CHAPTER 7
THE SECOND OF September 1945 was a hot, muggy day in Saigon. Starting in the morning, a well-known southern radical, Tran Van Giau, tried his best to preside over a massive demonstration of 200,000 people to celebrate Vietnam’s independence declaration. The participants included men and women, young and old, rich and poor, workers and civil servants. Starting on the outskirts of town, they all converged on Norodom Square in downtown Saigon. The highlight of the day was scheduled for the afternoon when loudspeakers would broadcast live Ho Chi Minh’s address to the nation which would announce the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and its declaration of independence.
The organizers had also learned earlier that day that the first Allied teams were about to arrive to accept the Japanese surrender. Men and women immediately plastered the town square with banners and posters reading in English, Chinese, and Russian: ‘Down with Fascism and Colonialism’, ‘Vietnam Has Suffered and Bled under the French Yoke’, ‘Long live the USSR and the USA’, and ‘Long Live Vietnamese Independence’. British, Chinese, American, Russian flags, and the DRV’s red one with a yellow star in the middle hung from administrative buildings. The French tricolor was conspicuously absent. The French were not among the Allied powers authorized to accept the Japanese defeat.
Powerful emotions mixing nationalist invincibility and colonial insecurity were swirling all over Saigon that day. Dozens of French families watched with fear and curiosity from their balconies as the Vietnamese poured into the square below them to chant independence slogans. But the crowd’s playful exuberance suddenly turned into anger when the organizers failed to broadcast Ho’s independence speech from Hanoi. Some muttered that it was colonial sabotage, as others began to eye the French staring down from above. Then, as the crowd began to disperse, shots rang out. French and Vietnamese both ran for cover as pandemonium seized the square. Some hotheaded Vietnamese attacked French houses and fired on the nearby cathedral as the DRV security forces tried (with little success) to maintain order. A dozen French people perished in the violence, including a French priest known for his charitable work among the poor of Saigon.
During the entire time, the armed Japanese sentries and soldiers looking on from the sidelines did little to maintain order in a country they had ruled throughout the Second World War. They refused to free the French soldiers they had vanquished a few months earlier. And now defeated themselves, they refused to take orders from anyone but the Allies. Two shattered empires were on display on that hot Saigon day for all to see, one French, the other Japanese. And no one knew, as Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence in Hanoi, what would come next. Would the ‘new French’ freed from the German imperial grip in Europe be able to empathize with the aspirations for independence of their former colonial subjects or would Free France’s Charles de Gaulle insist upon reasserting his country’s own colonial domination to erase the humiliating defeat of 1940 and thus reinforce France’s own national identity, international prestige, and economic recovery?1
GLOBAL WAR AND THE FALL OF TWO EMPIRE
The French and Japanese were not fated to clash over control of Indochina. Despite Japan’s military victory over the Russians in 1905 and French fears of a péril jaune, both countries had normalized their diplomatic relations in 1909 following Japan’s expulsion of Phan Boi Chau’s Go East movement and the latter’s recognition of French sovereignty over Indochina. In return, Paris had no trouble recognizing Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910 and membership in the ‘Great Powers’ club. Japan’s entry into the First World War on the side of the Allies kept relations on an even keel, as did its postwar participation in the League of Nations and collective security arrangements in the Asia–Pacific region.2
All that changed in the late 1920s. With the advent of the Great Depression and the rise to power of an authoritarian military class, Japan’s relative political and economic liberalism vanished rapidly. The country’s new military leaders abandoned collective security and engagement in the international system, convinced that the country’s survival depended on renewed colonial expansion and going it alone in Asia as Depression-driven tariff barriers went up around the world. In making this choice, however, militarists put their country on a collision course with the Western imperial powers in Asia, not just the French, but also the Europeans and Americans. China, however, bore the immediate brunt of renewed Japanese colonial aggression. As Chiang Kai-shek’s army advanced northward from its southern stronghold to defeat warlords opposed to the creation of a unified China, strategists in Tokyo concluded that they had to attack before China could consolidate. In 1931, as the French crushed anticolonial revolts in Indochina, the Japanese army invaded mineral-rich Manchuria. When the League of Nations objected, Tokyo withdrew its membership in order to continue its colonial offensive. In 1937, the international community looked on as the Japanese imperial army invaded China, took control of the coastline running to the Indochinese border, and pushed Chiang Kai-shek’s republican government into southwestern China. This occurred against the backdrop of the emergence in 1933 of another expansionist-minded authoritarian state on the other side of the Eurasian continent, Nazi Germany. And just as the Japanese sought to create a ‘new order’ in Asia, the Nazis wanted to do much the same in Europe. Two years after the Japanese invasion of China, the Germans set Europe ablaze by attacking Poland.3
The French were no more prepared to go to war with the Japanese over Indochina than they were capable of defending France against the Germans. In June 1940, the French capitulated to the Germans, while the majority of republican deputies, including figures such as Albert Sarraut, signed over full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain. The Third Republic was dead. In its place, Pétain assumed the leadership of the French State, better known as ‘Vichy France’, named for the town from which it soon operated. The Vietnamese had confronted superior French power in the mid-nineteenth century, and now the French found themselves in a similar situation. Many resisted the Germans, notably Charles de Gaulle, who fled to London, then on to Algiers following the Allied liberation of North Africa in late 1942. Most kept their heads down, while others saw a chance to promote revolutionary projects which had been marginalized under decades of republican rule. In October 1940, for example, Pétain promoted a policy of collaboration with Hitler and initiated the ‘National Revolution’, which included the termination of democratic politics, the reinvigoration of the Catholic Church, and the promotion of authoritarian rule based on agrarian identity politics. ‘Work, Family, and Country’ became the famous slogan. Mass propaganda drives, youth mobilization campaigns, and a cult of personality centered on the grandfatherly Pétain sought to inculcate such values. Meanwhile, authorities adopted anti-Semitic laws and took a hard line toward the left.4
Like his predecessors, Pétain attached great importance to the empire, both strategically and ideologically. However, the exportation of the National Revolution to Indochina was complicated by the fact that the French were not the only ones in charge. The Japanese had been following European events closely, keen to take control of the Indochinese overland and maritime bridge to Southeast Asia. Control of the Red River delta, its routes and the railway running from Hanoi to Kunming would allow Tokyo to further cut off Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Yunnan province from international suppliers. Worried by Japan’s assault on China, the Americans (and the Soviets) had already increased their support of the besieged Chinese Republic and warned the Japanese not to strike into Tonkin, keenly aware of the geopolitical importance of Vietnam.5
In a complex series of events which began with the French capitulation to the Nazis in June 1940 (ushering in the new Vichy government), Germany’s Axis ally, Tokyo put pressure on the French authorities in Hanoi to allow Japanese troops to enter Tonkin. In July, the new French authorities named Admiral Jean Decoux Governor General of Indochina, instructing him to maintain French sovereignty over the colony. In the fall, as Pétain moved France closer to Germany, Decoux received orders to allow the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin. In exchange, the Japanese recognized French sovereignty over Indochina. French collaboration with Nazi Germany—Tokyo’s main Axis partner from September 1940—opened the way to a troubled but unique imperial condominium in Indochina, in which two imperial powers, one Asian, the other European, now ruled. At the heart of this dual arrangement was the Japanese preference to administer Indochina indirectly through the French in order that they might focus on more important military matters.
