All through the night Lu Han’s troops poured into the city; we could hear their traffic, the racing of motors, the shouted instructions. We awoke next morning to a scene of shocking contrast. The quality of the Chinese “army” had undergone a drastic change. Yesterday’s elite corps was today a squatters’ army. Crossing town I saw an almost incredible scene of confusion and aimlessly wandering Chinese. Sidewalks, doorways, and side streets were cluttered with solders and camp followers hovering over bundles of personal belongings, with household furnishings and military gear strewn everywhere. Many had staked claims in private gardens and courtyards and settled down to brew tea, do household chores and start the laundry.22
For Ho Chi Minh, the physical appearance of the newly arrived occupying army was less important than the question of its ultimate purpose. Ostensibly it had been dispatched to accept the surrender of Japanese troops and preserve law and order in Indochina until a new civilian administration could be established. But what kind of government did Chongqing foresee in Indochina, and what role would China play there in the postwar era? Although at the Cairo Conference in 1943 Chiang Kai-shek had promised President Roosevelt that China had no intention of attempting to seize the country itself, there seemed little doubt that his government was determined to manipulate the local situation in order to maintain a degree of influence over the area. Then again, how would Chinese occupation authorities react to French efforts to restore colonial rule in regions under their administration? Although some Chinese military officers, such as General Zhang Fakui, were clearly anti-French, others might be tempted to reach a compromise with the French in order to extend Chinese interests. This was the concern Ho Chi Minh had expressed to Patti during their August 26 meeting.
Even before the launching of the August Revolution, Party leaders had turned their attention to the question of how to deal with the victorious Allied powers. At the meeting of the Party Central Committee held at Tan Trao in mid-August, Ho Chi Minh had explained to his colleagues the complexity of the problem and the need for the future provisional government to exploit the contradictions among the Allies for its own advantage. In that report, he provided some key insights into his view of the world scene, and how it might affect the Vietnamese revolution. In Ho’s view, the most dangerous of the Allied powers were the French and the Chinese—the former because of their desire to restore the colonial edifice, and the latter because of the plots of Chinese officials to wrest control over the territory or to support the aspirations of pro-Chinese nationalists to seize political power in Hanoi. He predicted that the contradictions among the Allies might evolve in two different ways: First, differences might emerge between the United States and China on the one hand and Great Britain and France on the other over France’s desire to restore colonial rule. This was something, he said, that Vietnam might be able to exploit. On the other hand, if tensions developed between all of the other Allied powers and the USSR, it could lead the United States and Great Britain to support the French and enable them to return to Indochina.
Under those circumstances, Ho Chi Minh recommended dividing the Allied powers into separate camps and developing distinct tactics to deal with each. With regard to the French, he explained, “we must avoid military conflict, but when they arrive, we must direct the masses to demonstrate against French plots to restore their old power in Indochina.” As for the British and the Chinese, it would be advisable to avoid clashes with their occupation forces and to develop friendly relations with both governments, but if they began to intrude on the provisional government’s authority, it would be necessary to mobilize the masses and demand national independence. Above all, it was important to avoid fighting alone, which would play into the hands of the French and their “running dogs” within the collaborationist camp in Indochina.23
Based on that scenario, the new government sought to handle the Chinese occupation authorities with kid gloves. When Ho Chi Minh’s onetime patron Xiao Wen arrived in Hanoi to serve as General Lu Han’s political adviser, Ho was careful to stress the desire of his government to cooperate with the Chinese authorities. To minimize the danger of military clashes between Vietnamese and Chinese units, the VLA was renamed the National Defense Guard (Ve quoc Quan), and the bulk of Giap’s troops were pulled out of Hanoi, while other Vietnamese units stationed in the capital were carefully placed to avoid confrontations. When General Lu Han himself arrived on September 14, the government made no objection when he took over the Governor-General’s Palace from the French as his own residence. To their discomfiture, Sainteny and his entourage were forced to move to a villa downtown near the Bank of Indochina, which was still under the control of the Japanese.
One potential difficulty between the government and the Chinese occupational administration was how to deal with Vietnamese nationalist politicians who had arrived in Hanoi with the Chinese army. While still en route through the Viet Bac to Hanoi, some nationalist politicians had attempted to occupy the headquarters of the local people’s revolutionary committees, compelling the government to send envoys to the border provinces instructing local military units and civilian officials to avoid a confrontation with the new arrivals. Once they were in Hanoi, Nguyen Hai Than and his colleagues settled downtown and attempted to set up an “autonomous zone,” where they began to agitate against the new government.
