Indo-China: Rise of the Viet Minh

• First published in Purnell & Sons Ltd., History of the Second World War, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1968

n 15 July 1941, Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's envoy to the Vichy O Government, was warned by Admiral Darlan that Japan would shortly occupy bases in French Indo-China 'for the purpose of projecting military operations southward'. Ever since the fall of France, Japanese pressure had been applied to acquire control over Indo-China, and as it became obvious that the French administration there could obtain no help from Great Britain or the United States, it was compelled, concession by hard-fought concession, to give in to the Japanese demands. Washington reacted quickly to Darlan's hint, and four days later Leahy conveyed a warning to France in terms of crude power politics. 'It was necessary to say bluntly,' he later wrote, 'that if Japan was the winner, the Japanese would take over French Indo-China; and if the Allies won, we would take it.' Two years later, in unbelievably cavalier fashion, Roosevelt offered Indo-China to Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference ('The first thing I asked Chiang was, Do you want Indo-China?) and Chiang refused on the grounds that the inhabitants would not 'assimilate' with the Chinese. But Roosevelt and his advisers were determined that the French should not have their colony back, and even after his death his attitude was reflected in the behaviour of such American units as the OSS whose representatives might have done much to assist the French to return, in the early days after the surrender ofJapan, had they been so minded. French Indo-China was a rich prize. Consisting of the protected states of Annam, Tonkin, Laos and Cambodia, and the colony of Cochin-China, with Saigon as its capital, it had an area of nearly 300,000 square miles and a population of some 23,000,000. It was easily the most prosperous part of the French Empire, the world's third most important exporter of rice, with considerable mineral deposits. It had land frontiers with China, Burma and Siam, and was within easy reach of Singapore, Borneo, and the Philippines. The French had treated it as a source of raw materials and as a market for French goods and there had been little attempt to educate the people or to provide them with modem means of military defence. Some 50,000 French troops garrisoned the country, but to defend its long coastline it had only one cruiser and four cutters. A mere twenty-five modem planes constituted its air force. Small wonder that the Governor-General General Catroux, when no British or American help was forthcoming, decided to capitulate to Japanese demands on 20 June 1940. The railway line from the port of Haiphong into South China was to be

312 INDOCHINA: RISE OF THE VIET MINH closed to supplies for Chiang Kai-shek, and a Japanese control mission would be on the spot to enforce the closure. Irritated by Catroux's independent action, and even more by his known sympathies for de Gaulle, Vichy replaced him by Vice-Admiral Decoux, who in his turn spent the war years giving in to further Japanese demands in an attempt to preserve the integrity of Indo-China and France's rule over it, under constant threat of a total Japanese military occupation.

VICHY IN VIETNAM Decoux applied Vichy's repressive laws, and thousands of political prisoners found their way to the infamous penal island of Poulo Condore. There were threats on the land frontiers as well as rumblings from within: a frontier war with a Japanese supported Siam ended with the loss of Cambodian and Laotian territory. On the other hand, Decoux made some attempt to cope with Indo-China's wartime shortages of oil, petrol, chemicals, and textiles, and opened the higher ranks of the administration to the Annamite (Vietnamese) population. But he put an end to electoral democracy. After the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris, Decoux's Petainist line was modified. He contacted de Gaulle and in November 1944 was instructed to retain his post, to deceive the Japanese into thinking that the French intended no immediate military action against them in Indo-China. Japan forestalled any possible move by French troops on 9 March 1945, when she took over the country completely, after a short but bitter resistance by the French garrison, notably at Lang Son and Dong Dang in the north, where the Japanese massacred the survivors. They then prevailed upon the young Emperor of Annam, Bao Dai, to denounce the French protectorate and proclaim the independence of the country under its earlier name, Vietnam, which he did two days after the Japanese coup d'exat. A nationalist government of middle class intellectuals was formed under the scholar Tran Trong Kim, but it proved incapable of carrying out its first and most important task, moving the rice of the south to starving Tonkin (where hundreds of thousands died of famine in 1945), and its writ did not run in the former colony of Cochin-China in the far south, which the Japanese kept firmly under their own military control. Only towards the end of the war, when the Japanese realised their days were numbered, did they permit Bao Dai to take over Cochin-China. But by then another figure had appeared on the scene. Among the various nationalist groups, political and religious, one movement had been as hostile to Japanese as to French control: the Indo-Chinese Communist Party under its leader Nguyen Ai Quoc, later, and better, known as Ho Chi Minh. Once a restaurant worker in Britain and France, an accomplished linguist and a puritanically dedicated patriot, Ho had taken part in the Chinese Communist movement in Canton, where he had founded the Revolutionary Youth Association to work in Indo-China. Ho knew that conditions were not ripe for Communism: Indo-China had a peasantry, but lacked an industrial proletariat, and the country would first have to achieve independence under a bourgeois democratic regime. There had been savage police repression of nationalist movements in the 1920s and 1930s, and Ho had worked in obscurity. In the spring of 1941, various left-wing Vietnamese revolutionary groups held a congress in South China, close to the Tonkin border, at which Ho and his party agreed to join a united front against the French, to be called the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi ('League for the Independence of Vietnam'), Viet Minh for short. Its aim was 'the union of all anti-Fascist forces in the struggle against French and Japanese colonialism until all Vietnam is liberated'. (First Viet Minh manifesto, 25

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