In November 1953, Ho Chi Minh and other Vietminh leaders planned the pivotal campaign of Dien Bien Phu. Here the “four pillars” of the Patty—Pham Van Dong, Ho, Truong Chinh, and Vo Nguyen Giap—map out their strategy at their command post.
The French fort at Dien Bien Phu, in the mountainous northwestern corner of Vietnam, fell to a final Vietminh assault on May 6, 1954, just a day before the peace conference on Indochina convened in Geneva, Switzerland.
After planning their spring 1954 campaign to attack Dien Bien Phu, Party leaders decided to strengthen the land reform program to win support from poor peasants. Here Ho Chi Minh addresses the land reform conference to describe the provisions of the new program.
With victory over the French in the summer of 1954, Ho Chi Minh and other Party leaders prepared to return to Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh, in his habitual jungle garb, was only occasionally able to savor a moment of relaxation.
The elaborate Presidential Palace, in a garden adjacent to Ba Dinh Square, was the scene of considerable bickering between the French and the DRV after World War II, with each claiming the right to occupy it. After Geneva, however, Ho Chi Minh refused to live in the palace, residing instead in a small gardener’s cottage nearby.
In this small stilt house built in the style used by members of the mountain minorities, Ho Chi Minh spent most of his last years. Ho lived in a simple bedroom on the top floor, adjacent to a small study. In the bookcase were books by David Schoenbrunn, Benjamin Spock, and Jack London.
Ho Chi Minh inspecting one of the new collective farms in Hai Hung province in 1958. After the return of the DRV to Hanoi, Ho played a largely ceremonial role in the domestic arena, leaving executive duties to General Secretary Truong Chinh and other senior colleagues.
Ho Chi Minh presenting his political report to the Third National Patty Congress in September 1960. To his right in the front row is the new general secretary Le Duan. To his left is Duan’s predecessor Truong Chinh. At far left in the second row is General Vo Nguyen Giap. At the other end is Hoang Van Hoan.
Although relations between Ho Chi Minh and senior Party leader Truong Chinh were never close, each apparently respected the other, and Chinh treated the president with considerable reverence.
During the 1960s, Ho Chi Minh made several visits to Beijing to receive medical treatment. On some occasions, he was able to meet his colleague Mao Zedong. Here the two elderly leaders converse at Mao’s residence in the imperial city.
On the grounds of the Presidential Palace and adjacent to the Stilt House was a small arbor where Ho Chi Minh often worked or hosted visiting delegations. Under towering shade trees, Ho found comfort here from the blistering heat of the sun.
During his last years in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh drew considerable pleasure from feeding the goldfish in the pond adjacent to his Stilt House. Across the pond is the gardener’s house occupied by Ho in the mid-1950s.
In the last years of his life, Ho Chi Minh continued to garden and perform exercises. Here he tends a small tree presented to him by a delegation of “liberation fighters” from South Vietnam.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail served as the main conduit for the shipment of personnel and provisions to the revolutionary movement in the South. Although at first the trail was limited to foot and bicycle traffic, by the end of the war it had been widened to accommodate well-camouflaged Soviet trucks.
When U.S. bombing raids approached the central district of Hanoi, a bomb shelter was constructed next to the Stilt House to protect the president from harm.
In 1976, this mausoleum was erected in Ba Dinh Square to hold Ho Chi Minh’s mortal remains. Thousands visit the site yearly to view his embalmed body inside.
In the late 1980s the Ho Chi Minh Museum was built directly behind the mausoleum in northwest Hanoi. Shaped like a lotus leaf, the building serves as a testimonial to Ho’s role in some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century.
X | THE DAYS OF AUGUST
On August 14, 1945, the guns fell silent across Asia. With the announcement of the Japanese decision to surrender, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur headed for Tokyo Bay to present the Allied peace terms to representatives of the imperial government on board the battleship U.S.S. Missouri.
In their mountain fortress at Tan Trao, Vietminh leaders had already heard the news of Tokyo’s impending surrender and had begun to react. On August 16, the day of the opening of the National People’s Congress, units of Vo Nguyen Giap’s Vietnamese Liberation Army, accompanied by Major Allison Thomas and his Deer team, had begun to move southward toward the Red River delta. On the same day, popular uprisings broke out in rural districts throughout North Vietnam. Some of the actions were essentially spontaneous in character; others were incited by local Vietminh units. In those areas where government power was successfully destroyed, local “people’s liberation committees” were established. The seals of office were transferred to the new authorities, and hostile elements were beaten and in a few cases people were put to death.
