Decisive Darkness: Part One – Majestic

by Paul Hynes

  Unlike in Cambodia or Vietnam, the Japanese had had to arrest and imprison the King of the former French Protectorate, Sisavang Vong, alongside French officials in March. The declaration of Laotian independence being forced at gunpoint. As many French soldiers and civilians had disappeared into the mountains that made up much of Laos to wage a guerrilla resistance many Laotions joined them in reaction the Japanese move that had ironically been designed to garner support for Japan amongst the population. Though the collaborationist government of Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa, head of the [i]Lao Issara[/i] or ‘Free Laos’ nationalist movement did have some support for its agenda of Laotian independence in urban areas, the majority of the population was rural or highland dwelling, and generally stood with the King, and the resistance led by his son, Prince Sisavang Vatthana, in returning to at least some sort of renewed union with the French. By November the few Japanese in the area found themselves suffering high casualties, and soon found themselves moving northwards with the rest of the Japanese forces in Indochina. The Japanese had seen little economic potential in Laos, and had moved to actively worsen the areas connection with the rest of Indochina, having cut the cable cars than ran between Laos and Vietnam. Unwilling and unwanted, exiting the area was a task most Japanese took with relish. The Ratanavongsa government, was left struggling to defend itself from those guerrilla that now switched their targets from the Japanese to their former collaborators.

  As attempts to bolster the governments legitimacy by constructing a Laotian army feel under financial and moral constraints, with the ‘Royal Army’ of Lao Issara members only having established a few half-empty camps of urban labourers. Ratanavongsa aimed at circumventing the vulnerability of his regime with an army only in training by attempting to enlist the help of Ho Chi Minh’s far stronger Viet Minh forces to protect his government’s hold of the nation, or at least its towns and cities. Ho was wary of any major actions that might impact future negotiations with the allies however, and remained wary of the Chinese to his north, the former collaborationist regime was alone, and fragile. These were facts that had not escaped Laos’ neighbours to her west.

  That long standing reason for Laotian fondness for the French soon became readily apparent. As Bofors and Krupp mountain guns pounded from the hills and their tanks and cavalry advanced from three pincers. The soldiers of the Free Thai Army still had the words of their leader Pridi, the national saviour, ringing in their ears. Of the historic duty to unify all peoples of common ancestry, and their global mission as humans to rid Asia of the stains of Japanese occupation that Thailand herself had recently cleansed. Divided and weak, Laos would be the first stepping stone towards the unification of the Tai, and now no-one in Paris could stop them.

  In the late January of 1946, as all of the world had watched with horror at the joint escalations of the civilian massacres in Indonesia and Operation [i]Sandman[/i] on Kyushu, a particularly rusted and dirt coated trawler pulled into Saigon. A year beforehand American bombers had devastated the harbour, destroying thousands of tons of shipping. Though the Japanese had attempted to make repairs to the harbour that had become increasingly important to their operations in the area, these had been disrupted by their formal takeover of Indochina in March, and were still not complete by the time of their evacuation in October and November. Nonetheless for this one, small solitary ship a wrecked harbour could still prove accommodating, and indeed, advantageous, for the essence of her cargo was such that would be convenient for the Western Allied powers to take little notice.

  The anonymous Mr Lin-tay might have seen somewhat annoyed by this entrance to the city after his long journey across Eurasia. A far more comfortable ship had taken from Burma to Liverpool after all, nothing but first class for the wealthy Chinese businessman who had had the means to journey from his native China to Zurich to treat his tuberculosis. He might have complained of the rough conditions he was forced to endure on his ocean voyage, had his disguise still had meaning. However amongst the men he was with now there was little point in continuing the pretence with which he had endeared himself to the peoples of Great Britain and Switzerland who had been such amicable hosts and enablers in his vast voyage. For now he could once again be comfortable in the fact that he was Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, not a sufferer of Tuberculosis, but a specialist in its treatment. Not a humble businessman, but the first ambassador of the People’s Republic of Vietnam.

  Like Ho Chi Minh himself he had spent a great deal of time in France before he had become instrumental in the takeover of power in the city of Saigon, his true home, from the defeated Japanese, his mission had been to return with the aim of re-establishing contact with the leadership of the PCF, the French Communist Party, now the largest party within the chamber of deputies within the young Fourth Republic. After spending several pleasant weeks amongst his Swiss friends, he had snuck across the border into France whilst Ho had established the new regime back home. With the Alps still to their backs he had met with Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos, the two men he hoped might prove decisive in ensuring that the French would not return to Indochina after the inevitable Japanese defeat. By providing evidence that French civilians and soldiers were being well treated, despite still being interned, he also aimed to contrast the Vietnamese from the increasingly murderous measures the Japanese had been taking against other European prisoners under their control.

