Embers of War (17 page)

The interagency discussion yielded, in late April, a State Department recommendation that the United States not oppose a French return to Indochina but merely seek assurances from Paris that it would grant more self-government and increased local autonomy to the Indochinese people. Though termed a compromise, the recommendation in fact marked a sharp departure from previous U.S. policy. As such, it stands as a pivotal moment in the long history of American involvement in Vietnam. “The recommendation,” historian Ronald Spector has written, “was a long step away from Roosevelt’s unwavering insistence on creating a trusteeship.”
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The differences, to be sure, did not go away. As we shall see, there were still those in Washington who were convinced that the United States was on the wrong side of history in supporting French colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia. At the field level in Indochina itself, that conviction was even more widely held. But the thrust of high-level policy was now plainly going in a new direction, which is evident in hindsight but was perceived as well by many at the time. When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not raise the issue of trusteeship for Indochina. On the contrary, U.S. secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured French foreign minister Georges Bidault with remarkable aplomb that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the U.S. government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.” James Dunn of the State Department’s European desk, a deeply conservative man whom Eleanor Roosevelt once called a “fascist” for his views on colonial matters, spoke in similar terms in San Francisco and worked hard behind the scenes to create a pro-French consensus. A report prepared for Harry Truman on June 2 acknowledged that “independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong” but declared that “the United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina.” When Truman met Chiang Kai-shek in Washington some weeks later, he dismissed any notion of trusteeship for Indochina.
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All this brought smiles to French lips. Paris officials had come to San Francisco in an aggressive mood and had worked hard, both there and in other meetings with U.S. officials in Washington and Paris, to induce the Truman administration to abandon formally any notion of an international trusteeship for Indochina. As Georges Bidault insisted at every opportunity during these weeks, the decision regarding Indochina’s future rested with France alone. Now U.S. leaders were in effect saying they agreed. Perceptive French analysts understood that they still faced potential problems with the Americans—Washington had not indicated any active
support
for French efforts in the Far East, and even the new administration seemed annoyingly sympathetic to the pleas of nationalists throughout the colonial world—but they were relieved nonetheless.

The general thrust of U.S. policy on Indochina was confirmed when American, British, and Soviet leaders convened in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam in July. Nazi Germany had surrendered in May, and the Allies now gathered to determine the postwar order and to clarify and implement agreements made previously at Yalta. De Gaulle was not invited, despite his persistent efforts to gain representation. He had earned Washington’s and London’s ire for sending French troops to the former French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, both of which had recently established their independence, and for proceeding with plans to make territorial “adjustments” in the Val d’Aosta area of northwestern Italy. U.S. officials, embarrassed by this defiance at a time when Truman was lecturing the Soviets about their heavy-handed actions in Eastern Europe, left de Gaulle off the Potsdam guest list.
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Notwithstanding de Gaulle’s absence from the meeting, or because of it, French interests regarding Indochina fared well—in the short term, at least. The long-standing dispute between Mountbatten and Wedemeyer over theater boundaries was resolved in a way that benefited French aims. Mountbatten’s SEAC operations would thenceforth include Indochina south of the sixteenth parallel (just below Tourane), while China would be in charge north of that line. American resources and attention could thus be focused on preparing for the final thrust against the Japanese home islands, but it also opened the door to Franco-British cooperation in securing French control over the colony. U.S. officials also agreed to let French officials participate in surrender ceremonies throughout Indochina (that is, even in the Chinese-controlled north) and to involve French forces in the Far East in order to hasten that surrender.
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Yet in a different sense the Potsdam agreement worked against French aims and in favor of Ho Chi Minh’s, though this would become clear only in time. The Chinese occupation of the northern half of Vietnam looked likely to complicate Paris’s plan to rebuild the colonial state. And so indeed it would. The Viet Minh would be given vital time to build up their forces and cement their authority in Tonkin, with hugely important implications for the war to come. Among many Vietnamese intellectuals, meanwhile, the conviction would take hold that France’s exclusion from the conference constituted further proof that she had become a second-rate, expendable power.

For now, however, de Gaulle delighted in the fact that he could dispatch to the region an Expeditionary Corps for the Far East. As leader of the mission, de Gaulle selected General Philippe Leclerc, the celebrated commander of the French Second Armored Division that had liberated Paris the previous year. Leclerc indicated a preference for a Moroccan assignment, but the general prevailed on him to go to Asia. Indochina, he told Leclerc, presented a vital and difficult challenge, but one that it was well within France’s power to meet.

The Pacific War ended before Leclerc’s force had a chance to intervene. On August 15, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. The Japanese, whose actions since 1940 had done so much to transform French Indochina, now promised to create more upheaval, this time by leaving the scene. There would be a vacuum of power, all informed observers could see, and the question was who would fill it. Charles de Gaulle, for one, seemingly had little doubt. On August 15, he sent a message from “the Mother Country to the Indochinese Union,” expressing France’s “joy, solicitude, and gratitude” for Indochina’s “loyalty to France” and her resistance to the Japanese. Even as he uttered those words, however, in the jungles of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh readied to make a triumphant entry into Hanoi. Their message to the crowds awaiting them: With Japan defeated and France prostrate, the moment of liberation was at hand.
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CHAPTER 4
“ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL”

H
ANOI WOULD BE THE EPICENTER OF THE UPHEAVAL, THE PLACE
where Ho Chi Minh, on a stifling-hot September day in 1945, in front of hundreds of thousands, would proclaim Vietnamese independence: Hanoi, with its wide boulevards, shady trees, and formal gardens, its ornate pastel-colored buildings erected to the glory of France at the turn of the century and in the interwar years. Physically compact, contained by the Red River to the north and the east, and surrounded by paddy fields on the other sides, its many lakes were a reminder to the visitor that the site was once little more than a swamp.