Despite their shared anticommunism, disgust for democracy, and antipathy for the Anglo-Americans, rightwing French and Japanese rulers were reluctant and distrustful allies. Clashes between their troops were always a real possibility. Decoux saw little to emulate in the Japanese ideologically and did everything in his power to maintain French sovereignty and promote the National Revolution to the detriment of Japan’s Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere and Pan-Asiatic propaganda. But, as in Europe, French territory in Indochina was in reality under foreign occupation. Decoux got his first taste of this when the Japanese supported the Thais in their phony war against the French over control of western Indochina, stepping in to ensure that Bangkok ‘won’, despite a French naval victory. In May 1941, left with no choice but armed resistance and the possibility of losing Indochina entirely, Decoux ceded large swathes of western Cambodia and Laos to Thai expansionists and in so doing undermined the territorial integrity of French Indochina. The Japanese also secured a new agreement with the French which placed the rest of the colony under Tokyo’s military jurisdiction. The Japanese could now station 75,000 troops in southern Indochina. They also administered monetary policy and extracted rice and natural resources there, with the collaboration of French authorities and the Bank of Indochina.
Alarmed by Japan’s expansion into Southeast Asia via Vietnam, President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and led an embargo against Tokyo. The Japanese replied by preparing a surprise attack on the American naval forces in the Pacific in order to expand further southward in search of oil and rubber. Meanwhile, the Germans prepared to strike eastward deep into Eurasia’s midsection. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Japanese attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in December and moved into all of Southeast Asia. The Americans entered the war, focusing first on Europe as the Japanese used their Indochinese bases to overthrow the British in Malaya (December 1941), Singapore (February 1942), and Burma (January–May 1942). American rule in the Philippines came to an end during December 1941 to May 1942, as did Dutch control over Indonesia by March 1942. Vietnam was now part of a world at war, carrying with it the seeds of great historical change and terrible human suffering.
Vichy’s collaboration was essential to Tokyo’s ability to rule Indochina. As long as the French honored their mutual agreements and provided the required food, labor, and natural resources, Japanese authorities were content to rule indirectly through the pre-existing colonial administration. Decoux both signed authorizations for, and approved rice transfers to the Japanese, and reported to them. It is uncertain, however, if the French grasped how some 15,000 Indochinese elite members and millions of increasingly hungry peasants may have interpreted such joint colonial collaboration. Firstly, while Decoux prided himself on keeping Indochina French despite foreign occupation (just as Pétain claimed to do in the metropole), it was clear to any thinking Indochinese that he did so because the Japanese allowed him to do so. Secondly, that a ‘yellow race’ could so easily dominate a ‘white one’ debunked for good Social Darwinian arguments which had often been used to justify European colonial rule. Vietnamese rickshaw drivers serving customers in Saigon would have understood that the Japanese soldiers strolling down Rue Catinat had upended the colonial order and the racist assumptions on which it rested. Thirdly, by collaborating with the Japanese, the French failed to honor duly signed international legal agreements binding them to defend their Asian colony. For the Vietnamese, who were accustomed to repeated legal arguments justifying colonial rule, the failure to honor this contract ruined the legitimacy of colonial claims and later French attempts to reassert them.
The Japanese left equally negative impressions. Despite all the talk of liberating the ‘Asian/yellow’ people from ‘Western/white’ colonial exploitation since the days of Meiji, the undeniable truth was that the Japanese colonialists had intentionally left the ‘white man’ in power in Indochina. By choosing to rule Indochina through the French, the Japanese even abandoned their most loyal Vietnamese allies in their hour of greatest need. When diehard lieutenants of Phan Boi Chau’s Go East program tried to seize power in the fall of 1940, the Japanese let the French crush them, rather than help the nationalists. Tokyo even refused to put their longtime ally, Prince Cuong De, on the throne in Hue, preferring not to disrupt the existing monarchy under Bao Dai and to risk undermining stability in Indochina. Cuong De died in Japan in 1951, a bitter and abandoned man. Worst of all, Japanese rule triggered a famine that would kill over a million Vietnamese peasants by 1945 (see below). In Indochina, the so-called ‘Co-prosperity Sphere’ (the term had been coined by the Japanese imperial government to describe a bloc of Asian nations which were to be led by them) was riddled with contradictions.6
The same was true for French efforts to promote their national revolution in Indochina. Admiral Jean Decoux faithfully applied anti-Semitic laws and clamped down on republicans and their associations in Indochina (Freemasons, the League of Human Rights, and the Popular Front). In their place, he promoted the fascist-minded French Legion of Soldiers and Volunteers for the National Revolution (Légion française des Combatants et Volontaires de la Révolution nationale). Thanks to volunteers from the European settler community, its ranks increased from 2,637 members in early 1942 to 6,576 by mid-1943, meaning about 25 percent of the total European population. Although some Vietnamese admired Hitler and dabbled with fascism, there is no evidence that Vichy authorities or activists sought to incorporate such rightwing Vietnamese nationalists into their fascist-minded Légion. Vichy did little of substance to break down the racially configured colonial divide between rulers and ruled.7
Vichy did roll back what little democracy the Third Republic had introduced to Indochina. Upon his arrival, Decoux rescinded those Popular Front reforms which had been designed to increase the democratic participation of local ‘indigenous councilors’ in the municipal assemblies of Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong. He now simply appointed people to those positions. In November 1940, Decoux presided over the dissolution of all Indochinese assemblies, including the Colonial Council of Cochinchina. Although Decoux dusted off Sarraut’s idea of creating an Indochinese federation, he gutted it of any remaining liberalism. The Federal Indochinese Council, created in mid-1941, relied exclusively on staunchly pro-French ‘notables’, all twenty-five of whom the governor named. The Japanese never required any of these antidemocratic measures. In 1943, Decoux justified his policy in terms fully in line with metropolitan (Vichy France) authoritarianism:
No doubt on the French side, some beneficiaries of the old regime will regret seeing their opportunities for democratic machinations disappear. But the wholesome element [. . .] will accept with satisfaction a reform marking the government’s desire to apply to Indochina the principles used to restore our [Patrie . . .] None of those who recognize the dangers of elections [. . .] can interpret this reform as a regression. [On the Indochinese side . . .] the evolved Indochinese element, in other words the key to indigenous opinion, has embraced wholeheartedly the principles of the National Revolution, and never had any delusions about the powers of former assemblies in the first place.8
This was woefully inaccurate. By brushing aside a half-century of Vietnamese calls for meaningful representation in decision-making, Decoux further alienated a wide section of the Vietnamese elite, including the pro-French Constitutionalists like Bui Quang Chieu. Hounded by the police, younger republicans like Nguyen Tuong Tam fled to China to join the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. A few elected to work with the Japanese. The politically minded leaders of the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious faiths, Huynh Phu So and Pham Cong Tac, used Japanese power and protection to politicize, mobilize, and eventually arm their followers, something which the French had tried to block for years.
