, for all the emotional resurgence of Jacobin principles that may have suffused France at the end of the war, had faded by comparison with the raw and remorseless nationalism that was waiting to engulf the French from one end of Vietnam to the other. Given these irreconcilable purposes it is Pham Van Dong and Giap, to take two symbols of Vietnamese intransigence, rather than Ho Chi Minh, who represented the reality of Franco-Vietnamese relations in the four or five months before the all-out war began in December 1946; even though it is tempting to consider how, up to the last minute, conflict might have been averted – or at least postponed.

Although the Fontainebleau conference failed and the Vietnamese delegation went home, Ho stayed on to conclude, on 14 September 1946, what Sainteny has called ‘that pathetic modus vivendi’ which gave France economic concessions and the promise of maintaining cultural connections in return for her co-operation in securing an armistice in the South. Again, it left the basic issues of independence and Cochinchina unresolved but perhaps, as Ho had said, it was better than nothing. For the moment it may have smoothed or at least covered the jagged edges between the two sides. Although it may have also been one of the last, desperate attempts to keep the road open to a negotiated settlement, Ho was being accused by the French, who compared the diplomatic assurances in Paris with continuing violence in Vietnam, of duplicity; and, ominously, by the intransigents in Hanoi, of treachery. Perhaps it was just procrastination. He may have believed, and was encouraged to think, that the Communist Party would win the coming election in France and form, or at least be made part of, a new government; and the Russian advice seems to have been to hold on and to wait for ‘democratic France’ and its ‘progressive forces’ to support the cause of colonial liberation.⁶⁰

Alternatively, Ho may simply have been waiting for something to turn up, something that would tip the scales one way or the other in the situation that was neither peace nor war. It was also, one must remember, a situation of continuing revolution which had no more ended in August 1945 than the French revolution had in July 1789. Although compressed into less than 18 months there are certain similarities between the two revolutions, in their tactics as well as their phases, and although it is not explicit there is a remarkable comparison that may be inferred from Devillers' brilliant essay in which he describes a Vietminh, at the end of 1946, already losing momentum and because of that, driven to imprudent acts:

The Vietminh had subjected the people to an extremely painful strain, practically a permanent mobilization, with its unending meetings, mass demonstrations, and the like, with its requisitions, with its control of thoughts and acts, with its atmosphere of suspicion and its informers, with the arrogance – and often the arbitrariness – of its officials, with its youth corps (the Tu Ve), and with the arrests, the abductions or assassination of its opponents and even of those considered lukewarm or suspect. If the Vietminh still seemed to be the only movement capable of achieving the fulfilment of the people's aspiration to national independence and to social justice, it nevertheless ruled with the aid of physical terror and moral constraint. As under the old régime, the political police, now called Trinh Sat or Cong An, was the main buttress of the régime.⁶¹

FLASHPOINTS

Whether or not it was ‘in their haste, their unwillingness to temporise, that the Vietminh leaders, with their fathomless vanity, had driven their country straight into conflict with France’ – the reproach of Vietnamese intellectuals and non-marxist nationalists – it was a rather academic if not drawing-room argument that the Vietminh could easily have brought about national unanimity and created a national state rather than revolution and the party state. The Vietminh, like the original French Commune, were embedded in the events of a more or less national revolution, turning it in particular directions but by no means in complete control. The enragés and the Girondins had their counterparts in Vietnam and in some respects, for example asceticism and a belief in virtue, whether Confucian or revolutionary, one might even compare Ho with Robespierre. More important one should realize that attempts at accommodation between the two new Republics, French and Vietnamese, were taking place not between two sovereign states but between two political forces in the same country, each in the throes of revolution, each unwilling to concede sovereignty to the other. As both manoeuvred for position, whether it was cutting down trees and digging up streets in Hanoi or sending ‘unauthorized’ French battalions to various strategic points, the risk – and incidence – of clashes increased and both sides were at least preparing for war. Before he left Fontainebleau Ho had given instructions to be ready for any eventuality. A few weeks earlier, on 10 April 1946, a circular from General Valluy, at that time d'Argenlieu's deputy in Saigon, had raised the question of a purely military operation ‘in the scenario of a coup d'état’; and for both sides there seemed to be obvious advantages in striking first.

