In these years, as he would all his life, Ho made a deep and winning impression on those he encountered. Many remarked on his humor, sensitivity, and sentimentality, on his extraordinary ability to charm. Recalled Léo Poldès, a member of the French Socialist Party who founded the Club de Faubourg, the setting for many debates Ho attended:
It was at one of our weekly meetings that I noticed this thin, almost anemic indigene in the rear. He had a Chaplinesque aura about him—simultaneously sad and comic, vous savez. I was instantly struck by his piercing dark eyes. He posed a provocative question; it eludes me now. I encouraged him to return. He did, and I grew more and more affectionate toward him. He was très sympathique—reserved but not shy, intense but not fanatical, and extremely clever. I especially liked his ironic way of deprecating everyone while, at the same time, deprecating himself.23
Later many of these traits would appear also in his public utterances and his diplomatic negotiations, which some interpreted as posturing intended merely to mislead his interlocutors and enemies. Perhaps, but if Ho was always a tactician, the evidence is strong that he also had his spontaneous side. A marvelous example of this comes from Jacques Sternel, a union organizer who offered words of support for Vietnamese workers in France. Ho came up to thank him. “He asked my permission to kiss me on both cheeks,” Sternel remembered. “And it was certainly not an exceptional gesture on his part. There were only three of us there: him, my wife, and I. That’s just the kind of emotional impulses he always had.”24
IV
THE CHARM AND THE CLEVER DEBATING POINTS WENT ONLY SO far. Over the course of 1922 and the first part of 1923, Ho Chi Minh came to the depressing realization—and not for the last time—that the French Communist Party attached barely more priority to the colonial question than had the Socialists. For both parties, European issues were what truly mattered. No doubt this recognition played into Ho’s decision in 1923 to leave Paris for Moscow. The move would put him closer to home, and he hoped also to meet Lenin and other Soviet leaders. On June 13, 1923, in an elaborately prepared plan to elude police surveillance, he made his way to Gare du Nord and boarded a train for Berlin, posing as a Chinese businessman. From there he continued to Hamburg, then by boat to Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg), finally reaching Moscow at the start of July.
Here too there would be disappointment. Lenin was ill and dying, and passed away in January 1924. Ho Chi Minh took the news hard: “Lenin was our father, our teacher, our comrade, our representative. Now, he is a shining star showing us the way to Socialism.” Ho joined the crowds waiting hours in –30°C temperatures to view the dead leader, and suffered frostbite to his fingers and nose. He participated in meetings of the Comintern, wrote articles for various publications, and, it seems, enrolled at the newly founded School for the Oppressed People of the East (also known as the Stalin School), which trained Communist cadres and helped organize revolutionary movements in Asia. But Ho found relatively little interest for his message—which he articulated in meetings both of the Comintern and of the Peasant International, or Cresintern—that the agrarian societies of Asia had nationalist aspirations and revolutionary potential that must be nurtured. Eurocentrism reigned supreme here just as it did in the French Communist Party, and just as it did among American champions of “self-determination.” He was, he later said, a “voice crying in the wilderness.”25
Still, the Moscow interlude must have been a heady time for Ho, as he communed with what he called “the great Socialist family.” No longer did he have to fear that the French police were watching his every move, ready to arrest him and charge him with treason. He was seen in Red Square in the company of senior Soviet leaders Gregory Zinoviev and Kliment Voroshilov and became known as a specialist on colonial affairs and also on Asia. In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina. To that end, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity—virtues that, as biographer William J. Duiker notes, had more to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism.26
In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.
Initially, the ICP was but one of a plethora of entities within the Vietnamese nationalist movement. The more Francophile reformist groups advocated nonviolent reformism and were centered in Cochin China. Most sought to change colonial policy without alienating France and vowed to keep Vietnam firmly within the French Union. Of greater lasting significance, however, were more revolutionary approaches, especially in Annam and Tonkin. In the cities of Hanoi and Hue, and in provincial and district capitals scattered throughout Vietnam, anticolonial elements began to form clandestine political organizations dedicated to the eviction of the French and the restoration of national independence. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party—or VNQDD, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang—was the most important of these groups, and by 1929 it had some fifteen hundred members, most of them organized into small groups in the Red River Delta in Tonkin. Formed on the model of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the VNQDD saw armed revolution as the lone means of gaining freedom for Vietnam, and in early 1930, it tried to foment a general uprising by Vietnamese serving in the French Army. On February 9, Vietnamese infantrymen massacred their French officers in Yen Bai. The French swiftly crushed the revolt, and the VNQDD’s leaders were executed, were jailed, or fled to China. The party ceased to be a threat to colonial control.27
Other non-Communist nationalist groups fared no better. Despite the intensity of the Vietnamese national identity, these parties were plagued almost from the beginning with deep factional splits and the absence of a mass base. To be sure, internal divisions were a common feature in anticolonial movements throughout the Third World and had many causes, including personality clashes and disputes over strategy. In some places, such as India and Malaya, leaders overcame the differences and established a broad alliance against the colonial power. Not so in Vietnam. Here the regional and tactical differences proved too deep, or the personality disputes too severe, for nationalist parties to band together. To compound the problem, anti-Communist political parties in Vietnam showed scant interest in forming close ties with the mass of the population. With their urban roots and middle-class concerns, party leaders tended to adopt a nonchalant attitude toward the issues vital to Vietnamese peasants, such as land hunger, government corruption, and high taxes.