The only Vietnamese card Decoux would consider was the one his predecessors had been using for decades, the monarchy, and its indefatigable Vietnamese defender, Pham Quynh. In 1942, this man published a front-page article in the newspaper La patrie annamite (The Annamese Nation) which embraced the royalist ideas of French fascist Charles Maurras. Quynh insisted that Vietnam had to return to its traditional Confucian values in order to ensure stability. The source of disorder for Quynh was, as for Maurras, modern individualism and the ideas that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had unfortunately sown in young Vietnamese minds across the land. Quynh and Decoux were convinced that a return to Confucian values and the monarchy could attract popular support in the countryside and ensure stability in these troubled times. For Quynh, the monarchy was the ‘most perfect form of government’. Quynh shared Maurras’ critique of democracy and agreed that the monarchy was the manifestation of a nationalisme intégral, or a ‘deep nationalism’.9
Like Pasquier and Sarraut, Decoux approved of the resurrection of a monarchical government based in Hue and made Pham Quynh Minister of the Interior. But once again this project went nowhere, not least because the Confucian ‘son of heaven’ was uninterested and not prepared to be a dupe. Bao Dai kept Decoux at bay, avoiding imperial tours designed to increase his ‘prestige’ among the people. More importantly, the monarchy had no chance of success as a counter-revolutionary device as long as the French refused either to unite the kingdom they had truncated or to endow its indigenous sovereign with some semblance of power. Decoux authorized the use of the word ‘Vietnam’ to manipulate patriotic sentiments and increased salaries for Indochinese civil servants to win over their continued support, but Vietnam remained divided and the Vietnamese elite had even less of a voice in the colony than under the Third Republic. Decoux’s team may have marched tens of thousands of Vietnamese youngsters across Indochina shouting ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ (‘Marshal, here we are!’), but the Japanese, Cao Dai, and Hoa Hao did so, too. And it all rang hollow for now middle-aged Vietnamese nationalists, not least of all for the champion of the Vietnamese youth and the man Vichy let die in a Poulo Condor prison cell on 15 August 1943, Nguyen An Ninh.
Things were different in Laos and Cambodia, where the French promoted for the first time a policy of Franco-Lao and Franco-Cambodian collaboration in order to contain the Thais. Undeterred by Bao Dai’s passive resistance, Decoux turned to a dynamic young Cambodian prince named Norodom Sihanouk. He made him King of Cambodia in 1941 and then sent him out of the palace and across the countryside. Through a series of carefully orchestrated imperial tours, the young emperor cast his gaze upon his people as they were invited to look upon him. If Bao Dai detested these tours in Vietnam, Sihanouk never forgot this lesson in modern kingship and its nationalist power. In fact, he would turn it against his colonial overlords in 1953. When a journalist asked him in the 1960s if the Vichy years had influenced him in any way, Sihanouk responded: ‘Yes, strangely enough again, it was thanks to Admiral Decoux, I have to say. From the moment I ascended to the throne, he pushed me to visit my kingdom in order to know it and to be closer to its people. I admit that at least on this matter, he provided good counsel’.10
The governor general also travelled to Luang Prabang to meet King Sisavang Vong. In a move to counter further Thai claims to Lao territories, Decoux entrusted to the king the administration of the amalgam of Lao kingdoms and military territories which the French had colonized at the turn of the century. In fact, Decoux allowed Sisavang Vong to rule over an increasingly unified Lao territorial body, one we recognize today as ‘Laos’, but one which had never existed as such in the past. Significantly, the same governor general refused to the Nguyen emperor in Annam that which he had just accorded to the Lao one in Luang Prabang—the right to rule over a unified Vietnam, one which had in fact existed, if only for a few decades, before the French arrived.11
THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE BIRTH OF A ‘NEW VIETNAM’
The 9 March Coup and the Vietnamese Race for Power
Like Pétain’s French state in Europe, Decoux’s colonial one in Asia did not survive the war. By mid-1943, both the Germans and the Japanese were in trouble. The Soviet counter-offensive into Eastern Europe and the Allied landing in Normandy in mid-1944 liberated France from German occupation and allowed Charles de Gaulle to declare and run the provisional government of the French Republic. Like his predecessors, de Gaulle was sensitive to the strategic importance of empire. In his radio address from London in 1940, he had already insisted that ‘France does not stand alone. She is not isolated. Behind her stands a vast empire’. Indeed, once liberated by the Allies in late 1942, Algeria had become the ‘French’ home to de Gaulle’s government-in-exile. As the leader of liberated France itself from mid-1944, de Gaulle now had to show the Allies that his new government was determined to fight the Axis powers. It was crucial to validating de Gaulle’s claim to Indochina. And that Roosevelt had been talking of placing Indochina under an international trusteeship made this all the more important.
Decoux, however, balked at the idea of fighting the Japanese, loathe to take orders from anyone, including de Gaulle, and convinced that only he could save Indochina. Again, like Pétain, he was wrong. The Japanese were taking no chances as they watched the Allies start to shift their undivided attention from Europe to Asia (technically, the Americans had already been dealing with Asia since Pearl Harbor, but now they could throw everything they had at the Japanese, including the atomic bomb). In fact, by early 1945, the Americans were well on their way to retaking the Philippines. On 12 January, a US naval task force attacked the Vietnamese coast, confirming Japanese fears of an imminent Allied landing. On 9 March 1945, doubtful of the continued collaboration of the French in Indochina, the Japanese launched a coup de force, overthrowing eighty years of French rule in a matter of days. Backed by the Japanese, Bao Dai announced Vietnam’s independence in the form of the ‘empire of Vietnam’. His prime minister, Tran Trong Kim, presided over the unification of the country for the first time in almost a century. The country was free of French rule, but not the Japanese. Although the government under Tran Trong Kim crumbled when the Japanese capitulated in mid-August 1945, during its three months’ existence it started rolling back decades of colonial rule by nationalizing education, culture, and the civil service, at the same time as it did its best to cope with a deadly famine rolling through the countryside.12
Meanwhile, to the north, Vietnamese nationalists and communists were closely following events from southern China. Convinced the Japanese would lose, they now saw the opening they needed to transform their ‘Vietnams abroad’ into a nation-state inside the country. We know that Ho Chi Minh was to win this race, when he would announce Vietnam’s full independence on 2 September 1945. But it is worth remembering that Ho was not necessarily well positioned at the start to win that contest. For one, the Kim government could have held, despite its association with the Japanese. (Nationalist leaders like Sukarno would manage to do so in Indonesia). Secondly, Ho was not inside Vietnam. Unlike Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Ho had spent all of his revolutionary career outside Indochina. He did not return to Vietnam or re-establish his preeminence within the Indochinese Communist Party until 1941 at the earliest. Some of the most active and articulate communists operated inside the country clandestinely, or were doing hard time in Poulo Condor. Although Ho had played a crucial role in getting the party off the ground in 1930, he was but one among several influential communists, none of whom was necessarily ready to elevate him to the top of the party’s leadership. Moreover, few people outside of this communist core and a handful of extremely well informed intelligence officers could have even recognized Ho had he walked into Hanoi or Saigon. He had no popular support. He had to create it from scratch.
Ho Chi Minh’s brilliance resided first and foremost in his uncanny ability to manoeuver himself into the right place at the right time. He was particularly good at assessing, connecting, and tailoring changes at the international and regional level to realities in Vietnam. He knew when it was crucial to act, as well as when it was best to wait patiently and lie low. He read newspapers and listened to the radio religiously. His knowledge of foreign languages (Chinese, French, Russian, English, and Thai) strengthened his effectiveness. His interpersonal skills were unparalleled, as was his impressive carnet d’adresses, allowing him to call in favors, recruit loyal disciples, and make vital connections in cities, towns, villages, and ports reaching from Paris and Marseille to Hong Kong and Guangzhou by way of Udon Thani and Singapore.