From the start, the French had invested the city’s architecture with important symbolic power, to signify colonial authority. Major buildings constructed in the French neoclassical style included the Governor-General’s Palace, the Opera House, St. Joseph’s Cathedral, and the Hanoi railway station. The Paul Doumer (later Long Bien) bridge, built around the turn of the century on a design by the company of Gustave Eiffel, was a major engineering feat, being 1.7 kilometers long and spanning a Red River that shifted from year to year. Along the fashionable rue Paul Bert, French shops sprang up as the century turned, as did innumerable sidewalk cafés.
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An American visitor to the city, Henry G. Bryant, president of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, liked what he saw. Hanoi, he commented in 1909, “is indeed a creditable creation of the French colonizing spirit, with its broad avenues, stately government buildings, sunny parks, and good hotel.… Should fate decree that I be exiled to the French colonies of Asia, Hanoi would be my choice as an abiding place.” Another American, Harry Franck, said after a visit in the mid-1920s: “It is quite a city, with expensive modern buildings, electric street-cars—found nowhere else in the colony—railways in four directions, many automobiles, both of the taxi-cab and private limousine variety, several excellent hotels; in short, it is a little Paris of the tropics, with some advantages that even Paris does not have.”
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Many Vietnamese too were attracted by the city’s bright lights. “Perhaps on nights when there are no moon and stars, the peasants in Nam Dinh, Thai Binh, Hai Duong, Bac Ninh, Son Tay, and Hoa Binh go out into their courtyards and see a shining halo,” the author Vu Trong Phung said. “There, hovering over a thousand years of culture and glowing with easy riches, what the peasants see is the halo over Hanoi, and they are still leaving their villages for it!” Once there, some became willing collaborators with the colonizers; others became disillusioned and returned to their villages; most sought merely to eke out an existence for themselves and their families. Over time, however, as we’ve seen, many joined the movement for independence, which took a great many forms but which was always centered in the urban areas of Vietnam. More than any place, it came to be centered in Hanoi.
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When Ho entered the city on August 26, it was for the first time. He had risen from his provincial Nghe An upbringing to travel to the far reaches of the globe—to Paris, to London, to New York City—and to become a nationalist leader, yet only now, at age fifty-five, did he set foot in his country’s cultural and political center. Almost four decades the journey had taken. In the immediate sense, the trip had started four days earlier, when Ho left Tan Trao by foot and by boat, bound for the capital. Still weak from his illness, he had to be carried part of the way on a stretcher, and after crossing the Red River on the twenty-fifth, the entourage halted in the northern suburbs of Hanoi. The next day, accompanied by Party Secretary Truong Chinh in a commandeered car, Ho crossed the Doumer Bridge and made for a three-story row house on Hang Nhang Street, in the Chinese section of town.
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It was a heady time for Ho Chi Minh and his comrades, the critical stage of what would become known as the August Revolution. Things had moved rapidly since news reached Tonkin of the atomic bombings and Japan’s collapse. Already on August 11, as rumors circulated that Tokyo was about to surrender, members of the Indochinese Communist Party regional committee began to prepare for an insurrection to seize Hanoi from the Japanese. Two days later Viet Minh leaders from many parts of the country met in Tan Trao to the north for a previously scheduled party conference (to be known in history as the Ninth Plenum) and reached a resolution that a nationwide insurrection should occur immediately to bring about an independent republic under the leadership of the Viet Minh. Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho issued an “appeal to the people.” “Dear fellow countrymen!” he declared. “The decisive hour has struck for the destiny of our people. Let all of us stand up and rely on our own strength to free ourselves. Many oppressed peoples the world over are vying with each other in wresting back independence. We should not lag behind. Forward! Forward! Under the banner of the Viet Minh, let us valiantly march forward!”
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Much more than they would later acknowledge, Viet Minh leaders rode to power on the wave of suffering in the north, caused by the famine that had hit earlier in the year and further strengthened by the overthrow of the French and the defeat of the Japanese.
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In official Vietnamese historiography, this dimension is largely absent; Ho and his colleagues are depicted as the masters of events, directing developments from the top. Their decisions and actions were important, but there is no question that they were beneficiaries of an upswell of protest from below.

Throughout the third week of August, Viet Minh forces took control in towns and villages in various parts of Annam and Tonkin. Resistance was usually minimal, as local authorities simply handed over power to the insurgents and as Japanese forces, now part of a defeated empire, stayed neutral. In Hanoi on August 19, Viet Minh forces seized control of all important public buildings except the Japanese-guarded Bank of Indochina, and announced their seizure of power from a balcony of what was then and remains today the Hanoi Opera House. For the first time since Francis Garnier seized it for France in 1873, the city was in Vietnamese hands. In Hue, Emperor Bao Dai announced he would support a government led by Ho Chi Minh, but a mass rally in Hanoi demanded that he abdicate his throne. He did so on August 25, declaring his support for the Viet Minh regime and handing over the imperial sword to the new national government, with all the legitimacy that that symbolic act conferred.
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A young female medical student observed the scene:

The Royal Family was grouped on the left-hand side of the courtyard. The crowd was thronging on the right. Suddenly, a man’s voice cried out: “From this day on, royalty is abolished in Vietnam. Bao Dai is from here on the simple citizen Vinh Thuy. And now, citizen Vinh Thuy has permission to speak.” Next, Emperor Bao Dai, who looked very young, stepped forward. He addressed the crowd: “Citizens, let me be understood. I prefer to be a free citizen than an enslaved king.”
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