The revolutionary forces were undoubtedly assisted by the famine in the northern and central part of the country that had continued since the previous winter. The government of Prime Minister Tran Trong Kim, which was appointed by Emperor Bao Dai after the Japanese coup in March, had attempted to end the crisis by stopping the forced sale of rice to Japanese authorities, placing a ceiling on prices, and seeking to increase grain shipments from the southern provinces by improving transportation facilities. Famine relief associations were established to provide grain to the needy. A good spring harvest had helped to reduce the famine, but heavy rains in midsummer caused the Red River and its tributaries to overflow. Many peasant families living in the low-lying regions of the delta were forced to abandon their homesteads and seek refuge on the dikes above the swirling waters. Widespread hunger provided a golden opportunity for the Vietminh, who continued to encourage angry peasants in areas coming under their occupation to seize public rice stocks for their own use. But at least in the short term, little could be done to alleviate the suffering. Up to one million people, nearly 10 percent of the population of the northern half of the country, had died of famine during the first half of the year.1
In a few instances, the insurgents encountered opposition from Japanese occupation forces. When units of Giap’s VLA, carrying U.S. weapons and dressed in fatigues, entered the provincial capital of Thai Nguyen on the morning of August 19, a massive popular demonstration broke out in the center of town to welcome the new arrivals, and dispirited soldiers of the Civil Guard turned their weapons over to the attackers. The Vietnamese governor and other senior officials within the province announced their surrender, but Japanese troops launched a vigorous defense of their own headquarters in the center of town. When news of the stubborn Japanese resistance reached the Party Central Committee, it ordered Giap to leave a portion of his troops in Thai Nguyen to block the Japanese, while directing the remainder toward the capital of Hanoi. A similar process took place in neighboring Tuyen Quang province.2
In Hanoi, rumors that Japan was about to surrender had begun to circulate on August 11, after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki, two days earlier. Members of the Party regional committee under Nguyen Khang began rapidly to prepare for an insurrection to seize the city from the Japanese. In fact, they had been preparing for that day for several months. Although there were only about fifty Party members in the capital, several thousand people had reportedly joined the Vietminh National Salvation Associations as disillusionment with the ineffectual policies of the Tran Trong Kim government spread. By the end of 1944, the most dedicated activists were being enrolled in assault units designed to seize government installations, or in so-called honorary units to carry out terrorist operations against government officials and other local residents sympathetic to the regime. In the surrounding villages, armed propaganda units had been formed to prepare for the moment when local villagers would be ordered to enter Hanoi to arouse the urban population and assist urban fo
rces to seize power.3
Economic conditions in all urban areas operated in favor of the insurgents. Industrial production had plummeted during the last two years of the war, while inflation—brought on in part as a result of the issue of banknotes by the Japanese military administration to meet its own needs—was rising rapidly. In a few months, the rate of exchange for the Indochinese piastre declined from about US$0.25 to less than US$0.10. By some estimates, the cost of living was up over thirty times what it had been at the beginning of the war. With living costs rising and the food shortage continuing, many middle-class residents in Hanoi and other major cities began to turn their eyes to the Vietminh, and some even began to buy Vietminh “revolutionary bonds” to curry favor with the potential new revolutionary authorities.
During the first two weeks of August, Party leaders based in Hanoi sought to infiltrate government military units stationed in the capital and established contact with Phan Ke Toai, the imperial delegate in Tonkin. Toai, who was reported to be secretly sympathetic to the revolutionary forces (his son was actively involved in the Vietminh Front), met with Nguyen Khang on August 13 and asked the Vietminh to join the Bao Dai government, which was now prepared to deal with the victorious Allies. But Khang refused and advised that the emperor abdicate and turn over power to a new republican government. Toai was noncommittal, but agreed to transmit the message to the imperial court in Hué. On the same day, Prime Minister Tran Trong Kim, conscious of the stain of illegitimacy on the current government and painfully aware of his own inexperience (prior to appointment as prime minister, he was a historian of moderate political views), resigned in Hué and turned over his authority to a committee designed to serve as a provisional government until the arrival of Allied forces. Non-Communist nationalists created their own Committee for National Salvation to serve as the representative of that government in Hanoi.4
Reports that Tokyo had accepted Allied peace terms the previous day arrived in Hanoi on August 15. Japanese occupation authorities immediately turned over power to the local Vietnamese government. That evening, members of the Indochinese Communist Party regional committee for Tonkin met in the suburb of Ha Dong to draw up their own response to the week’s events. Although the committee had received no orders from Ho’s headquarters in Tan Trao, the Party’s March directive had emphasized the importance of local initiative in order to take maximum advantage of the vacuum that would be created at the moment of Japanese surrender. The regional committee ordered popular uprisings in the provinces throughout the Red River delta in preparation for an imminent attack on the capital. A five-man “Military Insurrection Committee” was created under Nguyen Khang to direct the operation. The next morning, Khang rode by bicycle into Hanoi, where he met with local leaders to coordinate their actions. But, lacking word from Tan Trao, they still made no final decision on how and when to seize power.5
On the night of August 16, the people of Hanoi lay in the dark awaiting their fate. The street lights in the center of the city had been dimmed and covered in black shades in preparation for possible air raids, and the occasional light emanating from local hotels and restaurants contrasted sharply with the prevailing blackness. Suddenly, the eerie quiet of the streets was punctuated by the sound of pistol shots. A Vietminh squad had entered a downtown movie house near Hoan Kiem Lake (known to the French as Le Petit Lac) and interrupted the film with a series of short speeches. When a Japanese military officer in the audience fled the theater, he was gunned down on the street. His body lay untouched for hours.