  For their own part Thorez and Duclos were wary of any commitment. The leading role the Communist Party had played in the French resistance, alongside the Soviet Union’s as having defeated the Nazi menace almost singlehandedly, had gained the party a great deal of popular support in the wake of the liberation. Nonetheless the election that had taken place only a few weeks before they had met the Vietnamese Doctor had shown that said support was not yet enough to lead France on their own, and despite winning a plurality of seats, they had been forced into coalition with the two other major French parties, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. All three despised each, yet they were unified in their fear of the demagogic Charles De Gaulle, whom they privately feared would exploit his popularity amongst the people to establish a military junta if the three proved unable to hang together. In support of Vietnam the Communist Party knew that they would split the Socialists and gain almost universal opposition from the Christian Democrats, in all likelihood there was no means at present for which they could legislate for Indochinese independence. Even if they could, there was no guarantee that De Gaulle would not exploit this as the casus belli for which to launch a coup and ban the Communist Party altogether. They could offer Vietnam moral support, but until the young Republic stabilised itself, or the opportunity arose for a full Communist takeover of France, the potential pitfalls were too great to offer any legislative commitment.

  They were however willing to introduce the Doctor to the Soviet envoy in Paris, who managed to arrange a journey to Moscow to speak directly to the Soviet Politburo of his mission. Throughout war torn Europe he had travelled, into the frozen tundra that had halted the Wehrmacht, and into the Kremlin itself where he met an atmosphere far colder than the snow outside. The Soviet premier wished to know why the Vietnamese regime had seemingly chosen to disband the Indochinese Communist Party in favour of their own nationalistic concerns, and if they were in face just another Japanese puppet state yet to fall as some Soviet reports had indicated. Pham chose to emphasise the present situation rather than attempt to defend against these accusations, wary of meeting a similar fate that several other unofficial foreign delegations had met at the hands of Stalin. He declared that whilst Cambodia and Laos were indeed Japanese puppet regimes, there was little they could do to spread the revolution there without indirectly aiding the Thai, a far more ominous threat to socialism in Indochina. All the while he reminded Stalin that the Japanese who had retreated from Indochina had met a similar fate to their other comrades in China, and had fallen to the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai Sek, who still proclaimed his right to occupy Indochina
after the war was over. This had been exacerbated by French and Japanese mismanagement of agriculture which had left Vietnam on the brink of starvation, a fact that Pham did not have to exaggerate, with several regions only beginning to recover after their rice crops had been returned from Japanese control. This was yet another matter that had required greater attention than affairs to the north or the west. He nonetheless asserted that, with Soviet support to augment their existing Japanese arsenals Pham assured the Soviet premier that the Vietnamese would be in a position to not only hold off Chiang or the Pridi regime in Thailand, but would also be in a position to spread the revolution to those areas when the chance arose.

  With all the relief of a man expecting to be purged at any moment, Pham had reacted to Stalin’s non-committal stance with incredible enthusiasm. He would be sent back to Vietnam covertly whilst the Soviets would send an envoy alongside him to further discuss the Vietnamese situation. Phom would return to Saigon without any concrete assurances, but in the knowledge that both the French Communists and the Soviets knew that an independent Vietnam was a reality and they had not reacted to the prospect with the hostility some in the new Vietnamese leadership had feared. In contrast to the intense patriotic whirlwind of tri-colours he had seen in France, the streets of Saigon were now completely devoid of Red, White, and Blue in the wake of an aggressive effort of removing any indication that the French, or the Japanese, for that matter might have ever ruled Vietnam. The old man the Soviets had sent to meet the new Vietnamese leadership seemed to know more Japanese than French, but he nonetheless spoke the latter with a good deal of authority. As he had met with Ho Chi Minh he had been just as non-committal as Stalin had been despite general pleasantries but his importance was far greater than anything he might yet offer diplomatically. For Ho knew that the Americans were surely watching his movements, and whilst the French and the Soviets might have been cool in their response, he was sure the OSS report of this news would make for some interesting reactions in Washington.

  Collapse: The End of the Showa Era

  The reaction of President Truman to the news of Kenjii Doihara’s supposed coup has been an issue that is often linked in with that of his decision to abandon his predecessor’s determination to prevent the use of Chemical Weapons. It is true that perhaps in some sense he did feel personally responsible for bringing about the development’s that the United States may never have been aware of had it not been for Doihara, however the accusations that he dithered in response, or chose to soften the US approach towards Japan out of some lingering sense of guilt, are shown to be fiction by any detailed reading of his decisions made in the wake of the revelations that reached Washington on the morning of the 16th of February, 1946.

  Though across the Pacific the opportunistic coup had collapsed hours beforehand, President Truman responded to the information he had received with an energy that matched that of the Japanese General currently fleeing an embarrassed and vengeful Kempetai, choosing to personally call the drowsy head of the Naval Staff of the San Francisco Harbour Defence Command Post under the aged concrete structure of Fort Scott to demand he mobilise all available resources at his disposal as soon as possible, when Truman was informed that this was not much the angered President berated the Commander for his lack of urgency and disclosed fully the nature of the threat that might be headed towards the city.