In 1934, having spent two years in a Hong Kong prison, Ho Chi Minh skillfully regained his freedom and returned to the Soviet Union, leaving younger revolutionaries aligned with Nguyen An Ninh’s Lutteurs to lead the party inside Vietnam. During his long stay in Moscow, he assiduously studied the Marxist–Leninist canon, pledged allegiance to Stalin, and improved his Russian. He read everything he could about the situations in China and Vietnam and sent instructions to the party in Indochina. Using a pen-name, he published articles in leftist papers in Vietnam warning his colleagues of the dangers of Trotskyism and arguing in favor of Stalin’s show trials. But what mattered most to Ho as the war began in the Pacific was getting back to southern China and building up a broad nationalist front—his real specialty—that could catapult Vietnamese communists to power. Then he and the party could dedicate themselves to radical social revolution, but not before.13
Ho’s chances improved as the Japanese and Germans pushed the world—and with it, the communist bloc—toward global war and a new series of alliances and tactics. Most importantly, the Comintern’s shift in line in 1935 from promoting ‘class struggle’ and ‘international proletarianism’ to building up national fronts and international alliances against the fascists strengthened Ho’s hand immensely and helped his efforts to return to Asia. The Comintern’s changing policy toward China helped even more. Faced with Japanese invasion, in December 1936 Chinese communists and nationalists created their second united front (the first had been created by Sun Yat-sen in 1923). Stalin backed this and Ho benefitted directly from it. With the Comintern’s blessing, Ho arrived in northern China in 1938. After meeting with Chinese communists now operating in Yan’an, he joined the Chinese Communist Party’s Eighth Route Army, working as a communications specialist. He arrived in Yunnan province in early 1940, where he immediately reactivated a wide range of contacts. He renewed his longstanding friendships with Zhou Enlai and Ho Hoc Lam, the latter being the Go East veteran still attached to Chiang Kai-shek’s general staff. Ho also resumed his work soliciting the support of the Vietnamese diaspora, ingratiating himself to Chinese nationalist leaders in the south, extending his hand to both non-communist Vietnamese nationalists and to communist leaders inside Indochina.14
Several events occurring inside Indochina further strengthened Ho’s hand indirectly. The French decision to outlaw communism in France and Indochina in September 1939 forced the Indochinese Communist Party to go underground. Many members ended up in prison or on the run. The French repression of the communist uprising in Cochinchina in late 1940 wrecked the party in the south and in so doing transferred the party’s center of gravity northward to clandestine bases in Tonkin (led by Truong Chinh) and in southern China (led by Ho Chi Minh). The arrival of militants like Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap in southern China in 1940 allowed Ho to establish direct links with these lieutenants and, through them, the interior of Vietnam. Nguyen An Ninh’s death in 1943 further sealed the demise of southern radicalism and removed the man who might have easily competed with Ho Chi Minh for the nationalist and revolutionary mantle. Southern leftists lost their monopoly over Vietnamese politics, thus opening the way to northern domination of radical politics for decades to come. This would turn out to be a major political shift in the history of modern Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh skillfully used the second united front in southern China to position himself in the right place. He knew that Chinese nationalist leaders and generals in control of the frontier with Indochina needed Vietnamese communists and nationalists to create their own united front in order to help defeat their common enemy, the Japanese. Like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh was in total agreement with this Comintern-approved tactical alliance. Anticommunist Vietnamese leaders in southern China were less convinced, but depended on their Chinese Nationalist Party big brothers to operate in China and, they hoped, take power in Vietnam upon Japanese defeat. With varying degrees of success, Chinese nationalist leaders in charge of the border like Zhang Fakui and Siao Wen prodded both the leader of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party in China, Vu Hong Khanh, and the leader of a new party called the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance (Viet Nam Cach Mang Dong Minh Hoi), Nguyen Hai Than (see below), into joining forces with Ho Chi Minh in the common struggle against the Japanese. Ho thus joined a Vietnamese nationalist front in 1936 (in the image of the Chinese Communist Party–Chinese Nationalist Party united front). With a blessing from Chinese nationalists worried by Japan’s move into Indochina in late 1940, Ho moved his entourage to the Sino-Vietnamese border, promising to take part in the resistance to the Japanese. (He would also redouble his contacts with communists in Tonkin.) In remote Cao Bang province, Ho’s lieutenants set up camp in the limestone caves in Pac Bo. And in February 1941, Ho walked into northern Vietnam for the first time since leaving Saigon by boat thirty years earlier.
Just as important, Ho re-asserted his leadership within the communist party through the same united front tactics he had used in the mid-1920s in southern China. In meetings with Tonkin-based leaders trying to keep the Indochinese Communist Party afloat, Ho explained the Comintern’s united front policy and insisted on the importance of building up just such a front, but under communist control. He did not insist on leading the ICP or seeking revenge for those who had accused him of ‘narrow nationalism’ in the 1930s. Instead he endorsed Truong Chinh’s position as the party’s secretary general. Chinh had emerged as a leading theorist in Hanoi during the Popular Front period and published an important treatise called ‘The Peasant Question’ with Vo Nguyen Giap in 1938. Ho could have easily invoked his Comintern credentials to justify replacing Chinh, but he must have known that such a visible position at the head of the party would have undermined his ability to build up the nationalist front and win over non-communist support.15
In 1941, as the world moved toward a truly global war, Ho made his move. From bases along the Sino-Vietnamese border, he and his entourage presided over the ICP’s historic eighth plenum on 10–19 May 1941. This meeting and the documents it produced officially shifted the party’s line from proletarian internationalism to national liberation. This meant creating a broad national front which was focused on securing Vietnam’s independence, regardless of divisions of class, race, sex, or political affiliation. Talk of radical agrarian revolution, including land reform, disappeared. The new front emerging from this historic meeting was the Vietnamese Independence League (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, better known as the Viet Minh). In many ways, the Viet Minh replaced the pre-existing one set up in China in 1936, but it now put the communists at the helm inside Vietnam, not in southern China, where Chinese nationalist leaders and their Vietnamese allies could have easily interfered.
Little wonder Vu Hong Khanh and Nguyen Hai Than were convinced that the Viet Minh was a communist creation. It was. But the communists had no intention of letting their anticommunist nationalist competitors trap them in an anticommunist nationalist front backed by the Chinese Nationalist Party. Control and the expansion of a separate nationalist front were vital to winning the race for power. Where the non-communist Vietnamese parties in southern China erred massively was in their refusal to transfer their national front to Vietnam. By failing to do so, they allowed the Viet Minh to organize bases and mobilize people in upland areas of Vietnam and the delta for four years. Viet Minh agents were also in a better position to start opening granaries for famished peasants and penetrating the Tran Trong Kim government. Moreover, by betting entirely on the Chinese to put them in power in Vietnam, non-communist Vietnamese badly underestimated Ho’s proven ability to turn the united front strategy against his anticommunist adversaries, knowing that their Chinese backers would let him do it, focused as they were on their more pressing problems in China itself.
On the inside, Ho Chi Minh and his team did everything in their power to transform the front and with it the communist party into the defenders of the nationalist cause within the country. They began printing clandestine papers and distributing propaganda wherever they could safely. On 6 June 1941, Ho issued his ‘Letter from Abroad’, echoing the title of the letter Phan Boi Chau had written ‘in blood’ from Japan three decades earlier. In 600 easy-to-understand quoc ngu words, Ho called upon the Vietnamese to take up arms: ‘In such painful tormenting conditions shall we simply fold our arms and wait to die? No absolutely not! More than twenty million descendants of the Lac and Hong are determined not to be perpetual slaves without a country!’ Ho travelled throughout the northern hills, testing for the first time his ability to connect with people, many of them non-Viet, presenting himself as the defender of the nationalist cause, and preparing his cadres to move decisively and rapidly to take power when the right moment came.16
Whether he predicted it or not, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 only strengthened his hand against any who might have doubted his insistence on a nationalist front. The dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the Soviet Union’s life-and-death struggle against the Nazis ensured that there would be no direct interference from Moscow (or its Vietnamese allies) to Ho’s rise to the top of the party. And given that the Soviets were now engaged in the Grand Alliance with the Americans against the Axis powers, there was nothing stopping Ho from soliciting American aid in southern China. The American Office of Strategic Services in China recruited many Vietnamese, including the personable and English-speaking Ho, to provide intelligence about the Japanese and to help rescue downed American pilots. The British were doing the same thing in dealing with the Malayan Communist Party, including its Vietnamese leader Lai Tek. And Ho offered the same thing to the Chinese Guomindang, in Chinese—intelligence on the Japanese enemy—further ingratiating him with many of the Chinese officers who would arrive in Hanoi in 1945.