Hoping to devise a response to the rapidly evolving situation, leading members of the Tonkin Consultative Assembly, a deliberative body created two decades earlier by the French colonial regime, convened a meeting of the assembly at the imposing Governor-General’s Palace in the fashionable northwest section of the city on the seventeenth. The meeting was dominated by pro-Japanese members of the Dai Viet party, who had formed the majority in the Committee for National Salvation created four days earlier. They called for popular demonstrations in support of the Bao Dai government. In the meantime, however, Vietminh units in the suburbs—responding to the order of the Military Insurrection Committee—had gone into action, seizing power from local authorities and establishing people’s revolutionary committees in their place. Militia units, often armed with no more than sticks, sabers, and a handful of antiquated firearms, were created among the able-bodied, in preparation for an advance into the city the following morning.6
The stirring events taking place in the suburbs heightened the level of ferment inside the city. On the afternoon of August 17, while the Tonkin Consultative Assembly was still in session in the Governor-General’s Palace, another meeting convened at the Municipal Theater, an ornate French-style opera house built at the beginning of the century in downtown Hanoi. This meeting had been called to bring together political parties and groups loyal to the provisional government just created by Tran Trong Kim; a large crowd, estimated at 20,000, gathered in the square in front of the theater to observe and perhaps influence the proceedings. But as the conference opened, pro-Vietminh demonstrators acting under the orders of the Party municipal committee began to chant slogans demanding national independence and power to the people. Soon, militant agitators entered the building and ascended to the second floor, where they ripped down the imperial flag on the balcony and raised the red and gold standard of the Vietminh Front. Nguyen Khang mounted the rostrum erected in front of the building, announced the Japanese surrender, and appealed to the assembled crowd to support the forthcoming uprising. The meeting ended in chaos when the crowd formed into a massive column that marched through a heavy summer rainstorm to the Palace of the Imperial Delegate, two blocks away. Others continued to the Governor-General’s Palace or to the old commercial section of the city.
That evening, as the city lay tense in the heat of the hot summer night, the Party’s local leaders met at a secret location in the suburbs, to map out plans for the following days. Spurred on by Nguyen Khang, the committee decided to use the next day to smuggle weapons into the city and place the Party’s assault teams at strategic locations for an insurrection to be launched on August 19. Party leaders estimated that there were now over 100,000 Vietminh sympathizers in the city, or at least half the entire urban population. To bolster their strength, reinforcements were to be infiltrated from the suburbs, where militia units were awaiting the order to march. In the evening of the eighteenth, the members of the Military Insurrection Committee quietly entered Hanoi to direct the action.
A large crowd began to gather in the square before the Municipal Theater in the early morning hours. Many of those in attendance were peasants from the neighboring villages of Thanh Thi, Thuan Tin, and Phu Xuyen who had been mobilized by Vietminh armed propaganda teams and had begun streaming into the city before dawn. Others were townspeople, workers, students, merchants, and government officials simply curious to take part in the coming events. According to one participant, the men were dressed in brown shirts and rubber sandals, the women in brown blouses and kerchiefs and walking barefoot. The streets were a forest of red flags, each sporting the now familiar gold star in the middle. Because it was a Sunday, all the stores were shut, as were the local food markets.
A ceremony began in front of the Municipal Theater just before noon. After a moment of silence to commemorate those who had died in the struggle for independence, a band played the new national anthem as the flag was raised. Then a member of the Party’s municipal committee appeared on the balcony and announced that the general insurrection was under way. Shortly after, the crowd branched out into several columns, each proceeding to a strategic point in the city: City Hall, the central police headquarters, and the Palace of the Imperial Delegate. Most were unopposed, but in a few instances they encountered temporary obstacles. When the group led by Nguyen Khang approached the palace, a unit of the local Civil Guard was deployed to offer resistance, but after a brief skirmish with a Vietminh assault team, the officer in
charge surrendered. Members of the Vietminh unit scaled the wrought-iron fence in front of the palace and their Vietminh flag was soon hoisted in place of the imperial banner. Other columns marched to the headquarters of the Civil Guard, the city prison, and other municipal buildings, and occupied them as well.
Neither the provisional government not the Japanese offered any resistance. After negotiations with Vietminh leaders, Japanese occupation authorities reached an agreement that Japanese troops would not intervene. The Committee for National Salvation established a few days earlier seemed powerless to act—and in fact, it disintegrated before the end of the day. By sundown, Hanoi was in the hands of the revolutionary forces in a bloodless takeover, and Vietminh authorities sent messages to units elsewhere announcing the victory and giving instructions for further action: “If possible act as in Hanoi. But where the Japanese resist, attack resolutely. It is necessary at all costs to seize power,”
The events of the past few days had been an exhilarating experience for the population of Hanoi, which had suffered through several years of economic privation and Japanese military occupation. Unrestricted by Japanese police, crowds circulated through the streets, waving banners and shouting slogans demanding independence and the resignation of the puppet imperial government. Few of those wandering through the downtown streets had a clear idea of the nature of the Vietminh movement, which now claimed to represent the interests of all the Vietnamese people. But for the vast majority, the end of the Pacific War and the possible eviction of the French provided reason enough to celebrate.
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