News of the events in the capital spread quickly throughout Tonkin and undoubtedly facilitated the Vietminh takeover elsewhere in the region. Revolutionary forces brushed aside the halfhearted resistance offered by local authorities or the Japanese and in countless villages and market towns took power virtually unopposed. By August 22, the red flag with the gold star was flying throughout Tonkin and the upper districts of the panhandle. A cease-fire arranging for the surrender of all Japanese troops in the citadel at Thai Nguyen was negotiated the next day.
In the central provinces stretching south along the coast, the situation was somewhat more of a challenge. The revolutionary movement was not as well organized in the provinces of Annam, and lacked the advantage of a liberated base area within which to obtain recruits and provisions. Distance made communications with the Vietminh leadership in the north more difficult, and although Party units had received the March directive from the Standing Committee, it sometimes took several days to receive messages from Tan Trao, or even to obtain reliable news about the events taking place in Hanoi.
Under the circumstances, local Party leaders decided to act on their own initiative. Their main focus of attention was the imperial capital of Hué, where Party operatives had been preparing for the coming insurrection since receiving the March directive. The population mix in the region, however, was not as favorable to the revolution as it was farther to the north. As the old imperial capital, Hué was a city of administrators and court officials rather than factory workers or merchants. Although some residents—notably students, artisans, and petty functionaries—leaned toward the revolution, there were also a number of political parties or factions sympathetic to the old regime or even to the Japanese. As a consequence, cadres concentrated their efforts in neighboring rural villages, where support for the Vietminh was fairly strong.
On August 21, Emperor Bao Dai in Hué received a cable from the new government in Hanoi demanding his abdication. Local Party leaders seemed briefly uncertain what to do, but when the young revolutionary poet and Vietminh operative To Huu arrived in town, the ICP provincial committee became energized. Vietminh activists seized administrative power in surrounding villages and began to organize peasant militia units. Then, on August 22, more than 100,000 people gathered in the old imperial capital while the local uprising committee took power. As had been the case in Hanoi, there was virtually no resistance from the local government or the Japanese.
For the Vietminh, Cochin China was the toughest nut to crack. After the suppression of the 1940 uprising, the local ICP apparatus had been thrown into disarray. Most of the Party leadership in the region was either dead or in prison, and sympathizers were dispirited. In the meantime, non-Communist elements prospered under the Japanese occupation, which encouraged the growth of a nationalist movement directed against the West that reflected Tokyo’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, one based on the slogan “Asia for the Asians.” The Vichy French administration of Jean Decoux attempted to maintain its own influence by cultivating moderate elements connected with the relatively affluent middle class in Saigon and major market towns in the Mekong delta.
Faced with the threat of virtual extinction, Party elements painstakingly attempted to reconstruct the movement from scratch. Leading the effort was the veteran Stalin School graduate Tran Van Giau, who had been in prison at the time of the Cochin China insurrection in 1940 but had managed to escape the following summer. In the absence of any communication from the Party leadership in the north, local Party operatives decided to abide by the spirit of the Sixth Plenum of 1939, which had called for preparations for a future general uprising, while adapting it to conditions in Cochin China. Lacking a mountainous redoubt like the Viet Bac in the North, Giau decided to focus Party efforts on the city of Saigon-Cholon, while building up strength in rural areas for a general uprising at the end of the Pacific War, Although Party activists were unable to dominate their nationalist rivals as was the case elsewhere in the country, Giau attempted to boost the spirits of his colleagues by citing the example of the Bolshevik revolution to the effect that a trained and disciplined minority could seize power in a fluid situation. He thereupon began to plan for an urban uprising, with help from peasant elements infiltrated into the city from the suburbs.7
By early 1945 the Party had created a clandestine labor movement in the Saigon area with cells in more than seventy industrial establishments and a membership of 3000 workers. After the March coup, which toppled the Vichy French regime in Indochina, ICP activists took advantage of relaxed political restrictions by taking control over a youth organization established under Japanese sponsorship called the Vanguard Youth. Led by the covert Communist Pham Ngoc Thach (a son of the family friend Pham Ngoc Tho, who had sheltered Ho Chi Minh in Qui Nhon during his trek south after taking part in the peasant riots of 1908), the Vanguard Youth served as a cover for Party efforts to mobilize patriotic youth for future service in the revolutionary cause. Somewhat reminiscent of the Boy Scout movement in the West, with uniforms, songs, and an intense sense of mutual identity, it spread rapidly during the spring and summer of 1945 in schools, factories, and farm villages; by August the Vanguard Youth had a membership of over a million, in almost every province in Cochin China.8
After the March coup, the Japanese had decided to retain control over the administration of Cochin China for strategic reasons; only on August 14 did local occupation authorities permit Emperor Bao Dai to appoint the veteran nationalist Nguyen Van Sam as his imperial viceroy for the region. Non-Communist elements created a National United Front (Mat tran Quoc gia Thong nhat) to fill the vacuum that would be left by the departing Japanese. On August 16, the front’s executive committee took power in Saigon in a bloodless coup, while awaiting the arrival of the imperial viceroy.