All this created an opening for Ho Chi Minh and the ICP. French security services soon singled the party out as the most serious threat to colonial authority and devoted most of their resources to identifying the leadership. But Ho and his top lieutenants survived all French efforts to eliminate them—Ho kept constantly on the move in the 1930s, spending one year in Moscow, then in China, then in the USSR again, using different pseudonyms, his health often poor. In the mid-1930s, the party benefited from changes in the international scene. From 1936 to 1939, pressure from French authorities eased as a Popular Front government in Paris allowed Communist parties in the colonies an increased measure of freedom, the result of increased cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies against the common threat of glob
al fascism. In late 1939, however, after Moscow signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, French authorities outlawed the ICP and forced its leaders into hiding. Other party members were arrested and sent to Poulo Condore (Con Dao), the notorious island prison camp in the South China Sea, where they endured wretched conditions and defiantly plotted for the future.28
The relative ease with which the French carried out this crackdown was a sign of the continuing weakness of nationalist opposition within Indochina—and by extension, of the continuing ability of the colonial master to have his way. A few thousand French officials could maintain effective control over some twenty-five million Indochinese, a reality that casts doubt on the claim by some historians that colonial control (not merely in Indochina but all over the empire) was in the interwar period already drastically undermined.29 Perhaps the seeds of the empire’s ultimate collapse were already planted, its racist foundation more and more contrary to the spirit of the times, but as the 1930s drew to a close, only the most optimistic Vietnamese revolutionary—or pessimistic colonial administrator—could believe that France would soon be made to part with this Pearl of the Far East, this jewel of the imperial crown.
But a tidal wave was coming, one that would sweep over Southeast Asia and leave behind a new configuration of power—and more than that, a crucial undermining of the legitimacy (and practicality) of the entire colonialist enterprise. In September 1939, a new war broke out, and by mid-June 1940, France stood on the brink of defeat at the hands of invading Nazi German forces. Japan, on friendly terms with Germany and sensing an opportunity to expand southward, prepared to seize French Indochina. And Ho Chi Minh, meeting with associates in southern China, said he saw “a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it.”30
CHAPTER 1
“THE EMPIRE IS WITH US!”
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 18, 1940, THE TALL, STIFF-BACKED Frenchman walked into the BBC studios in London. His country stood on the brink of defeat. German columns were sweeping through France and had entered Paris. The French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain had fled for Bordeaux and had asked the Germans to state their terms for an armistice. These were the darkest days in the country’s history, but General Charles de Gaulle, who had arrived in London the day before, was convinced that France could rise again—provided that her people did not lose heart. De Gaulle had met earlier in the day with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and had secured permission to make a broadcast to France.1
He was pale, recalled one of those present, with a brown forelock stuck to his forehead. “He stared at the microphone as though it were France and as though he wanted to hypnotize it. His voice was clear, firm, and rather loud, the voice of a man speaking to his troops before battle. He did not seem nervous but extremely tense, as though he were concentrating all his power in one single moment.”2
De Gaulle’s thoughts that day were on the French Empire, whose resources, he sensed, could keep France in the war and fighting. And they were with Britain and the United States, great powers with whom he could ally. “Believe what I tell you,” de Gaulle intoned into the microphone, “for I know of what I speak, and I say that nothing is lost for France.” Then, like a cleric chanting a litany, he declared: “For France is not alone. She is not alone. She is not alone. She has a vast Empire behind her. She can unite with the British Empire that rules the seas and is continuing the fight. Like Britain, she can make unlimited use of the immense industrial resources of the United States.”3
The broadcast, which lasted barely four minutes, has gone down in French history as L’Appel du 18 Juin. At the time, however, few heard it and few knew who de Gaulle was. Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, knew only that de Gaulle had a “head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s.”4 Robert Murphy, the counselor at the U.S. embassy in Paris, could not recall ever having heard of him before that day. The same was true of most of de Gaulle’s compatriots. Although he was notorious within French military circles for his advocacy of the mechanization of the army and the offensive deployment of tanks, few outside that select group would have recognized his name, much less known the essentials of his biography: the birth in Lille in 1890; the diploma from the military academy at Saint-Cyr; the five failed (in part because of his conspicuous height) escape attempts from German prison camps in World War I; the postwar military career initially under the wing of Pétain.
