A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (26 page)

After Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman facilitated the French venture of reconquest. The new president and those who advised him thought they had sufficient reason to sacrifice the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Lao to French notions of the white man’s burden. Although the United States was courting the assistance of the Soviet Union for the final campaign to crush Japan in April 1945, Truman and his associates already saw Russia as a future menace. W. Averell Harriman, another of the architects of the postwar foreign policy, who was then ambassador to Moscow, rushed home in a B-24 bomber specially outfitted for him as a long-range transport plane to alert Truman that they might well face a “barbarian invasion of Europe.” To construct a postwar Western Europe where Soviet power would be excluded and American power firmly entrenched, Truman and his statesmen needed the cooperation of France. They wanted the use of French ports, airfields, and military bases to counter the presumed threat from Stalin’s Red Army. They believed that France’s nineteenth-century colonialism was probably unworkable in the postwar world. They felt morally uneasy about their connivance in its return to Indochina, and they were worried that France might be stepping into a conflict of indefinite duration and cost. Nevertheless, Truman confirmed Roosevelt’s decision. In May 1945, four months before anyone could know what sort of Vietnamese government would appear in Hanoi, he permitted Georges Bidault, de Gaulle’s foreign minister, to be told that the United States had never questioned, “even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.” Truman followed FDR’s inclination and let the British take the public onus for bringing back the French. They were happy to do so in the hope of stabilizing their own possessions. It was a joke among American officers in the China-Burma-India Theater that the initials of Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies.” This was, in fact, the command’s main purpose.

Maj. Gen. Douglas Gracey arrived in Saigon on September 13, 1945, with a mixed force of Gurkhas, other Indian Army troops, and French parachutists. He freed and rearmed the French soldiers of the Vichy garrison, whom the Japanese had disarmed and imprisoned that March after four and a half years of collaboration, and ordered the Japanese to join with his forces and the French to drive the Viet Minh out of the city. The disarming of the 17,000 Japanese troops in the South was postponed for several months so that they could assist in suppressing the Vietnamese. Everything was done in the name of “restoring order.” At the beginning of October, more French soldiers sailed up from Trincomalee,
the Royal Navy base on Ceylon, in British transports, accompanied by the French battleship
Richelieu
, which would lend the men ashore the support of her big guns, and a destroyer aptly named to inspire confidence at such a moment,
Triumphant
. Gen. Jacques Philippe Leclerc, the liberator of Paris, flew to Saigon to take charge. He started pushing out of the city in mid-October, reinforced by the British Indian troops and the Japanese, and penetrated far enough into the Mekong Delta to seize My Tho on October 25. Can Tho, the main city in the Delta, fell at the end of the month. By the beginning of December 1945, Leclerc had 21,500 French troops in the South, including the 2nd Armored Division and its American tanks, which he had used to liberate Paris. Truman approved a British request to turn eight hundred Lend-Lease jeeps and trucks over to the French. He claimed that it would be impractical to remove them from Vietnam. The French also obtained through U.S. Lend-Lease most of the many landing craft and a number of the large warships that they deployed to Indochina to launch the reconquest. The first French aircraft carrier to bomb the Viet Minh, the
Dixmunde
, was an American vessel and her pilots flew American planes—Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers made famous by the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the fall of 1945 the U.S. Navy helped open the way for the French landing at Haiphong and the penetration of the North that Kitts was to witness in the spring of 1946. Employing Japanese minesweepers and crews for part of the work, the Navy cleared the Haiphong harbor channel of American mines that had been sown during the war to block Japanese and Vichy French shipping.

With seized German aircraft and other materiel to add to their World War II American gear, the French had enough implements of combat to carry them through 1946. Three weeks after the war of no return began in Hanoi that December, the State Department informed the French government that it could buy what arms it wished in the United States, “except in cases which appear to relate to Indochina.” This meant that France could divert all of the weapons and ammunition it still held in Europe and elsewhere to Indochina and replenish stocks with new American armament. In 1947, Truman granted France a $160 million credit to buy vehicles and related equipment explicitly for Indochina. That same year the Marshall Plan began to revive France’s economy with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, making the colonial war less of a strain. The State Department classified all of Ho Chi Minh’s letters and telegrams and the memorandum of his last conversation with a first secretary at the Paris embassy Top Secret and locked them away. They
were not to be published until a quarter of a century later in the Pentagon Papers.

Requirements of high strategy were not the full explanation for American behavior. There were other, less seemly reasons. Yellow and brown men forgot in listening to the rhetoric of American presidents that the United States was a status quo power with a great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests. The emergence of the United States as the world’s leading status quo power with its victory in World War II had enlarged this capacity to rationalize beyond any apparent limits. Hopeful Asians who looked to the United States for protection also did not understand that American attitudes toward them were influenced by a racism so profound that Americans usually did not realize they were applying a racist double standard in Asia. The lyrics of the World War II ditty sung on the assembly lines of America had been:

The Japs were not worse; the Germans were. The Germans were the dangerous and fiendish enemy. Japan never possessed the military potential to threaten the existence of the United States; Germany did. The urgency behind the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb came from the realization of the American and émigré European scientists that Hitler might be ahead in a race to construct these “superbombs” with which to give the United States and Britain the choice of surrender or annihilation. Japan’s World War II technological capacity was so limited that its navy was forced to fight blind at night and in bad weather because the development of radar, let alone nuclear weapons, was beyond Japanese wartime science and industry. In contrast to the satanic planning and efficiency with which the Nazis used the facilities of an industrialized society to liquidate 12 million persons in the concentration camps (6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews from the occupied countries), the Japanese atrocities, however barbarous and cruel, were haphazard.