Faced with the dual danger of the prospective return of the French and the rise to power of a non-Communist Vietnamese administration in Saigon, Tran Van Giau attempted to improvise. On hearing of the Japanese surrender on August 14, he met with regional Party leaders to set up an uprising committee and prepare for an insurrection. But some of the members—undoubtedly recalling the debacle of 1940—expressed doubts that revolutionary forces were in a position to seize power. Not only did they lack sufficient numbers of weapons to arm the paramilitary forces that had been organized among progressive workers and the most militant elements in the Vanguard Youth, but Party leaders in Cochin China were unaware of the intentions of their colleagues in the north. Eventually the committee decided to delay the uprising until news had been received about the situation in Hanoi. In the meantime, they would launch a “test case” by attempting to seize power in a few select localities in the countryside while seeking to build up the base of the Vietminh movement among the general population throughout the southern provinces.
When news of the August Revolution in Hanoi reached Saigon, on August 20, Tran Van Giau requested a meeting with the executive committee of the National United Front. At the conference, held two days later, he argued that the Front, composed of many parties and groups that possessed damaging ties to the Japanese occupation regime, would certainly not be accepted by the Allied powers as the legitimate representative of Vietnamese national aspirations. Only the Vietminh Front—which, he argued, had full Allied support—could do that. During the meeting, word arrived that Emperor Bao Dai had called on the revolutionary authorities in Hanoi to form a new government to replace the defunct Tran Trong Kim administration. Reluctantly, nationalist representatives agreed then and there to cooperate with the Vietminh. The National United Front was disbanded and replaced by a new Committee for the South (Uy ban Nam Bo), with Giau as chairman.
In the meantime, Giau’s “test case” uprising in Tan An, a town a few miles southwest of Saigon in the Mekong delta, had gone off without a hitch or any response from the Japanese. This success enabled Giau to persuade doubters on the Party regional committee to give their approval for a general insurrection to seize power in Saigon on August
25. That operation was to be followed by smaller local uprisings in rural areas. Success, he argued, was “ninety-percent certain,” but action must be taken before the arrival of Allied troops. That night, the plan was finalized, and on the morning of the twenty-fifth assault teams seized key government installations and enterprises, while thousands of villagers who had gathered previously in the suburbs entered the city to mingle with townspeople in chanting “Down with the imperialists, down with the French colonialists,” “Vietnam for the Vietnamese,” and “AU power to the Vietminh.” By midmorning, most of the city was in the hands of the insurgents. Although revolutionary units were ordered to avoid confrontations with Japanese troops, there were a few violent clashes between Vietnamese and Europeans on the streets, and there were reports of scattered lynchings. Shortly after noon, the Committee for the South, six of whose members were from the Vietminh, was sworn in as the provisional government of Cochin China. The following day, Vietminh radio trumpeted the success of the revolution in “the city of Ho Chi Minh.”9
While the wave of revolutionary fervor swept across the land, Ho Chi Minh was preparing to leave his guerrilla base in Tan Trao and travel to Hanoi. Although he must have shared the common jubilation over the stunning events taking place throughout the country, he was undoubtedly conscious of the intimidating challenges ahead, and quoted Lenin’s famous words of warning to his own colleagues: “Seizing power is difficult, but keeping it is even harder,” On the morning of August 22, he left for Thai Nguyen, traveling part of the way on foot and the remainder by auto and ferry, arriving there shortly after nightfall. The journey had been a difficult one—he was still suffering from the aftereffects of his illness, and had to be carried part of the way on a litter. The next day, accompanied by a local woman cadre, he continued south by automobile on Route 3 into the delta and crossed the Red River—still swollen by heavy summer rains—into the northern suburbs of Hanoi. The sight of the flooding, which had inundated rice paddies and villages throughout the area, inspired him to remark in sorrow, “What can we do to save the people from misery and famine?”
