There’s nothing Chennault likes more than giving his photograph. So he presses the bell and in comes Doreen [Chennault’s secretary] again. In due course it’s some other girl who produces a folder of eight-by-ten glossies. “Take your pick,” says Chennault. Ho takes one and asks would the general be so kind as to sign it? Doreen produces a Parker 51 and Chennault writes across the bottom, “Yours Sincerely, Claire L. Chennault.” And out we all troop into Kunming’s sparkling air.43
Ho Chi Minh had thus established contacts with key U.S. military officials in Kunming. But he had yet to win formal recognition by the United States of the legitimacy of the Vietminh Front as the legal representative of the Vietnamese people or to obtain any more than a modicum of assistance for his movement. As he prepared for departure, he asked Charles Fenn for six new Colt .45 automatics in their original wrappers, which Fenn obtained from friends in the OSS.
At the end of March 1945, Ho Chi Minh flew in a small U.S. plane with his new radio operator to the town of Paise. Located about sixty miles north of Jingxi in Guangxi province, Paise was the new headquarters of Zhang Fakui’s Fourth Military Command since the Japanese occupation of Liuzhou during their famous “Offensive Number One” in south China the previous November. Ho’s objective at Paise was to reestablish contact with members of the Dong Minh Hoi in order to forge it into a weapon useful for the purposes of the Vietminh Front. After Ho’s departure from Liuzhou the previous August, the Dong Minh Hoi had virtually disintegrated because of Chinese inattention and the decision of several of the leading non-Communist members to return to Yunnan province. With the aid of Vietminh representatives like Le Tong Son, who had followed the Fourth Military Command to Paise, Ho attempted to reorganize the Dong Minh Hoi by creating a new “action committee” dominated by his own followers. To allay the suspicions of leading members of other nationalist organizations, he showed them the signed photograph from Chennault and handed each of them a Colt automatic. A few days later, however, General Xiao Wen, who was himself becoming increasingly distrustful of the Vietminh, disbanded Ho’s action committee and selected a new committee consisting of a mixture of Communist and non-Communist members, including Ho Chi Minh. Ho now departed for Jingxi en route to Pac Bo.44
White Ho Chi Minh was in Paise attempting to revitalize the Dong Minh Hoi, a U.S. military intelligence officer arrived in Kunming to join the OSS unit there. Captain Archimedes “Al” Patti had served in the European Theater until January 1944, when he was transferred to Washington, D.C., and appointed to the Indochina desk at OSS headquarters. A man of considerable swagger and self-confidence, Patti brought to his task a strong sense of history and an abiding distrust of the French and their legacy in colonial areas. It was from the files in Washington, D.C. that he first became aware of the activities of the Vietminh Front and its mysterious leader, Ho Chi Minh. In April 1945, he arrived in Kunming as deputy to the local OSS chief, Colonel Paul Helliwell, to direct OSS intelligence operations in French Indochina. As he quickly discovered, U.S. policy toward Indochina was in a state of flux, and there was considerable confusion among local U.S. officials over whether and how much to assist the Free French, and whether and to what degree such officials might be authorized to become involved with Vietnamese resistance groups inside the country. At a conference held shortly after Patti’s arrival, the activities of the Vietminh movement came under discussion, and the representative from AGAS mentioned that an “old man” known as Ho Chi Minh had agreed to assist his office in organizing an intelligence network in Indochina. Another official added that Ho had been undertaking some psychological warfare work with the Chinese propaganda office in cooperation with OWI.45
To Patti, Ho Chi Minh’s movement seemed a natural vehicle for his own operations in Indochina. Although any OSS effort to make active use of the Vietminh could encounter problems with both the Chinese and the French, Patti felt protected by recent directives from Washington to make use of whatever intelligence sources were offered to obtain information on Japanese activities in Indochina. What he now required was an opportunity to meet Ho Chi Minh, who had already left Kunming to return to his own country. Fortuitously, a few days after his arrival, Patti received a visit from Vuong Minh Phuong After initial pleasantries, Phuong identified himself as a member of the Vietminh Front led by “General” Ho Chi Minh and delicately offered its support to the Allied cause in return for military assistance and recognition of the front as the sole political organization representing the interests of the Vietnamese people. When Patti asked how General Ho could be reached, Phuong remarked that he could be contacted at Jingxi, where he was stopping on his way back to Indochina.