  Unfortunately for the President, the issue was indeed one of scarcity rather than sloth. This had not always been the case, the fact that San Francisco Bay Area shipbuilders were so significant to the United States war effort, having produced almost 45 percent of all the cargo shipping tonnage and 20 percent of warship tonnage built in the entire country during the war. The threat of further aerial Japanese attacks in the wake of Pearl Harbour had led to a radical build-up of the ports coastal and sea defences, the vast landscape around the iconic Golden Gate bridge being dotted with literally hundreds of mobile antiaircraft guns, searchlights and radars. Across the inner harbor and anti-submarine net extending from the Marina in San Francisco to Sausalito in Marin had been cast, with the Navy in full control of those ships allowed to enter and leave. Soldiers assigned to the fortifications and observation stations dug vast trenches on the hillsides near their batteries, even constructing underground quarters from inside the hillsides. Camouflage paint covered every battery and barrack, with those objects too large to paint being covered in large camouflage nets. From the skies predatory Airships had hung in wait for their expected prey with depth charges as they had patrolled offshore waters.

  Akin to much of the rest of the American war effort, it was an effort of truly staggering proportions, yet one that had been for nought for the vast arsenal would only ever fire in practice, and the airships only victims would be the occasional unfortunate whale. As the American role in the war intensified across both shining seas, and the threat of major Japanese aerial attack gradually receded, the large array of defences and her rather bored operators had been dismantled and sent to areas of greater need ever since the beginning of 1944. As the Golden Gate’s vista had gradually become less militarised, some would joke that the frail lookout air raid had been one of the best Japanese moves of the war by locking down this force for so long, little did the citizens of San Francisco know, there was now very little to joke about.

  Though San Francisco’s defences could be restored to their previous might, this was a process that would take several weeks, whilst recalling several of the Destroyers based in the Pacific to form a defensive perimeter around the city would also take over a fortnight. Without knowledge of the Japanese forces whereabouts this might have been too late to intercept the Submarines before their attack. Truman, who just a day beforehand had been busying himself with how to respond to the continuing Thai advance into Indochina, now found himself facing a major disaster on the American continent.

  The ultimate decision not to evacuate San Francisco in these circumstances has provoked condemnation from those on the West Coast for many years however in this regard Truman must be forgiven. Lacking foresight in what was to come, the President was more concerned with mass panic if he did indeed reveal the situation to the cities peoples, not to mention the strategic loss that an empty San Francisco would represent with ships undergoing repair being left abandoned at such a crucial moment before Operation [i]Coronet[/i].

  The city, for a time, remained calm, as troops slowly began to return to previously abandoned defensive positions on the basis of ‘exercises’, the city continued to busy itself with the winning of a war now seemingly close to completion, blind to the threat that now silently approached.

  Though the revelation of the planned attack on San Francisco dominated the attention of the Truman administration, it was not the only article of interest within Doihara’s offer. It was this fact that gave the Anami regime the greatest concern, for from the mountains outside of Nagano, Japan’s deepest secret, the Matsushiro Imperial Headquarters, now lay exposed.

  The enormous subterranean system of tunnels below the several mountains in Matsushiro had begun construction in November 1944 and had been planned to be a final fortress for the Japanese government and military command after the inevitable invasion by American forces. Under horrific conditions tens of thousands of Korean slave labourers had struggled to complete the complex as quickly as possible, at the cost of over a thousand dead they dead completed around 90% of the facilities were prepared on the night of Anami’s coup. The headquarters had been designed to withstand conventional raids from B-29 bombers, without knowledge of the Atomic Bomb, however now it seemed to be the only place capable of surviving one, subsequently relocation of the Emperor now took place despite ongoing construction.

  By February 1946 the Headquarters was now very much the heart of Japan, housing the broadcasting facilities, communications, state apparatus, war command, the Supreme War Council, the Emperor, and Japan’s Atomic research project. With some tunnels measuring 5850 metres, the complex was able to accommodate eve
ry aspect of the Japanese war effort, it had seemed rational to move all organisation to the one, safe, area. For several months the heads of the Japanese government had observed the war efforts continued deterioration from underneath the mountains, blissfully going about their business in the knowledge that the sky would not come falling down on their heads. Now, like so many millions of Japanese, they lay exposed, waiting for the inevitable.

  The decision to evacuate was an obvious one, though in his usual fashion the leader of Japan, now paralysed, refused to admit as much. Nonetheless, with American observation aircraft becoming an increasingly common sight in the skies across the area, the Prime Minister deemed it necessary that he be the man to replace the treacherous Doihara as head of the First General Army. Despite conspiracy theories to the contrary Anami’s motivations for this action were likely two-fold. The General, despite his growing irrationality in the field of strategic affairs, remained a competent administrator and tactician, in a normal situation he would have been a logical choice to head the defence of the Kanto Plain. This argument was made all the stronger by fears that Doihara, as part of a grander scheme, had somehow sabotaged the defence of the area alongside as a general feeling of dismay in that the Army had seemingly proven itself to be just as incompetent at dealing with the Americans as the Navy had been. Anami’s headstrong had carried him to the top of Japanese society and he now had no delusions that if there was anyone left to throw the Americans back into the ocean, it was himself. Whilst it was clear that the Japanese government would have to evacuate the area regardless, the General was adamant that he be present for the military evacuation before the rest of the Government and the Imperial Family left in stages for the mountainous city of Nikkō, officially to enable easier contact between the Prime Minister and his Council whilst the former despatched the Americans from the front.