On the morning of August 25, Ho was met in the suburban hamlet of Ga by Vo Nguyen Giap and Tran Dang Ninh, who had come from Hanoi to greet him and give him an account of the situation in the capital. Shortly after, Truong Chinh arrived; that afternoon, he and Ho left by car for the city. Crossing the river over the Paul Doumer Bridge, they passed through streets now festooned with Vietminh flags and banners and went directly into the old Chinese section of town, where they stopped at a three-story row house on Hang Nhang Street owned by a Vietminh sympathizer. It was now used by a number of Party leaders as their temporary residence. Accommodations had been arranged for Ho Chi Minh on the top floor. It was the first time in his fifty-five years that Ho Chi Minh had been in Hanoi.10
That afternoon, Ho Chi Minh convened a meeting of the Party’s Standing Committee at his new residence. While the conference was in session, the first detachments of the VLA began to arrive from Thai Nguyen and, after lengthy negotiations with the Japanese authorities, crossed the bridge into the city. The meeting took place on the second floor, where his colleagues Giap and Ninh had set up their own sleeping arrangements. As described by Vo Nguyen Giap, the room was used as both dining and sitting room, and had no desks. Ho worked at the dining table, with his familiar typewriter placed on a small square table covered with a green cloth in one corner. After the first night, he moved down from the third floor and slept on a collapsible canvas bed that was folded up during the day, while his roommates reposed on a davenport or two benches put together. To the servants and neighbors, Ho and his colleagues were simply “gentlemen coming from the village for a visit.”11
The main topic at the meeting was the need to announce the formation of a provisional government. The Standing Committee had already confirmed that the National Liberation Committee created at Tan Trao, of which Ho was the chairman, would serve as a temporary government until a formal one could be elected. At the meeting, Ho suggested that the provisional government should be broadened to include a number of non-Party elements, and that the composition of the new government should be presented at a massive rally to announce the declaration of national independence. All this, he urged, must be accomplished before the arrival of Allied occupation forces.
It was none too soon, for even as Ho Chi Minh turned his attention to the formation of a new Vietnamese government, the first foreign troops were already beginning to arrive in Hanoi, At the Potsdam Conference, held in the suburbs of Berlin at the end of July and early August, the Allied powers had agreed to divide French Indochina into two separate zones in order to accomplish the surrender of Japanese forces and restore law and order in the country. Because U.S. forces were actively involved in accepting the surrender of the Japanese Imperial Army elsewhere in Asia, no U.S. troops were to be involved in the operation here. North of the Sixteenth Parallel, the task was assigned to Nationalist China; to the south, it would be accomplished by Great Britain. At U.S. insistence, the French were not included in the operation.