Americans feared and hated the two foes in inverse proportion to the threat each posed. The market-research pollsters in the Treasury Department
discovered that advertising that relied on racist hate propaganda against the Japanese sold more war bonds than anti-German hatemongering. Their polls showed that the average American viewed Japanese as “ungodly, subhuman, beastly, sneaky, and treacherous.” The war-bond drives therefore concentrated on toothy “Nips.” The FBI arrested some of the more prominent American Nazis in the Bund. Otherwise, German-Americans were not disturbed, except for the heckling of neighborhood children.

After Pearl Harbor there was a wave of hysterical rumors in California and the other West Coast states, encouraged by the press and the Army, that Japanese-Americans were signaling submarines, sending secret radio transmissions to invasion fleets, caching arms, and drawing maps with which to guide the Nipponese hordes after they landed. An attempt to organize a program of voluntary resettlement inland failed because no one would have the Japanese. The reply of the governor of Idaho was typical: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats. We don’t want them.” The Army rounded up more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the spring of 1942, 60,000 of whom were U.S. citizens by birth, and herded them into concentration camps in barren and arid federal reservations in the West. The governor of California tried to have them employed on their way to the camps as menial agricultural labor. The Supreme Court approved what has since been recognized as the greatest violation of civil liberties in the history of the Republic.

Not a single case of espionage or other disloyal conduct was ever discovered among Japanese-Americans. The Army had the gall to ask the Nisei of military age (Nisei is the Japanese-American term for those born in the United States) to fight. Their families still had to remain in the camps for the duration of the war. Surprisingly, 1,200 Nisei did volunteer to prove their patriotism. Others permitted themselves to be drafted without complaint. Their 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed around a Nisei battalion recruited in Hawaii, became one of the most highly decorated regiments in the Army and won four Presidential Unit Citations for valor in Italy and France. The regimental motto, chosen by the men, was “Remember Pearl Harbor.” The Army permitted them to kill Caucasian Germans, but otherwise segregated these Japanese-Americans from white men, just as it then segregated blacks.

Had the Vietnamese been white Europeans, Roosevelt and Truman would not have consigned them so readily to the tortures of colonial conquest. Human considerations would have mitigated strategic ones. Truman’s high-minded warning in his October 1945 Navy Day speech that the United States would refuse to “recognize any government imposed
on any nation by the force of any foreign power”—the twelve-point Wilsonian declaration that had encouraged Ho to appeal to him for protection against the French—showed that the racist double standard of the American statesman had not changed since Wilson’s time. Truman’s words were directed at the Soviet Union for imposing its rule on the white nations of Eastern Europe. He was upset by Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe. There is no indication he was disturbed by the atrocities the French had been committing for a month in their campaign to reconquer the Saigon region and the Mekong Delta. Nor is there any evidence that he or anyone else in a senior position in the U.S. government became seriously upset about the greater atrocities, such as the November 1946 slaughter of 6,000 Vietnamese civilians in Haiphong, which the French were to commit during their subsequent campaign in the North.

Ho and his Communist-led Viet Minh were a happenstance that was not without some benefit to American statesmen. The emergence of Communists at the head of the Vietnamese Revolution gave the leaders of the United States a conscience-salving reason to do in Vietnam what Washington had intended to do there in any case. The men in Washington swiftly forgot the original circumstances and told themselves, to justify inflicting on the Vietnamese the sufferings of a war that was to endure for seven and a half more years, that they were preventing the spread of Soviet (soon to be Sino-Soviet) imperialism in Southeast Asia. Succeeding generations of American statesmen, who never examined the past because they too were so certain of what they wanted to do, were to tell themselves the same thing.

Ho Chi Minh and his disciples became Communists through an accident of French politics. They were mandarins, Vietnamese aristocrats, the natural leaders of a people whom foreigners have repeatedly sought and failed to conquer and pacify. There are a small number of such peoples on the earth. The Irish are one. The Vietnamese are another. The violence of their resistance forms history and legend to remind the living that they must never shame the dead.

The Vietnamese derived their precolonial system of government from China. The country was ruled by an emperor who governed through a hierarchy of mandarins. The Vietnamese emperor was a replica in miniature of the Chinese “Son of Heaven,” and his mandarins were scholar-administrators who acquired their positions by demonstrating proficiency in the Confucian classics through a national examination
system modeled on the Chinese one. As in China, the mandarins also developed into a class, the scholar-bureaucracy becoming a scholar-aristocracy, because landless peasants and poor farmers were unable to afford the cost of educating their sons for the examinations.

French colonialism corrupted the Vietnamese mandarin class. In order to keep their places, the majority of the mandarin families served the French, became agents of the foreigner, and lost the legitimacy of their claim to national leadership. They became socially depraved too. With its state monopolies to encourage the sale of alcohol and opium, forced-labor conditions on the rubber plantations, and other abuses, French colonialism was highly exploitive. The mandarins who collaborated had to participate daily in crimes against their own people. After a time they and their families no longer felt the sense of guilt that such atrocities would normally have aroused in them. A minority among the mandarins refused to bow their heads to the European barbarians. Their refusal brought about their humiliation and impoverishment, but it was later to be the salvation of family and country. They preserved their pride and a conviction that they were the spiritual heirs of the heroes of the Vietnamese past. They kept their place as the natural leaders of the society in the eyes of a peasantry which also retained a memory of national resistance to foreign rule. They aroused in themselves and passed on to their descendants an anger that would not be satisfied until the nation was rid of outside domination. The leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party came chiefly from these families and from mandarin families that splintered under the ordeal of colonialism, with some members collaborating while others held true.