The attempt by Frenchmen to seize a Chinese junk carrying what was considered to be a cargo of contraband fuel, and their ensuing capture by Vietminh militia, was an unlikely incident to trigger a war and falls, no doubt, into Aristotle's category of trivial occasions. The incident, trivial in itself, of 20 November 1946, culminated three days later in a terrible bombardment of Haiphong which was a prelude to pitched battles in Tonkin between the Vietminh forces and the French; and although the usually quoted figure of 6,000 Vietnamese dead in Haiphong may be too high, the ease with which casualties of this order could be inflicted, with a French cruiser joining in at close range, suggested misleadingly that when French forces were fully engaged it would be such a one-sided contest that the Vietminh would learn the appropriate lesson.⁶² Such, indeed, seems on the French side, to have been the object of the exercise. When d'Argenlieu dispatched himself hastily to Paris a few days after the French elections and before the Haiphong incident, it was to lobby intensively for a policy of firmness; and his tactic, says Devillers, was simple: to create fear.⁶³ Not only was this the only way, according to d'Argenlieu, to stop a Vietminh that was determined to oust the French but, in effect, it would be the only way to hold the French Union together. When the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Indochina met on 23 November 1946 and heard d'Argenlieu's report it resulted in what Devillers affirms was obviously the government's decision to face up to every infringement of the Franco—Vietminh agreement, if necessary by force. And these infringements, needless to say, could only come from the Vietminh.

Whether or not Bidault actually insisted ‘Il faut tirer le canon’,⁶⁴ d'Argenlieu cabled his commander in Saigon, General Valluy, to this effect and, by-passing General Morlière in Hanoi, orders were sent direct to the ‘irascible’ Colonel Dèbes in Haiphong. Thus, after two days in which a negotiated settlement to the original squabble seemed possible, an ultimatum to the Vietminh to clear out of Haiphong in two hours led to a bombardment which must have killed at least 1,000 people, many if not most of whom would be described as innocent civilians. As a result, the Vietminh undoubtedly came, as General Valluy intended, to a better appreciation of the situation. There were fragments of evidence, however, to suggest that the final collision might have been avoided. In the last interview he gave to a French journalist before the war began, Ho, in envisaging the way in which ‘at all costs war must be averted’, seemed to accept independence within the French Union; although unless this was based on a total misunderstanding of the nature of the French Union, which also seems unlikely, this was probably more of a smoke-screen than a smoke-signal.⁶⁵ On the French side although the Communists failed to form a government and were thus not in a position to change French policy towards Vietnam – whether they would have wanted to do so is not quite so clear – the impasse between them and the MRP had resulted in a caretaker government under the veteran Socialist party leader, Léon Blum; and Blum, calling for an end to equivocation and an absolutely clear definition of policy, had urged not only confidence and friendship but ‘sincere agreement’ on the basis of Vietnamese independence.⁶⁶ Ho responded immediately to this newspaper article by proposing various measures which might lead to a return to normality and to the hopeful provisions of the modus vivendi, not least an end to the press and radio incitements from both sides, ⁶⁷ but whether at this stage Ho and Blum were in the saddle or not, things were beginning to fall apart. For one thing it seems that Ho's reply, via Saigon, was held up deliberately by the French authorities so that it was not received in Paris until after the war had begun. For another, the ‘war party’ may already have taken over within the Vietminh: at least when Sainteny, attempting his last act of mediation, saw Ho for the last time before the war started, he complained about the moderate elements who had been eliminated from the government to the benefit of the notorious Francophobes; and as the war was on the point of beginning, and as attacks on French soldiers and civilians had not ceased, nor had French retaliation, Sainteny's exasperation was to be seen in his demand that culprits should be punished within 24 hours.

This was hardly a crucial ultimatum but, coming from a moderate, indeed sympathetic Frenchman, it suggests that the French, generally, were beyond the point of no return; while for the Vietminh, with assorted military forces estimated at 60,000, having already lost Haiphong as the point of entry for many of their weapons and in danger now of facing overwhelming French fire power in Hanoi, the temptations of a pre-emptive strike, even if it was an act of desperation, must have been irresistible. With d'Argenlieu returned to Saigon but no more amenable to close control from Paris than Paris seemed disposed to provide it, with the French forces understandably nervous and anxious at least to clear Hanoi of their opponents, one may feel that whether it was the French or the Vietminh who brought about the final rupture does not much matter.⁶⁸ In the event, and after at least a hint of treachery, shortly after eight o'clock on the night of 19 December 1946 the Vietminh blew up the power station in Hanoi and signalled the formal beginning of the Vietnam war.⁶⁹

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Virginia Thompson, French Indochina (London 1937), p. 249.