Because the end of the Pacific War had come with such lightning swiftness, the main units of the occupation forces were not expected to arrive in Indochina for several weeks. But an advance party of American and French officers had already arrived at Gia Lam Airport and took up residence at Hanoi’s stylish Metropole Hotel. A luxurious hotel built in French colonial style, the Metropole was located directly across from the Palace of the Imperial Delegate and a block east of Hoan Kiem Lake. Among the new arrivals was Captain Archimedes Patti, the OSS officer who had enlisted Ho Chi Minh’s cooperation during their meeting at Jingxi four months previously.
Shortly after the Japanese surrender, Patti had been appointed to head a “Mercy” team to fly to Hanoi in order to obtain the release of Allied prisoners of war held in Japanese concentration camps, as well as to provide intelligence information on conditions in Indochina. Jean Sainteny, one-time head of the French military mission, and now the senior representative of General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government in China, had requested permission to join Patti on the trip, allegedly to ascertain the situation of the thousands of French residents there. Although both the Chinese and the U.S. governments were reluctant to authorize the French to play any formal role in the surrender of the Japanese, Sainteny was eventually given permission to accompany Patti’s team to Hanoi, provided that he limit himself to taking part in humanitarian operations.
Once he was ensconced at the Metropole Hotel, Patti opened negotiations with the Japanese occupation authorities. He also established contact with local representatives of the victorious Vietminh Front, as well as groups representing French residents in the city, many of whom were fearful of possible attacks on Europeans. Around noon on August 26, he suddenly received an invitation to meet with Ho Chi Minh, He drove a circuitous route to Ho’s residence on Hang Ngang Street. After opening pleasantries and a delightful meal of fish soup, braised chicken, and pork, followed by rice cakes and fruit, the two engaged in a lengthy conversation about the current situation. Ho complained about the presence of the French team in Hanoi, which, at Sainteny’s instructions, had just taken up residence at the Governor-General’s Palace—and warned Patti that its actual goals went well beyond its stated concern for the conditions of French citizens in Indochina. He expressed concern about the attitude of the Chinese and the British governments, remarking that the latter shared the French interest in retaining the Asian colonies, while the Chinese were likely to sell out the interests of the Vietnamese to obtain advantages of their own.
Ho also attempted to probe his visitor about the U.S. perspective on Indochina. Conscious of his reputation among politically knowledgeable observers as a veteran agent of the Comintern, Ho protested that he was only a “progressive-socialist-nationalist” who had turned to Moscow and the Chinese Communists because there were no alternatives. But Patti, according to his own account, was noncommittal, insisting that he was not autho
rized to engage in discussions of local politics. For Ho Chi Minh, there was one piece of good news. Just before Patti left, a messenger arrived with a report that Nguyen Van Sam, the imperial viceroy of Cochin China, had tendered his resignation to the court in Hué. Shortly after three-thirty in the afternoon, Patti took his leave and returned to his new residence at the Maison Gautier, a luxurious villa on a quiet tree-lined street close to Hoam Kiem Lake.
At the Maison Gautier Patti found a message from Jean Sainteny, who invited him for a conversation at the palace. Sainteny, who was undoubtedly aware that the American had been in contact with Ho Chi Minh, expressed an interest in holding discussions with the Vietnamese leader. Patti agreed to pass on the message; later in the day he was informed that Vo Nguyen Giap had agreed to meet with Sainteny and Patti the following morning. Clearly the Vietnamese hoped to use the American’s presence to strengthen their case in this first meeting with a French official since the end of the war. Giap arrived at the palace in a white linen suit and a battered fedora, and was immediately subjected to a lecture from his host on the reckless behavior of the Vietminh authorities, which threatened law and order and the lives of innocent French citizens, Giap retorted that he had not come to defend the actions of the Vietnamese people, but to exchange views with a representative of the “new French government.” Sainteny then became more conciliatory, promising his visitor that the French government would respond in a favorable manner to most of the requests of the “Annamite” people. But he refused to go into specifics and issued a veiled warning that without a French presence, the people of north Vietnam would be at the mercy of Chinese occupation forces. The meeting ended inconclusively.12
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