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 th
em 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.
It was not to be. In 1941, Japanese attention turned southward again. In September 1940, Tokyo had officially joined the Axis by signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. In the months thereafter, army minister and then prime minister Hideki Tojo and his colleagues plotted their next move. To facilitate good relations with Thailand, Tokyo officials consented to a Thai plan to attack Indochina in order to regain territory on the right bank of the Mekong River ceded to Laos and Cambodia at the turn of the century. A series of Franco-Thai skirmishes ensued, with no clear victor except in a naval battle that the French won handily. Yet even though Thailand got the worst of the encounter, Japan, eager to have Thai cooperation for a planned drive toward Singapore and Burma, forced upon France a settlement that granted Thailand many of her claims. Once again, the hollowness of independent French colonial rule over Indochina was exposed.37
In April 1941, Japan signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, then watched with satisfaction as Hitler’s forces invaded Russia in June. The Japanese might have used this occasion of Soviet weakness to conquer parts of Siberia—a plan they actively considered—but instead they concentrated on expanding the empire to the south. On July 14, only ten months after signing its agreement with France, Tokyo presented Vichy with a new ultimatum that would allow the establishment of Japanese bases and troops in southern Indochina. Vichy consented, and on July 25 Japanese troops landed in Saigon to occupy strategic areas in the south, including the key port of Cam Ranh Bay and airfields at Da Nang and Bien Hoa. This gave the Japanese a forward vantage point from which to move quickly against Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and the Philippines. There was jubilation in Tokyo, where nobody seemed to remember the cautionary words a few weeks before of Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, who worried that such an operation would bring innumerable logistical difficulties and risk war with the United States. “A military operation in the Southern Seas,” Matsuoka had warned, “will court disaster for our country.”38
V
AND INDEED, THE MIKADO’S MOVE INTO COCHIN CHINA LAUNCHED a series of actions and reactions that put Japan and the United States on a collision course, culminating in the outbreak of war five months later. Events in Vietnam, so much a concern of a succession of postwar American presidents, and arguably the undoing of two of them, proved decisive here as well, in the last half of 1941, in making the United States a belligerent, and in joining the Asian and European conflicts into one world war.
Early on July 24, the White House received word that Japanese warships had appeared off Cam Ranh Bay, and that a dozen troop transports were on the way. American analysts were stunned, even though cables from the Paris embassy and MAGIC intercepts39—decoded Japanese communications—had told them for days to expect such a southward thrust. They grasped immediately the threat posed to the U.S. position in the Philippines and the British posture in Malaya and Singapore. That afternoon President Roosevelt summoned Japan’s special envoy, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, to the Oval Office and proposed a neutralization of Indochina. In return for the withdrawal of all Japanese forces, Washington would seek an international agreement to regard Indochina as a neutral country in which the existing French government would remain in control. The president must have known the proposal would find little favor in Tokyo, for he did not wait for a response before taking a much more forceful step: On the twenty-fifth, the administration froze all Japanese assets in the United States, imposed an embargo, and ended the export of petroleum to Japan.
Just what Roosevelt and his aides sought to achieve by this aggressive response has divided historians for more than half a century, but it seems most likely that the president himself did not intend to cut off all petroleum exports or mean for the freezing of assets to be permanent. He wanted to create uncertainty in Tokyo, not provoke a U.S.-Japanese war. Contrary to FDR’s intention, however, second-echelon officials in the State Department—among them Dean Acheson, later to be secretary of state under Harry Truman and an important player in our story—imposed a total embargo while the president was meeting with Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland. By the time Roosevelt returned to the capital on August 16, it was deemed too late to step back, for reasons political and diplomatic. The embargo received strong popular support, and polls showed that a majority of Americans now preferred to risk war rather than allow Japan to become more powerful. Furthermore, U.S. officials feared that the Japanese would see any modification as a sign of American weakness.40
For Japan, so poor in natural resources, the implications were dire. The country consumed roughly twelve thousand tons of oil each day, 90 percent of it imported, and also imported most of her zinc, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, cotton, and wheat. She could not survive a year of a thorough embargo—unless she seized British and Dutch possessions in Asia. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, a moderate among hard-liners, proposed a summit meeting with FDR and indicated a willingness to withdraw from Indochina as soon as the war with China was settled. Roosevelt was tempted by this offer, but his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, persuaded him to insist on Japanese abandonment of China as a precondition for such a meeting. The proposal collapsed, and Konoe was ousted as prime minister in mid-October. Tojo replaced him. Diplomatic maneuverings continued, and in November Tojo offered to move troops out of Indochina immediately, and out of China once general peace was restored, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline. Hull rejected the offer and repeated the American insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and abandonment of the Southeast Asian adventure. On December 7, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbor.
The news rocked world capitals. No one doubted that American involvement changed the equation, not merely in the Asian conflict but in the European war—this even before Japan’s Axis partner Germany declared war on the United States on December 11. For Charles de Gaulle, the end result was now assured. “Of course, there will be military operations, battles, conflicts, but the war is finished since the outcome is known from now on,” he remarked. “In this industrial war, nothing will be able to resist American power.”41
Since his June 1940 appel, de Gaulle had worked to establish the legitimacy of the Free French as authentic representatives of the nation in the eyes of the Allies, on whom he depended for both economic and military support. The colonies that backed him played an essential part in this endeavor, because with their support de Gaulle could claim for the Free French a status analogous to the other governments-in-exile that were then active in London, even though both Britain and the United States maintained relations with Vichy and recognized it as the legitimate successor to the Thir
d Republic. Although the effort to rally colonial support had met with only limited success—in late 1941, Vichy still controlled the most important areas of the empire—de Gaulle hoped Pearl Harbor would change the equation. On December 8, he proclaimed common cause with Washington and declared war on Japan.
CHAPTER 2
THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST
DE GAULLE’S MOMENT OF HOPE DID NOT LAST LONG. PEARL HARBOR and the American entry into the war, it soon became clear, had failed to improve his organization’s standing in Washington. In the eyes of President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the Free French continued to be an illegitimate and potentially dangerous group, with which limited agreements might be negotiated on matters of pressing concern but which was in no way representative. It certainly did not have to be consulted when French interests were at stake. Both men believed that Franco-German disputes lay at the root of much of Europe’s inability to maintain the peace. Both doubted that France could be a stabilizing force in world affairs after the war, given what they saw as her weak political system and the failure of her armed forces to put up more of a fight against the Wehrmacht. France was a fading power, Roosevelt believed. Her people, he told aides, would have to undergo a fundamental transformation in order to have a workable society.1
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