Meanwhile, inside Vietnam, following the Japanese-instigated March 1945 coup, non-communist nationalists supportive of Bao Dai and his prime minister, Tran Trong Kim, mobilized the young, tore down colonial monuments, renamed streets after such figures as Nguyen Thai Hoc, and promoted a heroic, independent and unitary Vietnam with roots in the faraway past as essential to building a new national identity. However, in the eyes of Vietnamese nationalists perched on the northern border, the Tran Trong Kim government remained a creature of the Japanese. Like the Indochinese Communist Party, the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance leaders had every intention of eliminating it once the war ended.17
What mattered most for Ho, however, was positioning the Viet Minh inside the country, so that the miniscule communist party of some 5,000 members (of whom at least half were sitting behind colonial bars) could take power at the propitious moment. Unlike the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance, the Viet Minh quickly went to work recruiting members and building up organizations in remote northern areas free of Franco-Japanese patrols. For communist nationalists, this meant winning over local leaders and village headmen, and creating ‘national salvation associations’ to group different social groups—farmers, women, landowners—together under the Viet Minh umbrella. In most cases, it simply meant being in a position to take over the local colonial administration when the Japanese would inevitably surrender. Along the northern border, Vo Nguyen Giap began building a tiny liberation army. The American Office of Strategic Services provided some arms and military training as part of the broader fight against the Japanese. Meanwhile, Truong Chinh administered an underground network in Hanoi which cultivated contacts with intellectuals, civil servants, and youth groups, all the while trying to prepare his lieutenants to take control of the capital and provincial towns once the Japanese were defeated. Non-communist nationalists in China did little of this type of work. In the south, however, the situation was very different. The communists there had never truly recovered from the failed uprising of 1940 and had little, if any real contact, with northerners. Non-communist religious nationalists led by the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao led the way in organizing territory and mobilizing people.
Back in the north, the Indochinese Communist Party leadership carefully monitored the course of the war at the international, regional, and local levels. Party strategists certainly welcomed the Japanese overthrow of the French on 9 March 1945. The disappearance of the redoubtable colonial police allowed Ho’s team to push deeper into Vietnam, setting up headquarters in the village of Tran Trao. However, like de Gaulle facing the Nazis in France, Ho understood that only Allied victory over the Japanese, generally viewed as sure to happen in 1946 or 1947, would provide the opportune moment for taking power. What neither de Gaulle or Ho or Vu Hong Khanh saw coming was the rapid Japanese capitulation on 15 August following the American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But when news of it came via the radio, Ho lost no time. The ICP immediately issued the call for a general uprising as de Gaulle’s intelligence officers and the non-communist nationalists in China looked on helplessly. On 19 August, the Viet Minh seized power in Hanoi and the northern provincial capitals before extending its control southward over Annam and Cochinchina by the end of the month. These events are collectively known in Vietnam today as the ‘August Revolution of 1945’.
In an equally historic event, on 30 August, Bao Dai, the last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, formally abdicated. He and his prime minister, Tran Trong Kim, could have asserted themselves at this time, like several others in similar positions in Southeast Asia in August 1945, but they did not. In a carefully choreographed ceremony, Bao Dai handed over the dynastic seal and sword to the newly constituted provisional government of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. The emperor abandoned his title and name to become the simple citizen ‘Vinh Thuy’. He even served as an advisor to Ho. His actions gave a powerful source of legitimacy to Ho Chi Minh and his fledgling government. Bao Dai’s colonial king-makers were speechless. He must have been forced to do it, they repeated one after another. And yet the emperor had personally written a missive to Charles de Gaulle begging France’s liberator to recognize the Vietnamese right to independence:
I would ask you to understand that the only way to maintain French interests and France’s spiritual influence in Indochina is to recognize frankly Vietnamese independence and to renounce any idea of re-establishing sovereignty or a French administration in any form whatsoever. We could so easily get along and become friends if you could stop claiming [the right] to become again our masters.18
Given the importance the French had always paid to their colonial monarchs, especially this one, it is impossible that de Gaulle was unaware of Bao Dai’s letter. For the first time in his life, France’s colonial emperor had openly challenged the French. And the French now found themselves in the sorry position of having no Vietnamese partner with whom to rebuild their lost colonial state. In August 1945, individually or on communist party orders, Viet Minh agents executed France’s most faithful allies, Bui Quang Chieu and Pham Quynh.19
That said, despite Ho Chi Minh’s shrewd positioning of the party and the timely abdication of Bao Dai, there was nothing necessarily inevitable about the communist-engineered ‘August Revolution’. As Mao Zedong famously quipped, ‘Had the Japanese never invaded China, the communists would have never taken power’. The same could be said of their Vietnamese counterparts. Moreover, the ICP was not as in control of events at the time as its defenders—and anticommunist detractors—would like us to believe today. As in earlier periods of Vietnamese history, famine, more than anything else, ushered in change. This was particularly the case in central and northern Vietnam during the Japanese occupation. Increased population pressure, falling rice-paddy output, poor weather and cultivation methods, and a shift to industrial crops all combined to reduce the 1944 rice crop in Tonkin and in the northern central provinces of Thanh Hoa and Nghe An drastically. To make matters worse, the French and the Japanese refused to reduce taxes on farmers, thereby increasing the burden placed upon them, without offering the peasants incentives to produce more. Meanwhile, the French and the Japanese stockpiled rice for themselves. As the supply of rice fell, its price skyrocketed on the black market, greatly exceeding the officially set price. Farmers hoarded rice in order to meet their own needs rather than sell it at the official price. The only way to head off famine was to transport rice to the north from the comparatively rice-rich south. However, Allied bombers had severed the north–south railway and destroyed bridges, just at the same time as submarines were keeping coastal shipping to a minimum. Junks and parts of the railway could have been used, but Japanese officials were more concerned with the war in the Pacific as the Allies concentrated on destroying the rest of the Axis. French authorities failed to provide any solutions.20
The result was that from December 1944 until about May 1945, famine swooped down on Tonkin and upper Annam, killing about one million Vietnamese. An estimated 10 percent of the population in this crucial area perished in a five-month period preceding the ‘August Revolution’. In many ways, Viet Minh leaders rode a famine-driven wave of angry peasant hunger to power in mid-1945, opening granaries as they raced across the provinces to take control of the colonial administration the French and Japanese had abandoned in their defeat. Bao Dai and the Tran Trong Kim government’s rural administrators had little chance of surviving this massive social surge. In the eyes of the famished, the provincial and district notables were part of the problem, the ones who had stockpiled rice while their families slowly starved to death. These people became the visible objects of peasant wrath and many paid with their lives. Without war and the famine it produced, Vietnamese communists might well have never taken power in August 1945.21
THE END OF WORLD WAR AND THE RISE OF A ‘NEW FRANCE’
De Gaulle’s government was badly out of touch with these events. Unlike the British and the Americans, Free French intelligence services had refused as a matter of policy to cooperate with the ‘natives’, thereby denying postwar French leaders an invaluable source of information on events inside Indochina and the opportunity to make partners for reconstructing peace in the future. Like so many in the French ruling class, Gaullist policy makers first in Algiers, then in Paris, were convinced that republican reformism and colonial humanism would be enough to rebuild the empire and placate nationalist calls for independence. Nowhere was this more evident than during the conference at Brazzaville (in the French Congo) held in early 1944. Attending this meeting were governor generals, mainly from Africa, and the representatives of the Provisional French Consultative Assembly. Japanese control of Indochina prevented any Indochinese presence. No Asian or African colonial subjects participated. One of the leading architects of Gaullist colonial policy, Henri Laurentie, argued that France had to adopt a more liberal policy if the French were to maintain their sovereignty against rapidly emerging nationalist elites contesting the empire from within. The main change approved at Brazzaville was to move the empire away from the principle of assimilation and toward federalism (though it had never been exclusively ‘assimilationist’ in Indochina). Federalism would accord more autonomy to the restless elite through the creation of local parliaments with expanded electoral colleges, all the while allowing the French to remain in charge of the imperial state, its foreign affairs, and defense.22
For the Gaullists, Indochina would be the litmus test for colonial federalism. On 24 March 1945, hardly two weeks after the Japanese overthrew the French, the provisional government of the French Republic issued its first major public statement on policy toward Indochina. Based on the federal ideas developed at Brazzaville, the declaration heralded the creation of a pentagonal Indochinese Federation which would regroup Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, Laos, and Cambodia into one colonial state. The federal structure would give each local state a greater level of autonomy, via the creation of state governments under the direction of a French high commissioner (the new name for the governor general). This Indochinese Federation would in turn be linked to other French colonial states like Algeria, via its membership in the ‘French Union’, the new word for the empire which was now to be a much more structured and interconnected one. Indeed, the French Union would eventually acquire an empire-wide consultative assembly based in Paris.
