Embers of War (8 page)

The agreement stipulated that the first Japanese units would arrive by sea. But the Twenty-second Army was intent on moving its elite Fifth Infantry Division across the Chinese border near Lang Son at precisely 10
P.M
. Not long after crossing the frontier, the Japanese units became engaged in a fierce firefight near the French position at Dong Dang. Almost immediately, skirmishing also began at other frontier posts. For two days the battle raged, with the key French position of Lang Son falling on the twenty-fifth. The French forces had suffered a major defeat—two posts were gone, casualties were significant (estimates run to 150 dead on the French side), and hundreds of Indochinese riflemen deserted in the course of the battle. It might have been much worse had not Decoux and Baudouin appealed directly to Tokyo and had not the emperor personally ordered his troops to halt their advance. The Japanese apologized for the incident and termed it a “dreadful mistake,” but they had made their point: Governor-General Decoux and the French might still be the rulers of Indochina, but they operated at the mercy of Japan.
²⁶

Decoux did his best to pretend otherwise. To anyone who would listen, he claimed that the Japanese were not an occupying force but were merely
stationed
in the country; that the French administration functioned freely and without impediment; and that the police and security services were solely in French hands. The tricolor, he noted, continued to fly over his headquarters in Hanoi. And indeed, French authority in Indochina remained formidable, as Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party learned firsthand in the fall of 1940. Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin and Cochin China against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed. In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process. Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed. Not until early 1945 would the party’s southern branch recover from this defeat.
²⁷

III

YET IN THIS GLOOMIEST OF HOURS FOR THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNISTS
would occur one of the key developments in the thirty-five-year struggle for Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had objected to the uprisings, considering them premature, but he was convinced that, with international events moving fast and Decoux’s government isolated from metropolitan France, the potential for revolution in Vietnam was much enhanced. Along with other party leaders, he determined that there should be a plenary meeting of the party’s Central Committee in the spring of 1941. For symbolic reasons, they agreed, the meeting should occur on Vietnamese soil. In the early weeks of that year, Ho Chi Minh slipped across the frontier from China by sampan and set up headquarters in a cave near the hamlet of Pac Bo, in Cao Bang province. It was the first time in three decades he had set foot in his native country. And it was not far inside either—Pac Bo, which Ho reached by traversing forty miles through thick jungle growth and over steep mountains, was less than a mile from the Chinese frontier. Near the cave ran a small stream that Ho named for his hero Lenin and a massive outgrowth that he dubbed Karl Marx Peak.

The living conditions were austere: The group slept on planks of wood in the cold and damp cave and had only one small oil lamp among them. The diet was meager, mostly soup of corn and bamboo shoots, fortified by fish caught in the stream. Each morning Ho woke up early to do calisthenics and then swim in the stream before sitting down to work at a flat rock he used as a desk. He spent long hours reading, writing—on his trusted Hermès typewriter—and conducting meetings, all for the purpose of setting up a new Communist-dominated united front and outlining a strategy for liberating Vietnam from foreign rule. Ho and his colleagues formalized their plans at what would become known as the Eighth Plenum of the Indochinese Communist Party, which convened at the Pac Bo camp for nine days in mid-May 1941. The delegates sat on simple wood blocks around a bamboo table, and out of their discussions a new party came into being. Its official title was Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam—or, for history, the Viet Minh. Dang Xuan Khu, alias Truong Chinh (“Long March” in Vietnamese), an intellectual who had been with the ICP since its creation and had edited a party journal, became acting general secretary.
²⁸

Led by Ho Chi Minh, the delegates set a basic policy that would in time enable this small minority to capture the seething nationalism of Vietnam and make it theirs, and to bring disaster upon first France and then the United States. The longing to be free from foreign domination was the most potent force in Vietnam, Ho reminded his colleagues, which meant that the Viet Minh had to be a patriotic, broad-based movement, directed against both French colonial rule and the growing Japanese presence in the country. Women would play a vital role in the effort, and should be given equal rights. The result, notes historian Huynh Kim Khanh, was a “radical redefinition of the nature and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution,” away from the class struggle and toward national liberation. This emphasis on patriotism can be seen in the organization’s name, which not only stressed the issue of independence but replaced the word
Indochina
with the singular
Vietnam
.
²⁹

“National Salvation is the common cause to the whole of our people,” Ho declared in a widely circulated letter in June 1941. “Every Vietnamese must take a part in it. He who has money will contribute his money, he who has strength will contribute his strength, he who has talent will contribute his talent. I pledge to use all my modest abilities to follow you, and am ready for the last sacrifice.”
³⁰
He elaborated on these points in myriad publications, including a “History of Our Country” that extolled Vietnam’s glorious and heroic past and her valiant struggles against Chinese invasions. He also churned out articles for a journal titled
Viet Nam Doc lap
(
Independent Vietnam
), more than 150 issues of which were distributed in northern Tonkin. The contents of a typical issue could be strikingly diverse, including, say, an article attacking Pétain and Decoux, a fable for children, and a short poem such as “Song of the Soldier” or “Song of the Guerrilla,” to be sung in a round.
³¹