Clearly, in Ho Chi Minh’s mind, the United States could play a key role in fending off the challenges from other world powers, and he had sought to exact every advantage from the tenuous relationship he had established with the OSS in the spring of 1945. But Ho must have already sensed that his efforts had borne little fruit. Sometime in mid-August, he had written one final letter to Charles Fenn, his friend and associate with AGAS who was now preparing to return to the United States. It was good for everyone, he remarked, that the war was finished, but he felt badly that his American friends would be leaving him soon. “And their leaving,” he said, “means that relations between you and us will be more difficult.”24
Although in retrospect, his remarks appear prophetic, they were fully in character with his understanding of the nature of the world and the future policies of the United States. As the Pacific War came to an end, Ho viewed the United States as a crucial but enigmatic factor in his country’s struggle for national independence. As a capitalist country, it represented a potential opponent of the future world revolution. On the other hand, President Roosevelt had emerged during the Pacific War as one of the most powerful and vocal spokesmen for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of Asia and Africa from colonial rule, and Ho apparently held out the possibility that Roosevelt’s policies would continue to shape U.S. attitudes after the close of the war.
Ho’s dual vision of the United States as a beacon for human freedom and a bastion of global capitalism was graphically demonstrated in the resolution issued by the Party Central Committee at Tan Trao in mid-August. On the one hand, Ho felt that U.S. dislike of European colonialism might prove useful in the Party’s struggle to prevent the return of the French to power in Indochina. On the other hand, if tensions rose between the capitalist powers and the USSR, Washington might decide to make concessions to Paris in order to enlist the French in an effort to prevent the spread of communism.
When Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency on the death of Roosevelt in April, he tacitly abandoned his predecessor’s waning effort to prevent the restoration of the French to power in Indochina. At the conference in San Francisco creating the United Nations in May, U.S. officials had indicated that they would not oppose the return of the French to Indochina after the end of the war. That policy change had been opposed by Asian specialists within the State Department, many of whom sympathized with Vietnamese aspirations for national independence; but the Department’s Division of European Affairs had argued that U.S. opposition to French sovereignty over Indochina could complicate relations with Paris after the war and—with tensions between Moscow and Washington on the rise in Europe—their views
had prevailed. Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had tried to assuage U.S. concerns by promising in March that Indochina would receive “an autonomy proportionate to her progress and attainments,” and at San Francisco U.S. delegates had responded with the announcement that Washington would not press for the transformation of Indochina into an international trusteeship. Still, in deference to the views expressed by Asianists in the State Department, the administration “insisted on the necessity of providing a progressive measure of self-government for all dependent peoples looking toward their eventual independence or incorporation in some form of federation according to circumstances and the ability of the peoples to assume these responsibilities.”25
In late August, just as the Vietminh were consolidating their power in Hanoi, de Gaulle met with Truman at the White House. Although Truman urged his visitor to pledge the future independence of Indochina, de Gaulle demurred, remarking that any public statement to that effect would be just “fine words.” He did assure his host that the French government would take appropriate steps that would eventually lead to self-government for the peoples in the area. A few days later, the State Department circulated a statement to the effect that the United States did not dispute the French claim of sovereignty in Indochina. Unfortunately, news of that decision did not arrive in Chongqing until October. As a result, Archimedes Patti and other Americans arriving in Indochina lacked formal instructions from the American Embassy there on future U.S. policies in the region.
Unaware that Patti was little better informed on current U.S. policies than he was, Ho Chi Minh concentrated his efforts on reassuring his visitor. In his meeting with Patti on August 26, Ho had already complained about Chinese intentions in Indochina, as well as those of the French. Then, on the day prior to the Independence Day ceremonies, Ho met with Patti again to complain that U.S. officials did not understand what the Chinese and the French were intending to do in Indochina. To relieve possible U.S. doubts about the ideological orientation of his government, he denied once again that the Vietminh Front was dominated by the ICP, and said that it was willing to accept a limited form of independence from the French (in his cable describing the meeting, Patti quoted Ho as demanding “limited independence, liberation from French rule, right to live as free people in family of nations and lastly right to deal directly with outside world”). As an additional inducement, he told Patti that his country badly needed U.S. investment and advice and implied a willingness to grant special concessions to U.S. commercial interests in Vietnam.
