Acknowledgments

Tonnesson, Vietnam 8/11/09 5:05 PM Page xvii Acknowledgments e present book has come about in three stages. I first wrote an MA thesis at the University of Oslo in 1981–82, which I published as a report of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), in 1984. For introducing me to archival work and historical reasoning, I want to thank my supervisor at the University of Oslo, Helge Ø. Pharo, my supervisor at PRIO, the late Marek ee, David G. Marr, who treated me as if I were already an accomplished scholar when we first met in the French colonial archives, Alain Ruscio and Odette Vilmont, with whom I could discuss every detail of the 1946 events, and above all Philippe Devillers, who received me in Paris in October 1981, briefed me on his own experiences and research on the 1945–46 period, and put me on the right track in the archives. Neither his nor Marr’s or my work would have been possible without the wonderful help we got from the archivists. My good friends in the archives provided invaluable support both at the first and second stage. It feels natural for me to choose Lucette Vachier at the Centre des archives d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence to represent all of them. Second, I wrote a book in French on the basis of the MA thesis, which was published in Paris by l’Harmattan in 1987 under the title 1946: Déclenchement de la guerre d’Indochine: Les vêpres tonkinoises du 19 décembre. For this period I should acknowledge the assistance I received from Bruno Metz, who not only translated the manuscript from English to French, but also contributed manifold suggestions on content and argument, as well as from my editor, Alain Forest, who reorganized much of the book and made it more readable. I would also like to thank the Re- search Council of Norway, who supported both the publication and me, and the Institute of Defense Studies in Oslo, who hosted me at the time. And thanks go to the late Huynh Kim Khanh, who put me in touch with l’Harmattan, aer discus- ii Tonnesson, Vietnam 8/11/09 5:05 PM Page xviii iii Acknowledgments sions with Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery at the Université de Paris VII at Jussieu, and Denis Pryen at l’Harmattan, who sees no problem in allowing me to publish a new, updated English version of the book he published in 1987. In between the second and the third stage came a long period when I worked on other subjects, the Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, nation-building in Southeast Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, and the history of the dispute in the South China Sea. In 1989, I visited Vietnam for the first time and was exceptionally well received at the Institute of International Relations, the Institute of History of the National Centre for Social Sciences, and the Department of History at the University of Hanoi. I par- ticularly want to thank my friends at the Institute of International Relations, above all Luu Doan Huynh, Nguyen Vu Tung, Duong Quoc anh and Hoang Anh Tuan, who have always been ready to host and help me. I visited Vietnam multiple times aer 1989, and got many chances to discuss my findings and queries on the outbreak of the Indochina War in 1946 with Vietnam’s military, diplomatic, and political historians, notably Bui Dinh anh, Duong Kinh Quoc, Trinh Dao Hung, Duong Trung Quoc, and not least Dinh Xuan Lam, who found time, along with his own research on nineteenth-century Vietnam, to translate my French book into Vietnamese. I also had the opportunity to befriend and discuss Vietnamese history with internation- ally recognized Vietnam scholars such as Pierre Brocheux, Laurent Césari, William J. Duiker, Charles Fourniau, Lloyd Gardner, Daniel Hémery, Gary Hess, Robert J. McMahon, Irene Nørlund, Phan Huy Le, Alain Ruscio, Masaya Shiraishi, Anthony Short, Hugues Tertrais, the late Ralph B. Smith, Judith Stowe, Martin Stuart-Fox, and Marilyn young, and got a chance to take part in two U.S.