Patti then consulted with his superior, Colonel Richard Heppner, chief OSS representative in Chongqing and, in peacetime, a prominent lawyer with high-level connections in the Roosevelt administration. Heppner at first was hesitant. Patrick Hurley, the veteran Oklahoma politician who had just replaced Clarence Gauss as U.S. ambassador to China, had become Chiang Kai-shek’s advocate and was irritated with OSS officers in Yan’an for seeking to arrange a coalition between Chiang and the Chinese Communists; Hurley had also warned Heppner that both the French and the Chinese would be unhappy to discover U.S. intelligence contacts with the Vietminh, and especially with Ho Chi Minh, whom French intelligence sources had correctly identified as Nguyen Ai Quoc. On April 26, however, Heppner received a cable from General Alberr C. Wedemeyer, commander of U.S. forces in the China Theater, authorizing him to introduce OSS operatives into Indochina to obtain intelligence and carry on demolition work against enemy installations in the area. Heppner informed Patti that the matter of enlisting Ho Chi Minh into the Allied effort remained open for consideration, while warning him not to alienate the French or the Chinese.
The next day, Patti arrived at Debao airport, just north of Jingxi, and after consultation with local AGAS representatives, drove into Jingxi, where he met a Vietminh contact at a local restaurant and was driven to see Ho Chi Minh in a small village about six miles out of town. After delicately feeling out his visitor about his identity and political views, Ho described conditions inside Indochina and pointed out that his movement could provide much useful assistance and information to the Allies if it were in possession of modern weapons, ammunition, and means of communication. At the moment, Ho conceded that the movement was dependent upon a limited amount of equipment captured from the enemy. Patti avoided any commitment, but promised to explore the matter. By his own account, Patti was elated.46
A week later, Ho Chi Minh was back at Pac Bo after a strenuous trek through the jungles along the border. The group accompanying him totaled about forty, and included U.S. Army radio operator Mac Shinn and Frank Tan, a member of the aborted GBT team. Both had been provided by Fenn in the hope that, as Asian Americans, they would attract less attention from prying eyes than another American might. From Pac Bo, Mac Shinn began reporting to Kunming, and the OSS began to air-drop additional supplies, including medicine, a second radio set, and more weapons, into the wilderness around Pac Bo. In return for the equipment, Ho and his colleagues provided the Americans with useful services, including weather reports, and rescued several U.S. airmen shot down over northern Indochina and returned them to China. Ho had finally established a linkage—however tenuous—with the Allied cause.
By now, an Allied victory in the Pacific War appeared only a matter of time. U.S. military forces were moving inexorably closer to the Japanese home islands, and air raids by B-29 bombers relentlessly laid waste to the major Japanese cities. Tentative plans were still under way for a possible Allied invasion of French Indochina, combined with Chinese Nationalist units moving south into the area; this idea had strong support from the White House.
Inside Indochina, the situation was evolving rapidly. Bad weather conditions over large parts of the country had led to a considerable shortfall in the fall 1944 harvest, resulting in hoarding and price speculation on the part of rice dealers. Japanese occupation authorities had compo
unded the problem by mandating shipments of rice to Japan and ordering peasants in agricultural districts throughout the northern part of Vietnam to shift from the cultivation of rice to oil seeds, peanuts, cotton, and jute. Now, as famine struck, the Japanese refused to open the state granaries or increase rice shipments from the fertile Mekong delta to hard-hit regions in central Vietnam and the Tonkin delta. Through indifference or incompetence, the Vichy regime under Jean De-coux had done little to help.