De Gaulle had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general only a few weeks before, in the midst of the Battle of France (thus making him, at forty-nine, the youngest general in the army). He then joined Premier Paul Reynaud’s government on June 5 as undersecretary of state for war. Reynaud sought to carry on the fight, but twelve days later, with the French war effort collapsing wholesale, as German armies were well south of Dijon and pressing down the Atlantic coast, he resigned. De Gaulle, certain that Pétain would seek an armistice, escaped to London, determined to continue the resistance from there.
The basis for de Gaulle’s speech that fateful day was his conviction that the conflict was not limited to Europe. It was a “world war,” he declared, one “not bound by the Battle of France.” He would be proven correct. Likewise, Britain and the United States would become critical to the ultimate victory of de Gaulle’s “Free French” organization, though not in the way he imagined. Even his deep faith in the empire’s importance to his cause would in time find a certain degree of vindication.5
A vast empire it was. In 1940, it ranked in size second only to the British, extending some six million square miles and with an overseas population of eighty million. The island of Madagascar alone was bigger than metropolitan France. The colonies of Equatorial and West Africa together were as large as the United States. In the Middle East, the French were a major presence, and they had holdings as well in the Caribbean and the Pacific. And of course, there was Indochina, the Pearl of the Empire, rich in rubber plantations and rice fields. As the farthest-flung of the key French possessions, it along with Algeria (administered as part of France proper) conferred great power status on France and, it was thought, gave her an important voice in global affairs. As a whole, the empire took more than a third of all French trade in the 1930s (a figure inflated by the fact that the Depression caused business leaders to fall back on colonial markets); colonial troops made up 11 percent of mobilized men in 1939.6
In his memoirs of the war, de Gaulle recalled his feelings as he sat in London in 1940 and watched the deterioration of the French position in the Far East, at the expense of the encroaching Japanese. “To me, steering a very small boat on the ocean of war, Indochina seemed like a great ship out of control, to which I could give no aid until I had slowly got together the means of rescue,” he wrote. “As I saw her move away into the mist, I swore to myself that I would one day bring her back.”7
It was an immense task, de Gaulle knew. The journey would be as long as it was treacherous. It would take time to win French loyalty and French territory and so to establish his legitimacy as the authentic representative of the French nation. In those early days, hardly anyone answered his call. Not only did few people come from France to join him, but most leading French figures already in London decided to return home to support the Pétain government, which negotiated an armistice with Germany on June 22 and set up a collaborationist regime in Vichy, a damp, gloomy spa town best known for its foul-smelling waters.8 Even many of those who wanted to go on fighting rejected de Gaulle’s call. Some went instead to the United States, while others, including the imperial proconsuls in North Africa and other territories (under the terms of the armistice, the empire was left in French hands), were unprepared to reject the authority of the eighty-four-year-old Pétain, savior of France at Verdun in 1916. The only exceptions in the early months were French Equatorial Africa (Chad, French Congo, and Oubangui-Chari, but not Gabon) and the Cameroons, which declared for de Gaulle in Augu
st 1940. That same month a French military court sentenced de Gaulle to death in absentia, for treason against the Vichy regime.9
“You are alone,” Churchill told de Gaulle, “I shall recognize you alone.” On June 28, the British government voiced its backing of de Gaulle as “leader of all the Free French, wherever they are to be found, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause.”10
The phrasing was important: The British were endorsing de Gaulle the man rather than his organization. Whereas the general saw his outfit as a proto-government rivaling that in Vichy, most London officials hoped Free France could be restricted to the role of a légion combattante, a group of French citizens fighting as a unit within the Allied armies. For them, the only French government was that headed by Marshal Pétain. Still, limited though it was, the British pronouncement was a critical early endorsement of de Gaulle, arguably as important as any he would ever receive. His bold action on June 18 made an impression on Churchill, one that would never quite dissipate even during the tensest moments—and there would be many in the years to come—in their relationship. The romantic in Churchill admired de Gaulle’s epic adventure, his self-importance, his claim to speak for la France éternelle. He saw a certain nobility in the Frenchman’s bravado and shared with him a love of drama and a deep sense of history. When in September the two men joined together in a scheme to try to win French West Africa away from Vichy with an operation against Dakar, de Gaulle rose in Churchill’s esteem despite the fact that the plan ended in humiliating failure. To the House of Commons, the prime minister extolled de Gaulle’s calm and authoritative bearing throughout the engagement and said he had more confidence in the general than ever.11
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 4