There is no evidence that the French revisited General Théophile Pennequin’s reformist ideas of the 1910s for a policy of transition to an independent Indochinese state which was nonetheless still associated with the French, or the American creation in 1935 of a commonwealth which included the Philippines and was designed to do the same thing. The Gaullists had no intention of creating the equivalent of a British commonwealth of nations in which colonial states such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and latterly India acceded to full independence while remaining loosely in the imperial dominion. Nor did the French have any intention of uniting Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina into one territorially unified sub-state—‘Vietnam’—within the Indochinese Federation. Laos, however, maintained the territorial unity which Decoux had accorded it. And, in 1946, Laos and Cambodia recovered the territories the Thais had taken from them in 1941.23
The problem was that the Indochina Declaration proved badly out of touch with events. Most obviously missing was any mention of the Japanese destruction of French Indochina two weeks earlier. Nor did it take into account the independence or the unification of Vietnam declared by Bao Dai. In fact, rather than pondering the meaning of Bao Dai’s letter defending Vietnamese independence quoted above, de Gaulle ordered his new high commissioner, Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, to retake all of Indochina, by force if need be, at the same time as the general searched out a new colonial emperor through whom he could legitimate this second war of colonial conquest. In an astonishing irony, de Gaulle selected the very emperor whom the French had deposed thirty years earlier for colonial treason—Duy Tan. The plan failed when Duy Tan perished in a plane crash in late 1945, but the French governmental obsession with colonial monarchy was clearly alive and well as the Fourth Republic came falteringly into being.24
The disconnect between French and Vietnamese nationalist thinking could not have been greater than when Ho Chi Minh stepped up to the microphone on 2 September 1945 and declared before tens of thousands of Vietnamese the independence of all of Vietnam. In an extraordinary transformation, Ho was no longer the angry young man arguing with Phan Chu Trinh in Paris. Sporting a wispy beard and dressed simply, he now intentionally played the role of the wise humanist Confucian grandfather, or ‘cu Ho’, a man of the people. Papers carried his picture on the front page, for Ho was almost completely unknown inside Vietnam before mid-1945. His anticolonialism remained as ardent as in Paris, but he carefully hid his internationalist communist faith and connections in order to embody the national desire for independence and lead its bid toward it. When he asked his ‘compatriots’ that day if they could hear him as he prepared to read the country’s declaration of independence, the crowd roared back with a resounding ‘Co!’ (‘Yes!’). Communist though he most certainly was, Ho had every intention of ensuring that the communists were seen as the true defenders of the nationalist faith, and creating a personality cult was an essential part of that project. Two new nation-states and two new nationalist leaders had thus emerged from the Second World War—the French Republic under de Gaulle and the Vietnamese one under Ho. Both men had real charisma and both held opposing yet strong feelings about the future of this Asian territory. This was a very dangerous mix.25
The Second French Colonial Conquest
General de Gaulle could not, however, do as he pleased in 1945. The European-dominated international system of the late nineteenth century was very different from the order emerging out of world war in 1945. It was clear to all that the Americans and the Soviets had emerged as the two most important powers in the international system, dominating both ends of Eurasia as never before in world history. If the Soviets occupied most of Eastern Europe at the war’s end, the Americans were particularly well positioned in Atlantic Europe and in Pacific-Asia. In East Asia, they administered Japan, had re-established their hold over the Philippines, and occupied southern Korea. The Japanese overthrow of Western colonial states across Southeast Asia had deeply undermined European dominance, whose governments in any event did not have the financial means to compete with the Americans. Although the Soviets sent troops into Manchuria and upper Korea, Stalin’s attention remained mostly focused on Europe, above all, Germany. Fearful that Mao’s troops would take over China, the Americans helped Chiang Kai-shek reoccupy large swathes of the country following the Japanese defeat. And whatever his weaknesses, Chiang Kaishek’s wartime alliance with the Americans provided the Republic of China with a new voice in postwar Asian affairs.26
The opposite was true of the French. Having been knocked out of the war at the start, the French could hardly hope to retake their Indochinese colony as easily as the British restored their colonial presence in Southeast Asia (the increasingly popular term coined from the British South East Asia Command during the war). Moreover, Gaullist relations with Roosevelt were never good. French marginalization in the Allied decision-making was such that de Gaulle was not even privy to many of the Allied decisions concerning the fate of Indochina. A critical example was the decision taken during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 by Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill which allowed the British to occupy and accept the Japanese surrender in Indochina below the sixteenth parallel while the Republic of China would do the same above that line. In early September 1945, British and Indian troops under the command of General Douglas Gracey began landing in Saigon, while Chinese troops led by General Lu Han established their headquarters in Hanoi. American OSS officers landed in Hanoi and Saigon in search of prisoners of war as the State Department began preparations to re-open its diplomatic offices there.27
Ho Chi Minh was keenly aware of the advantages and disadvantages of this war-generated internationalization of Indochina and marginalization of France. But if he had adroitly exploited changes in power relations in order to take power in August a few days after the Japanese capitulation, he knew that these same forces could undo his nascent nation-state and with it the Indochinese Communist Party’s fragile hold on power. Ho knew, too, that de Gaulle would do everything in his power to turn the Chinese, Americans, and British against his nascent republic.