During the winter, the authorities had refused to reduce taxes or to increase the price of obligatory quotas of rice assigned to each farmer for sale to the government. Desperate farmers switched to the cultivation of other crops, such as sweet potatoes or manioc, but supplies quickly ran out. As prices for all staple commodities began rapidly to rise, the threat of famine loomed in urban areas as well. By midwinter, thousands were suffering from hunger, and deaths from starvation were rising rapidly. Peasants sought to ward off hunger by eating roots, weeds, and even the bark of trees, while city dwellers traded precious household items in exchange for rice and vegetables sold at inflated prices. As the number of dead mounted, bodies began to appear along the highways, and hungry peasants wandered aimlessly begging for food or gathered near granaries zealously guarded by Japanese troops.
However tragic its impact on the population of Vietnam, the crisis was a potential godsend to the Vietminh, who could now argue with little fear of contradiction that neither the French not the Japanese authorities were capable of looking out for the interests of the Vietnamese people. During the winter, Vietminh activists urged local peasants to raid warehouses throughout the northern and central provinces, seizing the grain stored there and distributing it to the needy. In many cases, however, it was too late, and the number of deaths from hunger stretched into the hundreds of thousands. The bodies of the dead lay unattended by the roadside in rural areas, as family members were often too weak to help their kin.47
That winter, the French had made strenuous efforts to clean out Vietminh guerrilla bases in the mountains north of the delta. After their initial victories in the battles at Phai Khat and Na Ngan, Vo Nguyen Giap’s armed propaganda units now marched northward toward the Sino-Vietnamese frontier, occupying villages inhabited by local minority peoples along the way. When the French sent out patrols, the rebels retreated to their base area (known as Hoang Hoa Tham) between Cao Bang and the village of Bac Can, where Giap and Vu Anh and Pham Van Dong, his colleagues on an interprovincial Party committee, began to draft plans to resume their March to the South to liberate Hanoi and the Red River delta from Japanese military occupation.
When, on March 9, 1945, the Japanese launched a coup d’état, they in a stroke of a pen brought to an end over half a century of French rule over Vietnam. By abolishing the colonial administration and replacing it with a puppet imperial government headed by Emperor Bao Dai but firmly under their domination, the Japanese had inadvertently opened up the entire region north of the delta to a revolutionary takeover. Party General Secretary Truong Chinh had anticipated the move, having called a meeting the previous day of available members of the Central Committee in Dinh Bang, a village twelve miles northeast of Hanoi, to discuss the implications. As the coup was taking place, the committee issued a directive ordering heightened preparations for an upcoming general uprising. Declaring that several factors favored the success of such an uprising, including the ongoing political crisis created by the coup, the intensifying famine, and the prospective Allied invasion, it concluded that military struggle should now receive the highest priority; the directive therefore called for the expansion of guerrilla bases, a broadening of the political base of the Vietminh Front, and a fusing of the various units of the revolutionary armed forces into a new VLA.
Nevertheless, the cautious Truong Chinh was concerned that the Party should not move until the internal and international conditions were ripe, for the revolutionary forces themselves were still not yet adequately prepared to launch a successful uprising. Only when those factors had ripened should his followers be prepared to act. The committee apparently assumed that an Allied invasion was likely, for the Party’s forces were directed to strike behind the Japanese lines and wage a general insurrection once the Allied forces had landed in Indochina and begun their advance. But it noted that even if the Japanese government decided to surrender before such an invasion took place, “our general uprising could still break out and succeed.”48
Prior to his departure from Kunming, Ho Chi Minh had provided his U.S. contacts with his interpretation of the March 9 coup. In a note signed “Luc” that is now in the U.S. archives, he declared that it had brought an end to the French domination in Indochina, a domination that had begun eighty-seven years previously. “Thus,” he concluded, “the French imperialist wolf was finally devoured by the Japanese fascist hyena.” Luc admitted that in the overall scheme of things in the world at war, this was only “a minute event,” but he claimed that it would have “a serious bearing on the World War in general, on Indo-China, France, Japan, and China in particular.” Ho’s purpose in writing the report was clear—to persuade the Roosevelt administration to attack Japan in Indochina, which he called “Japan’s only road of retreat.” In characteristically colorful language, he stated that “from Japan to New Guinea, the Japan force lays {sic} like a long snake whose neck is Indo-China. If the Allies knock hard on its neck, the snake will cease to move.”49
In the Cao Bang redoubt in northern Indochina, other Party leaders drew their own conclusions from the change of government in Indochina. On hearing the news of the coup, they ordered an intensification of guerrilla attacks throughout the frontier region near Cao Bang, while Giap’s armed propaganda units began to move south, occupying villages and enrolling new recruits for the liberation armed forces along the way. Passing through Cho Chu, they finally arrived at Kim Lung, a tiny village located in the midst of tangled jungle midway between Thai Nguyen and Tuyen Quang. There they encountered military units of Chu Van Tan’s National Salvation Army, who had been moving into the area from the east. With their meeting at Kim Lung, the junction of the revolutionary forces operating in the Viet Bac had been achieved and the road to the delta was open.