2. Dennis J. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam (London 1968), p. 99.

3. Lancaster, The Emancipation of French Indo-China (London 1961), pp. 65–6.

4. Duncanson, op. cit. p. 109.

5. William J. Duiker, ‘Hanoi Scrutinizes the Past: The Marxist Evaluation of Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh’, Southeast Asia, Summer 1971, Vol. 1 Part 3.

6. For the development of Soviet policy see Charles B. McLane, Soviet Strategies in South-East Asia (Princeton 1966).

7. The significant part of the text is given in Hélène Carrére d'Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia (London 1969).

8. Jean Lacouture, Cinq Hommes Et La France (Paris 1961), p. 12.

9. d'Encausse and Schram, op. cit. pp. 199–200.

10. William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder 1981), p. 18.

11. I. Milton Sacks, ‘Marxism in Vietnam’ in Frank N. Traeger (ed.) Marxism in South-East Asia (Stanford 1959).

12. Sacks, op. cit.

13. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale 1976).

14. Duiker, op. cit. p. 43.

15. July 1 1934. Sacks, op. cit. p. 136.

16. McLane, op. cit. p. 217.

17. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (MIT 1968), p. 24. Pike says that, according to reliable sources, the day war began someone delivered to Sûreté headquarters in Saigon the full Fourth International Party membership roster, listing names, aliases, addresses, and locations of every Trotskyist in the country. Within hours French police had rounded up virtually all leaders and dispatched them to the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Madagascar, and other French colonies remote from Indochina. Years later, according to Pike, many Vietnamese historians and political scientists in Saigon asserted that only the ICP had the resources and the capability to accomplish such a feat of tactical intelligence. Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1976 (Stanford 1978), p. 37.

18. Duiker, op. cit. p. 68.

19. Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism 1925–1976 p. 47.

20. Bernard Fall, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution (New York 1967), p. 132, 134.

21. As Christine White suggests in her introduction to Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap The Peasant Question (1937–1938), Cornell Data Paper no. 94, Ithaca January 1974.

22. Op. cit. p. 22.

23. Edward R. Drachman, United States Policy Towards Vietnam, 1940–1945 (New Jersey 1970), p. 33.

24. British readers will scarcely need to be reminded that the Japanese torpedo bombers which sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had taken off from French airfields in Vietnam.

25. Christopher Thome, Allies of a Kind (London 1979), p. 468. Churchill concluded his note to Eden by asking him if he really wanted to go and stir all this up at such a time as this, i.e. (as Thorne notes) on the eve of D-day. Roosevelt, too, is on record as telling a number of diplomatic representatives, Russian, Chinese and British included, that he ‘had been working hard to prevent Indo-China being restored to France who, during the past hundred years, had done nothing for the Indo-Chinese people under their care’ and advocating a UN trusteeship to prepare the territory for independence. Thorne, op. cit. p. 463.

26. Duiker, op. cit. p. 79.

27. According to Duiker the first unit was formed on 22 December 1944 and consisted of 34 men. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, it is supposed to have attacked and destroyed two French camps and captured a number of weapons. Duiker says that the unit then moved north ‘to consolidate the border area’ although this was obviously a large task for such a small force.