De Gaulle was not alone in that endeavor. Accompanying Chinese troops moving into Tonkin and northern Annam in September 1945 were the nationalist leaders of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Vu Hong Khanh, and of the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance, Nguyen Hai Than. They were counting on their Chinese partners either to overthrow Ho and his government or, if the Chinese insisted on maintaining a national united front, that the Chinese would force the Vietnamese communists to accept a coalition government. (During February 1946, Chiang Kai-shek seriously considered giving the order to his officers in Hanoi to overthrow Ho in favor of their non-communist Vietnamese allies, but in the end refrained from doing anything.) In the south, communist leaders like Tran Van Giau and Pham Ngoc Thach did their best to cooperate with the British. Cooperation among Vietnamese in the south was no easier than in the north, as southern communists struggled to survive in a nationalist coalition with religious groups and Trotskyists whose leaders deeply distrusted the ICP.28
It was in this complex context that de Gaulle dispatched his delegates to Indochina with clear orders to re-establish French sovereignty. These men entered into negotiations with the British, Chinese, and Vietnamese with the aim of resuming French control. The British, worried about the preservation of their own Asian empire, but also keen to maintain order on the ground, allowed local French forces to execute a coup de force in Saigon on 23 September 1945, pushing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s southern forces into the countryside as the arriving Expeditionary Corps under General Philippe Leclerc began taking control of the major cities, routes, and bridges in southern Indochina. However, French forces did not do this alone. The British used Indian Gurkhas to help establish order while Japanese soldiers joined the French in combat operations against the Vietnamese below the sixteenth parallel.29
The Vietnamese resisted French colonial re-conquest from the outset, but did so in an extremely complicated situation. In December 1945, Nguyen Binh, a former prisoner of Poulo Condor and member of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, took charge of southern forces for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. While no one knew it at the time, a thirty-year war for Vietnam had begun, in the south, on 23 September 1945. North of the sixteenth parallel, however, the presence of the Chinese occupation forces continued to protect the DRV against an immediate colonial attack. As onerous as Chinese nationalist occupation most certainly was for the Vietnamese, Chinese republican troops—not Chinese communist ones—helped Ho keep his fledgling nation-state intact. Thanks to the Chinese decision not to overthrow Ho Chi Minh’s government, until December 1946 DRV authorities were able to consolidate their state, mobilize the population, and create an army free of direct French intervention. For both the French and Vietnamese, foreign forces were vital to their abilities to promote their respective states in post-Second World War Indochina.30
The French understood this and did their best to secure the rapid withdrawal of Chinese forces. Increasing Chinese hostility toward the DRV in early 1946 led Ho to a similar conclusion. In late February, an agreement was reached whereby the Chinese agreed to withdraw their troops in exchange for special privileges for their nationals living in Indochina and the relinquishment of French colonial concessions and privileges in China. The French agreed. The Chinese insisted, however, that the replacement of their troops by French ones required both the French and the Vietnamese to reach an accord first. Local Chinese authorities wanted to avoid the outbreak of a destabilizing war on their watch, as had happened to the British on 23 September 1945. As a result, on 6 March 1946, the French and the Vietnamese signed a preliminary accord, by which Ho Chi Minh accepted that Vietnam would join the Indochinese Federation as a ‘free state’. The French would be able to station 15,000 troops above the sixteenth parallel, but also had to agree to organize a referendum on the question of the unification of Cochinchina with the rest of Vietnam. The DRV, as a free state, would be able to run its own government, parliament, and finances, but not its foreign affairs, defense, or currency. Significantly, part of the accord also stipulated that the French forces would withdraw from the DRV within five years. This effectively allowed Ho to defend himself against anticommunist, nationalist charges that the communists were selling out the nation. It was also in this precise context that Ho muttered to a French counterpart that it was ‘better to sniff French crap for five years than to have to eat Chinese dung forever!’ That said, the agreement was a nightmare for non-communist nationalist leaders because it guaranteed the withdrawal of their main backer, the Chinese. Against the wishes of his own party, Vu Hong Khanh signed the accords with Ho and his French counterpart, Jean Sainteny, probably under heavy Chinese pressure or out of political naivety or both. The nationalist opposition was now vulnerable to attacks from both the French and the DRV.31
Although the accords allowed the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to strengthen their respective military positions as the Chinese withdrew, they also offered a chance for peace. Ho understood this and threw himself into finding a negotiated settlement that would result in Vietnam’s decolonization. A real problem turned, however, upon the question of the status of Cochinchina. The French now controlled much of it. Ho lost his bet when follow-up conferences designed to resolve the Cochinchina question failed, first in Dalat and then in France in mid-1946. The failure of the French and the Vietnamese to find a peaceful solution to the status of Cochinchina allowed colonial hardliners in Indochina like Thierry d’Argenlieu to take matters into their hands, making a compromise solution increasingly difficult to achieve. In a desperate move, Ho pleaded with Marius Moutet, a member of the Socialist Party and in charge of the Ministry of Overseas France (formerly known as the Ministry of Colonies), whom Ho knew from his Paris days, to sign a preliminary accord in September 1946. It would prescribe, among other things, a ceasefire in the south. Moutet agreed, but the lack of political will in France, exacerbated by ever-changing governments in Paris, allowed local authorities in Indochina to apply de Gaulle’s instructions to the letter, rolling back the DRV’s national sovereignty in favor of the colonial federation. Such brinkmanship led to serious clashes in Lang Son and Haiphong in November 1946, before the Vietnamese lashed out in Hanoi on the evening of 19 December 1946. Long spoiling for a fight, local French authorities were all too ready to reply with force. Full-scale colonial war started that evening in Hanoi.
Civil War Begins
Wars of decolonization almost always spawn civil violence as different groups vie for control over the postcolonial state and its ideological soul. The first to challenge the communist claim to Vietnam were their former anticommunist nationalist enemies from the colonial prisons and southern China, above all the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. However, upon coming to power in mid-1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam could not immediately unleash its security services against the opposition. Any premature moves ran the risk of alienating potential allies across the political spectrum and from within the colonial state the communists were so desperately trying to take in hand. Most importantly, the occupation of northern Vietnam by Chinese republican troops had meant that the Indochinese Communist Party needed to be extremely careful. Chinese commanding officers in Tonkin, such as Lou Han, Zhang Fakui, and Siao Wen, had long supported non-communist Vietnamese anticolonialists in southern China. They knew perfectly well that Ho was a Comintern-trained communist with longstanding links to the Chinese Communist Party.