-Vietnamese conferences, where a team around former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara discussed the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam with Vietnamese diplomats and military officers. Back in 1982, David Marr, Alain Ruscio, Odette Vilmont, and I were the only historians working on the French Indochina files, while the reading rooms of the colonial archives were crowded with North African scholars working on the histo- ries of their countries. Wedealt with different worlds; in the breaks I talked so much about the French colonial administrator Léon Pignon that a French scholar on North Africa, Olivier Vergniot, started calling me Petit Pignon (Little Kernel). With the worsening intellectual climate in the 1990s, the North African scholars disappeared from the reading rooms. I missed them, but took great pleasure in witnessing a new generation of Vietnam historians from many countries filling up the reading rooms and scholarly conferences, and producing wonderful papers, theses, and books: Mark Bradley, Robert Brigham, Chen Jian, Anne Foster, Ilya Gaiduk, Gilles de Gantes, Christophe Giebel, Christopher E. Goscha, François Guillemot, Andrew Hardy, Eric Jennings, Pierre Journoux, Vladimir Kolotov, Agathe Larcher, Philippe LeFailler, Lin Hua, Fred Logevall, Shawn McHale, Nguyen Van Ky,Mari Olsen, Qiang zhai, Sophie Quinn-Judge, Martin Shipway, Martin omas, Frédéric Turpin, Claire Tran i Lien, Benoit de Tréglodé, Daniel Varga, and Peter zinoman, to name Tonnesson, Vietnam 8/11/09 5:05 PM Page xix Acknowledgments i but some. In February 2008, Claire Tran i Lien organized a seminar in Paris on Vietnam 1946, with Philippe Devillers and myself as speakers. If one of the young should be mentioned in particular, it would have to be Frédéric Turpin. He is one of the few Vietnam historians whom I’ve never met, but I greatly admire his 666- page study De Gaulle, les gaullistes et l’Indochine (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2005). In 2001, I became director of PRIO, the same institute who hosted my work as a graduate student 1981–82 and as a doctoral student in 1988–91. When Chris Goscha and Fred Logevall contacted me in 2005, asking if I was willing to write a new book for their University of California Press series, on the basis of my 1984 report and my 1987 French book, I first thought it would be impossible to manage while at the same time fulfilling my duties at PRIO, but my deputy director, Kris- tian Berg Harpviken, agreed to lead PRIO during my most intense periods of work, and Chris Goscha and Fred Logevall provided such encouragement and valuable advice that I managed to surmount the third stage of this book’s production, merge the two former manuscripts, translate back from French to English, add a chapter based on an article I had published on the March 6, 1946 agreement, include ma- terial published by my colleagues since the 1980s, and write a completely new in- troduction and conclusion. At this third stage my main gratitude goes primarily to Chris and Fred, but almost equally to Philippe Devillers and David Marr who read and commented on the manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to Chu Duc inh, director of the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi, Trieu Van Hien, director of the Museum of Revolution in Hanoi, and director of the Museum of His- tory in Hanoi, Pham Quoc Quan, for providing me with new evidence in the sum- mer of 2007, for allowing me to use their holdings, and for authorizing the repro- duction of some of their exhibits as illustrations. My thanks go also to my relative Tor Fuglevik, who photographed the painting that is used on the cover of the book, and to Tran Kieu, a leading personality among the Norwegian Vietnamese Dias- pora, as well as my friend Ha Hoang Hop in Hanoi, who both helped me to read some key Vietnamese texts, and who provided me with valuable advice. Two important sources to Vietnamese decision-making during the wars in Viet- nam are General Vo Nguyen Giap’s most recent memoirs, and a new biography of Giap by the Vietnamese historian Tran Trong Trung. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Tran Trong Trung for our discussions in the past, and to General Giap himself for taking time to read Devillers’sand my work; for having the courage to reflect on our queries in several interviews and later in his memoirs; for bluntly telling me on September 18, 1992 that “we” took the initiative in the fighting on December 19, 1946; for allowing me to attend when, on June 23, 1997, he discarded Robert McNamara’s suggestion that both sides, not just the Americans, had made mistakes in the Vietnam War; and for receiving me in his villa on December 20, 2005, to express an old warrior’s wish for peace. Tonnesson, Vietnam 8/11/09 5:05 PM Page xx This page intentionally left blank.

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