In early April 1945, the Central Committee convened a military conference at Hiep Hoa, a few miles northwest of Hanoi in Bac Giang province, to discuss how to carry out the directive issued at the Central Committee meeting held on the eve of the coup. This conference confirmed the conclusions reached in March, based on the assumption that Allied forces were likely to launch an invasion of Indochina prior to the end of the Pacific War, The conference formally ordered the creation of the VLA and instructed Vietminh cadres throughout the country to set up national liberation committees in preparation for the coming seizure of power. But the conference warned that the general insurrection must not take place until Japanese forces had become fully engaged in fighting against Allied troops—that is, unless Tokyo decided to surrender before an Allied invasion. In that event, when the Japanese regime in Indochina became “isolated and confused,” the insurrection could be launched. At the meeting, Vo Nguyen Giap learned from a colleague that his wife had died in prison three years earlier.50
A few days after his return to Cao Bang from the conference, Vo Nguyen Giap received the news that Ho Chi Minh had just returned from China and was preparing to set out along the route newly occupied by Vietminh forces to join his colleagues. Giap immediately traveled north to greet him along the way. Ho had arrived back at Pac Bo at the end of April, and quickly sent off his first intelligence report to Archimedes Parti. Enclosed with his message were two pamphlets, one directed to the leaders of the Allies, the other to the newly created United Nations, both appealing for Allied recognition of Vietnamese independence. The documents were ostensibly authored by the “National Party of Indo-China (Annam),” described as one of five parties that had originally formed the Dong Minh Hoi in 1942 and later merged with the Vietminh Front. Patti passed the pamphlets o
n to U.S. authorities in Chongqing.51
On May 4, 1945, dressed in a dark blue jacket of Nung style, with a conical hat and a cane, Ho Chi Minh left Pac Bo and headed south toward Kim Lung, where revolutionary forces had linked up a few weeks previously. He was accompanied by bodyguards and the AGAS team. A few days later, fighting the hot sun, the rugged mountain trails, and the ever present leeches, the group arrived at the village of Lam Son, where they joined Hoang Quoc Viet, Vu Anh, and Pham Van Dong coming from Cao Bang, After sending off a short note to Charles Fenn in Kunming thanking him for agreeing to provide training in radio equipment for some of his colleagues, on May 9 Ho and the remainder of the group headed south toward Ngan Son. On the seventeenth, they reached Na Kien, where they encountered Vo Nguyen Giap coming up from the south,52
Giap had not seen Ho Chi Minh since their meeting in Pac Bo the previous fall to plan for the creation of the armed propaganda brigades. He reported on current conditions in Indochina and on the results of the military conference at Hiep Hoa; Ho gave his colleague an account of the international situation. The two then discussed where to place the new military command post of the movement. Kim Lung’s advantages proved decisive. It was strategically placed near the direct route from the Chinese border to the Red River delta, but because it was tucked away in the tortuous mountain range between Thai Nguyen and Tuyen Quang, it was sufficiently isolated from major arteries of communication to be reasonably secure from enemy attack. At the same time, the local minority population was fervently sympathetic toward the revolution and could be trusted not to disclose the location of the base. Sensing the historical importance of the village for the fortunes of the Vietnamese revolution, Ho ordered it renamed Tan Trao (New Tide).53
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