Who, exactly, constituted the opposition in the north in 1945? Three parties stand out: the Vietnamese Nationalist Party led by Vu Hong Khanh, the Dai Viet, or the Greater Vietnam coalition under Truong Tu Anh’s leadership, and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance marshaled by Nguyen Hai Than. None of them were pro French; all of them were nationalist; and each was anticommunist. We have already encountered the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance. Greater Vietnam was a non-communist, nationalist coalition of urban, mainly northern elite members who had come together during the Popular Front period. This party consisted of republican nationalists such as Nguyen Tuong Tam and more authoritarian-minded ones like Truong Tu Anh. However, the outbreak of the Second World War led the French to crack down on these nationalists. Many of Greater Vietnam’s leaders ended up in prison, fled to southern China, like Nguyen Tuong Tam, or went underground to work against the French, with or without Japanese backing.32
The communist core of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had no love lost for any of these men and that feeling was fully shared by anticommunists. In the days following its seizure of power in August 1945, before the Chinese arrived to intervene, the communists jailed dozens of their opponents who had ‘collaborated’ with the Japanese and sinned against the Indochinese Communist Party. The chief of the DRV police has described how he toured a jail where he viewed with great satisfaction the incarceration of several dangerous ‘traitors’ who ‘had blood debts’ toward the people and the party. The security services arrested leading non-communist politicians such as Tran Trong Kim, Ngo Dinh Khoi, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Pham Quynh. The Viet Minh executed Ngo Dinh Khoi and Pham Quynh. Only Ho Chi Minh’s personal intervention saved Khoi’s brother, Ngo Dinh Diem from a similar fate. In all, several thousand enemies of the communists ‘failed to survive abductions’ in the wake of the August insurrection of 1945. As in China, such violence hardly built trust or facilitated cooperation between communist and non-communist nationalists following the Japanese defeat.33
The arrival of the Chinese occupying forces put a brake on the executions and delayed the start of what would have surely become a full-blown civil war in October 1945. Determined to deny the Chinese any pretext for overthrowing the fledgling government, the communists swallowed hard and allowed the opposition to organize propaganda drives, operate newspapers, publish political cartoons satirizing the communists and even ones which ridiculed Ho Chi Minh, the ‘father’ of the new nation. Never in the history of twentieth-century Vietnam, neither under the French colonialists nor the Vietnamese communists, did the press and opposition operate so freely. Thanks to the Chinese security umbrella, these parties widened their memberships, mobilized youth groups, and recruited for their militias. Opposition leaders decried what they considered to be the communist monopoly on power. They called for the creation of a truly nationalist coalition, with non-communists holding key ministries. Their wish was granted on several occasions, thanks to Chinese pressure. It was all part of their bid to roll back communist efforts to define the foundations of the state, national identity, and power at this crucial conjuncture.
Civil war erupted when the Chinese finished pulling the bulk of their troops out of upper Vietnam in mid-June 1946. Within a few weeks, the communists unleashed the security forces against the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance, and Greater Vietnam in Hanoi, while Vo Nguyen Giap used his emerging army against nationalist troops located in the countryside. In July, the DRV security forces descended upon the opposition’s headquarters, offices, and presses in Hanoi. In the Red River area, the government sent its army northward to recover provincial towns held by the opposition parties as their Chinese protectors withdrew across the border. As one Democratic Republic of Vietnam officer later described the civil violence he witnessed in a small border town: ‘On the right side of the building a man emerged with a gun in his hand, a bayonet attached to it. He’s three meters from me when I put him in my sights, throw myself to the ground, and shoot. He stood there, his gun in the air, looking at me, and then he collapsed’. Vietnamese were now killing Vietnamese, as civil war returned to Vietnam for the first time since the eighteenth century. The French did not start this. It was a Vietnamese affair. It was also the first in a long line of civil conflicts that would mark modern Vietnamese history until 1975. As one anticommunist nationalist later recalled the violence that took his father from him: ‘Patriotism at the highest degree gives to some an almost unimaginable will to survive, but it also encourages people of the same forefathers to kill their compatriots more eagerly and savagely. That is a reality of the armed conflict from 1945 to 1975 in Viet Nam’.34
In the south, two religious groups posed a major problem for the DRV—the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. As we saw earlier, the Cao Dai faith is a syncretic, monotheistic religion, combining elements of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and humanism. The Cao Dai Church emerged in the wake of the First World War, and under its main leader, Pham Cong Tac, had adopted an increasingly political trajectory during the 1930s. The colonial police arrested Pham Cong Tac because of his links to the Japanese and his attempts to create an autonomous religious state and militia. The treatment of the leader of the Hoa Hao faith followed a similar track. It had emerged in the late 1930s in the Mekong delta. Its messianic leader, the young and dashing Huynh Phu So, drew heavily upon local Buddhist beliefs to build this millenarian religious movement with its roots deep in the past. The Japanese backed Huynh Phu So, and had put pressure on the French to release him from captivity. With the defeat of the Japanese, Hoa Hao and Cao Dai leaders joined the DRV in opposition to the return of the French.
This cooperation did not last for long, however. Religious leaders of both groups were wary of the DRV’s communist core and the idea of subordinating their forces to any control other than their own. The French quickly picked up on this tension as they returned to the Mekong delta and sought to rebuild their Indochinese house. Determined to turn anyone they could against the DRV, the French had no problems forgetting about the past. They immediately released Pham Cong Tac from the state of exile in Madagascar which they had imposed upon him, and returned him to the Mekong delta region in mid-1946 on the condition that he rally his church and people to the French cause. Pham Cong Tac agreed. On 8 January 1947, as the Expeditionary Corps retook Hanoi street by street, Pham Cong Tac signed an accord with the French and, within a few weeks, thousands of his followers began to cross over to the French side as the DRV scrambled to hold together their national coalition in the south.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s leadership authorized its representatives to contact the Cao Dai leadership secretly in a bid to stop the defections to the French. Talks occurred in January 1947, but to no avail. The Cao Dai asked the DRV to pull out of their home base in Tay Ninh province; the latter refused, invoking their sovereignty over all of the south. Things went immediately from bad to worse, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s security and military forces became involved in another civil war, this time with Cao Dai forces armed and supplied by the French secret services. By June 1947, most of the Cao Dai’s forces had crossed over to the Franco-Vietnamese side, but not without leaving behind a trail of blood.35
Civil violence broke out almost simultaneously with the Hoa Hao. At the outset, Huynh Phu So was a special delegate in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s southern administration. However, when he began to ally his followers, not alongside but with the Dang Dan Xa, a Hoa Hao political party independent of the DRV’s control, relations between the two sides deteriorated rapidly. More importantly, like Pham Cong Tac, Huynh Phu So was also loathe to submit his military forces to the DRV’s national control. And his religious antipathy toward communism was well known. When Huynh Phu So entered into secret negotiations with the French secret services in early 1947, southern DRV leaders reacted with violence. Tay Ninh province was rapidly slipping from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s control, and, with it, hundreds of thousands of people. In April 1947, tensions between the Hoa Hao and the DRV were so bad that the latter decided to execute the church’s spiritual leader, Huynh Phu So, in what had to be one of the biggest political blunders it ever committed. It created a sea of hate.36
A year later, the French successfully rallied yet another southern group to their cause, the brigands turned patriots known as the Binh Xuyen and named for the small village outside Saigon from whence they came. Ironically, this group led by Bay Vien had caused the French security services headaches during the interwar period. Arrested for theft, Bay Vien ended up in Poulo Condor, where he learned from political prisoners what the word ‘Vietnam’ really meant. He also saw with his own eyes the latent civil war already building behind colonial bars between communists and non-communists. The Binh Xuyen embraced the nationalist cause in 1945, but distrusted communists and the leader they had chosen to run the military show in the south, Nguyen Binh. Bay Vien finally broke with the DRV in mid-1948 as French intelligence officers adroitly steered his entourage toward the creation of an anticommunist state led by Bao Dai (see chapter 8).
That said, loyalties and strategies did not remain static. Unlike the civil war in the north, communism was not the only thing dividing the Vietnamese in the south. The creation of a modern, unitary nation-state, and the incorporation of what had been the separate colony of Cochinchina, was also a major source of friction. Local leaders, peoples, and identities often opposed the DRV government’s attempt to assert central control and impose a new national identity over the south. The French would try to turn this friction to their advantage by according special privileges and autonomy to particular groups, hoping to divide in order to rule. But the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen were actors too, perfectly capable of ‘playing’ the colonizers to their advantage in order preserve their autonomous proto-states in the delta. It was only in 1955, during the Battle of Saigon, that Ngo Dinh Diem would finally achieve what Nguyen Binh had failed to do in 1947—to defeat the Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Binh Xuyen in order to create one sovereign nation-state, the Republic of Vietnam. It was no accident that Diem drove out the French at the same time.