Was there a contradiction between this emphasis on patriotism and national unity, and the internationalism of the Comintern? Some authors have said so, but it’s really a false dichotomy. True, the Comintern generally frowned on overt expressions of nationalism and emphasized the primacy of the class struggle. But the Comintern did not deny colonized peoples the right to celebrate their past or to try to throw off their oppressors. Lenin, as we have seen, expressly offered Soviet backing for anticolonial nationalism. Ho Chi Minh and his five colleagues around that table in the cave in Pac Bo were Communists, convinced that Marxism-Leninism represented the best path of development for their country. But it was their country. They saw no contradiction between their Communism and their fervent desire to make Vietnam Vietnamese again. “By founding the Viet Minh,” historian Pierre Brocheux writes in denying any contradiction, “Ho Chi Minh brought together—or at least into synergy—the dynamism of nationalism and that of international communism.”
³²

As the Pac Bo meeting broke up, the delegates knew their principal task: to create a movement for independence that would generate mass support among the Vietnamese people as well as win the sympathy of the Allied powers. Victory over the French and Japanese imperialists would mean national liberation and would bring to power a broad-based government dominated by the ICP but including other nationalist elements. Once that core objective was established, work could begin to usher in the proletarian or socialist stage of the revolution.

IV

IT WOULD TAKE FOUR YEARS FOR THE VIET MINH TO FULLY ASSERT
themselves, but both French and Japanese authorities understood early on that Vietnamese nationalism was a potentially powerful adversary. (Long before this point, indeed, French security officials had been tracking Vietnamese nationalists across Vietnam and Southeast Asia and beyond.) They responded by at once colluding to keep that nationalism in check and competing with each other for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. The Japanese tried to impress the Vietnamese with propaganda and cultural events about their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and touted their slogan “Asia for the Asians.” They organized judo classes and distributed Tokyo movies and magazines. Decoux countered with the “Indochinese Federation,” a mutually beneficial organization of different peoples, each with separate traditions, held together and directed by France. He also promoted Vietnamese language and culture, established an ambitious program of public works, and ordered salaries of native functionaries to be brought closer to those of their French counterparts. He even authorized the use of the until-then-forbidden name “Vietnam.”
³³

ADMIRAL JEAN DECOUX (LEFT) LEADS A JAPANESE COMMANDER PAST A LINE OF FRENCH TROOPS IN 1941.
(photo credit 1.1)

Decoux took special pride in his innovations on behalf of the colony’s youth. He increased the number of Vietnamese children enrolled in school, raising the total from 450,000 in 1939 to 700,000 in 1944 (although this still only constituted 14 percent of the school-age population). He built new schools and hired new teachers. The Youth and Sports organization, meanwhile, led by Maurice Ducuroy, sought to draw students away from the Japanese and nationalist influence through organized athletics and cultural events. The French constructed sports stadiums, swimming pools, and libraries all over Indochina. By 1944, Ducuroy could claim more than a thousand new sports instructors and 86,000 registered members of sports societies. He organized swimming meets and track-and-field competitions, as well as an annual Tour d’Indochine bicycle race extending 4,100 kilometers across all five parts of Indochina—and modeled closely on its metropolitan prototype, the Tour de France, down to the yellow jersey worn by the overall race leader. When Japanese officials asked if Japanese athletes might compete in these sporting events, Ducuroy allowed them to sign up for cycling and the ball game pelota but not for swimming and track and field, where they were known to excel.
³⁴

“Throughout four dramatic years,” Decoux would write later of the Youth and Sports program, “all these young people, who were not our blood, and most often did not speak our language, gave the 25 million Indochinese a moving example of fidelity and obedience to our devastated fatherland.”
³⁵
The remark gives insight into Decoux’s attitude regarding his own position and the people of Indochina. Patterning his administration on Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian Vichy regime, which liquidated France’s democratic institutions and persecuted Communists, Freemasons, and Jews, he expected obedience and gratitude, in equal measure, from the Vietnamese, and he tolerated no nationalist agitation.

The main instrument of French rule remained the Sûreté Générale, the all-powerful French police. Decoux gave the Sûreté more personnel and expanded its powers, and he applauded its plan to recruit a “Legion of Combatants” to hunt down Vietnamese nationalists as well as
colons
who might be a threat to the regime. On the authority of Decoux and in the name of Vichy, Sûreté agents also pursued Jews, liberals, and Freemasons. Dossiers were opened on people suspected of associating with the Japanese, and the Sûreté could intern anyone deemed “dangerous” without trial and force them to labor in “special working groups.” This included Gaullists, who by some estimates suffered more repression in Indochina than anywhere else in the empire. Newspapers and periodicals were suppressed—at least seventeen were shut down between 1940 and 1943. At the Indochinese University in Hanoi, a special commission was set up to enforce quotas on the number of Jewish students—a straightforward task, it would seem, as there were only some eighty Jews in all of Tonkin, forty-nine of whom were in the military.
³⁶

This, then, was Decoux’s master plan: to show one and all that, despite defeat in France and acquiescence to Japanese occupation, his government was still firmly in control and capable of subduing challenges to its authority. For a time, the strategy worked. In the countryside, where the Japanese rarely ventured and 90 percent of the Vietnamese people lived, life went on pretty much as before; the French in control, the routine of life more or less unchanged. In urban areas, though, among educated Vietnamese as well as French settlers, no demonstration of French authority could hide the plain fact that Japan had established her presence with singular ease. Decoux understood this as clearly as anyone, but he hoped—and hope is all it could have been—that Japan’s appetite for expansion in Indochina had been satiated.