28. The controversy has continued for the last thirty years. After the war was over the US 14th Airforce Commander, General Chennault wrote that ‘… orders arrived from Theater Headquarters stating that no arms and ammunition would be provided to French troops under any circumstances.’ Wedemeyer's orders not to aid the French says Chennault, came directly from the War Department. ‘Apparently it was American policy then that French Indo-China would not be returned to the French.’ Quoted in Bernard Fall The Two Vietnams (London 1963). Peter M. Dunn, in the course of compiling his book The First Vietnam War (London 1985) succeeded, where Fall had failed, in interviewing General Wedemeyer. Among his conclusions was that much of the disagreement between Wedemeyer and Mountbatten originated with Chiang Kai-Shek who ‘told Mountbatten one thing and Wedemeyer the opposite’. It is hard to accept the proposition of Ronald H. Spector in his volume on the US Army in Vietnam Advice and Support: The Early Years (Washington 1983) that ‘The view that the United States deliberately limited and delayed its help to the French during the Japanese takeover is thus incorrect’ (p. 34) and the source of the delay and limitations to American assistance to the French in Vietnam was to be found in attitudes that went all the way up to, and policy directives that came down from, the highest levels of American Government. For months Roosevelt refused to discuss the matter with anyone except Churchill. Churchill was noticeably reticent to raise the issue himself until the Japanese coup precipitated operational decisions; and at the time that French forces were fighting their way out of Vietnam Roosevelt is on record that he had not changed his ideas: that French Indo-China and New Caledonia should be taken from France and be put under trusteeship. ‘The President hesitated a moment and then said – Well, if we can get the proper pledge from France to assume for herself the obligations of a trustee, then I would agree to France retaining these colonies with a proviso that independence was the ultimate goal. I asked the President if he would settle for self-government. He said no. I asked him if he would settle for dominion status. He said no – it must be independence. He said that is to be the policy and you can quote me in the State Department’. This excerpt from Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945 (FRUS) Vol. 1 p. 124 is contained in Allan W. Cameron, Vietnam Crisis (London 1971), p. 33. Equally revealing, in the same volume is Roosevelt's conversation with Stalin at Tehran in November 1943: ‘He felt that many years of honest labour were necessary before France would be re-established. He said the first necessity for the French, not only for the government but the people as well, was to become honest citizens.’ Cameron, op. cit. p. 10. For another account of the generally unsuccessful efforts of Force 136 in Indo-China, secret French missions, and some less than transparent honesty between allies see Charles Cruickshank, SOE in the Far-East (Oxford 1983), part 2 ch. 4. It is, incidentally, in the latter aspect of clandestine operations that Dunn makes the sensational claim that on the night of 22 January 1945 two British four-engined ‘Liberators’ (American B 24s) flying to Tonkin were destroyed by American night fighters based in China, a loss which Dunn describes as a logical outcome of the Mountbatten-Wedemeyer dispute over activity in Indo-China. This would certainly have been possible – Dunn suggests that for a period at least the American P 61 night fighters destroyed more Allied than Japanese planes – and while the original information came from the British military representative in Chungking, and the results of a subsequent investigation were apparently not released or cannot be found in the Public Record Office, it is also possible and more likely that the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed in Burma on its return flight. Dunn op. cit. pp. 87–8. Also author's correspondence with Ministry of Defence, Air Historical Branch, London; and Wing Commander Peter Farr. An authentic, evocative account of RAF support for clandestine operations in Southeast Asia has now been published by Terence O'Brien The Moonlight War (London 1987). See in particular pp. 106–8.

29. FO 371 F63/11/6 Eden to Duff Cooper, 12 March 1945 Public Record Office, London.

30. R.E.M. Irving, The First Indo-China War (London 1975), p. 4.

31. Ibid.

32. David Halberstam claims that there is considerable evidence that five thousand weapons were air-dropped to the Vietminh in the summer of 1945 by the Allies. Presumably this was mostly if not entirely by the United States. David Halberstam Ho (New York 1971), Ch. 4.

33. Charles Fenn, Ho Chi Minh (London 1973), p. 82.

34. Cited in Cameron op. cit. p. 27. See, also, Duncanson ‘Ho Chi Minh And The August Revolution Of 1945 In Indochina’ in The Lugano Review, May 1975.

35. Brian Crozier, De Gaulle: The Warrior (London 1973), p. 364.

36. Bao Dai, Le Dragon D'Annam (Paris 1980), p. 119.

37. Rima Rathausky (ed.), Documents of the August 1945 Revolution in Vietnam (Canberra 1963), p.53.

38. In an article ‘The Vietnamese August Revolution Reinterpreted’ Huynh Kim Khanh says that the ICP skills in revolutionary analysis, organization, propaganda, and leadership were undoubtedly superior to all save none, of Vietnamese political parties. The Japanese coup was equally important but by destroying French colonialism it merely provided the Vietnamese revolution with an opportunity, a chance for success. The rest was up to the Vietnamese revolutionaries themselves. Journal of Asian Studies Vol. xxx no. 4, August 1971.

39. Duiker, op. cit. p. 91.

40. Quoted in Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams, (London 1963), p. 68. Patti's account is to be found in Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Vietnam? (Berkeley 1980).

41. Starting with the a priori assumption that the French should not have returned to Vietnam, Harold Isaacs, an American journalist in Saigon at the time, suggests that numbers of Vietnamese were killed in the September coup. This is denied by Dunn who provides a credible account of what was happening during the British occupation. Harold Isaacs, No Peace for Asia (Cambridge, Mass. 1967) and Dunn, op. cit. The most recent and most reliable account, which has the added advantage of comparison with what was happening in Indonesia, is to be found in Peter Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace (Manchester 1987).

42. For years one of the armed factions of Vietnamese political life who paraded proudly under a voluminous banner which said ‘Binh Xuyen Pirates’. See Lancaster, op. cit. p. 137.

43. Lancaster notes that, as part of the general turbulence in Vietnam at this time, another of the armed religious sects, the Hoa Hoa, some fifteen thousand or so, had attempted to set up their own ‘kingdom’ early in September but had been repulsed by the Vietminh and the Japanese. On the deadly rivalry between the Vietminh and the Trotskyists, Lancaster says that the Vietminh leader in the South, Tran Van Giau, was responsible for the mass arrests and executions of the Trotskyist leaders, ibid.

44. Dunn, op. cit. p. 196.

45. Ibid. p. 286, 293, 309.

46. Ibid. p. 263.

47. Ibid. p. 251.

48. D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven 1973), p. 135.

49. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (London 1977), Ch. 1.

50. See Marshall, op cit. Chs. 5, 6 and 7. Also Clark W. Garrett ‘In Search of Grandeur: France in Vietnam 1940–1946’, The Review of Politics Vol. 29 no. 3 July 1967.

51. Marshall, op. cit. pp. 103, 110.

52. Garrett, op. cit. p. 317.

53. Irving, who had access to the papers of Jean Letourneau, the MRP Minister of Overseas France, quotes from the Leclerc report of 30 April 1946, op. cit. p. 19.

54. Philippe Devillers Histoire Du Viêt-Nam (Paris 1952), gives one of his chapters the title ‘La chevauchée cochinchinoise’. Rather than a cavalcade, however, the Provisional Government may be seen as a charade with very little power and doubtful popular support. See also Hammer, op. cit. and Lancaster, op. cit.

55. According to André's interview with Irving, op. cit. p. 27.

56. Hammer, op. cit. p. 167.

57. Duiker says, without comment, that 97 per cent of the electorate voted, op. cit. p. 117. This would have been a spectacularly high figure even allowing for the excitement of Vietnam's first general election. Hammer, op. cit. says: ‘It was, in fact, impossible to talk of real fairness and accuracy in a country-wide election held in conditions of quasi-war and among people who had no knowledge of the techniques of democracy.’ p. 143. Devillers gives a qualified answer to the question ‘Can one speak of free elections?’: ‘Yes and no.’ Be that as it may, he says, from now on the Vietminh had their democratic façade, op. cit. p. 201. Lancaster, op. cit. concludes that in spite of many irregularities the results ‘were probably fairly indicative of the state of public opinion at that time’, p. 127.

58. ‘Even before the armed conflict blanketed the entire country, the Communists felt perfectly justified in equating opposition to the Vietminh with anti-state activity. Though the communists introduced radical democratic reforms, they had no compunction about imprisoning or even murdering those who tried to use these reforms to oppose them.’ Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Political History (New York 1968), p. 258.

59. The Dutch, by coincidence, had just convened a similar meeting at Malino to contain and dilute the strength of the Indonesian Republic within a federal structure. But, having chosen the delegates, the Dutch were apparently surprised by their demands for genuine independence.

60. ‘Until the outcome of the Communist struggle for power in France was known, a clear-cut policy in Indo-China was blocked. No Communist, respecting Stalin's interest in a Communist France, could urge the revolutionary course which the situation in Vietnam appeared to warrant.’ McLane, op. cit. p. 271.

61. Devillers, ‘Vietnamese Nationalism and French Policies’ in William L. Holland (ed.) Asian Nationalism and the West (London 1953).

62. By contrast, when British and Republican forces had fought a comparable pitched battle in the Indonesian port of Surabaya a year earlier – a battle which may also have had essentially accidental origins – the violence of the encounter left no doubt, at least for the British, about the strength of Indonesian nationalism.

63. Devillers, Histoire Du Viêt-Nam pp. 340–1.

64. As Communist former Minister Charles Tillon told the National Assembly in 1949. Quoted by Irving, op. cit. p. 29.

65. Devillers, op. cit. pp. 347–8.

66. Ibid. pp. 342–3.

67. Ibid.

68. Irving, op.cit. p.29.

69. The events that led up to the outbreak of war on 19 December are dealt with in two brilliant and fascinating pieces of historical reconstruction by the Norwegian historian, Stein Tønnesson: The Outbreak of War in Indochina 1946, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo 1982, and 1946: Déclenchement de la guerre d'Indochine, Les vêpres tonkinoises du 19 Décembre (Paris 1987).