By his own account, Patti (like virtually every American who had met with Ho in the closing days of the war) was sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh and his new government, but he was operating under the restrictions relating to his assignment and the ambiguity of U.S. policy, and so refrained from making any promises. A short trip to Kunming in early September did not alleviate his concern. OSS chief Richard Heppner was angry at Patti’s apparent willingness to mediate the Franco-Vietminh dispute and ordered him to refrain from future political activities. Left to his own devices, Ho Chi Minh decided to temporize with the Chinese. When General Xiao Wen met with him in early September and broadly hinted at the advisability of adding more non-Communist nationalist leaders to the provisional government, Ho replied that it was indeed his ultimate intention to “democratize” the government, but that elections could probably not take place until the end of the year.26
While Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were trying to preserve their government’s tenuous authority in Hanoi, the fragile position of their counterparts in south Vietnam was under a more immediate threat. After the tumultuous events in Saigon on August 25, the situation there had begun to stabilize, as the Committee for the South—under its Vietminh chairman, Tran Van Giau—attempted to consolidate its power in preparation for the imminent arrival of British occupation forces. A few days later, Hoang Quoc Viet arrived in Saigon as the representative of the Party Central Committee, and he undoubtedly advised Giau to avoid provocative actions or any confrontation with the British after they arrived. But Giau’s position was a delicate one. He was forced to share power in the committee with representatives of rival parties, many of whom were not only deeply suspicious of the character and intentions of the Vietminh Front but were also ready to take advantage of any signs of Vietminh weakness toward the enemy, which would enable them to accuse Giau of selling out. To make it worse, despite the presence of Hoang Quoc Viet, Giau and his colleagues were still almost totally isolated from the Party leadership in Hanoi and forced to make decisions on their own. They had only just learned from Hoang Quoc Viet that the mysterious Ho Chi Minh was in reality Nguyen Ai Quoc. Long accustomed to taking action according to local circumstances, southern leaders did not respond with enthusiasm to Viet’s suggestions (sometimes apparently phrased in the form of instructions). In return, Hoang Quoc Viet, a labor leader from a worker background with a strong bent toward ideological orthodoxy, apparently viewed Giau and his associates as petty bourgeois adventurers heavily tainted by the decadent character of life in capitalist Saigon. The mutual distrust between the northern and southern branches of the Party that had begun to emerge in the late 1930s was reinforced by the separate tracks followed by the two regions during and after the August Revolution.
On September 2, large crowds gathered in front of the Norodom Palace in the center of Saigon to celebrate Independence Day and listen to a radio broadcast of Ho Chi Minh’s speech in Hanoi. But tensions ran high between Vietnamese and French residents within the city, and when demonstrators began to march down Rue Catinat, the affluent shopping street that led from the cathedral to the Saigon River, small-arms fire suddenly broke out in the square in front of the church. The crowd became agitated, and angry youths began to enter nearby buildings searching for French snipers. In the tumult that followed, Father Tricoire, the curator of the cathedral, was struck by a bullet and killed as he observed the events while standing on the steps. Fanned by popular hysteria, the violence spread, as mobs raided homes, looted shops, and roamed the streets looking for Europeans to bear up. Before the day was over (“black Sunday,” the French press labeled it), four were dead and hundreds injured.
Over the next few days, Tran Van Giau counseled his followers to maintain their discipline and pleaded with them to avoid unnecessary provocations, but rival elements within the nationalist camp and the local Trotskyite faction lurked in the wings, eager to profit from any Vietminh misstep. Also opposed to Vietminh authority were two growing religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, both of which had recently flourished in the fluid and unstable atmosphere of the Mekong delta in the early twentieth century. Syncretic in nature and eager to maintain authority over their own flocks, the two sects had already attained followings of several hundred thousand people and were determined to resist the infusion of outside authority.
On September 12, the first units of the British occupation force, most of them Gurkhas as well as a few French troops, arrived at Tan Son Nhut Airport. Their commander, British Major General Douglas Gracey, arrived the next day. Slim, mustachioed, and ramrod-straight, Gracey was every inch the image of a British general. He was the son of a colonial civil servant in India, and a graduate of Sandhurst. His own Twentieth Indian Division had just completed a long and successful stint fighting the Japanese in Burma, and Gracey had spent much of his own career in colonial areas, where he had earned the respect of his own troops, many of them Asians, for his courage and fair-mindedness. To many observers, he must have seemed an ideal appointment for the challenging task of accepting Japanese surrender and maintaining law and order in Indochina until a political settlement could be achieved.
Right from the start, however, problems arose. In the first place, Gracey was not suited by personal experience or political instinct for his delicate assignment. Long service in the British army had solidified in his mind the conviction that colonial rule over Asian territories was inevitable and correct. Second, his assignment was ambiguous. While in Rangoon,
he had been assigned command of all Allied land forces in Indochina south of the Sixteenth Parallel, but en route to Saigon, his orders were amended by Lieutenant General William J. Slim, commander in chief of British land forces in the Southeast Asian Theater. Gracey was instructed to maintain law and order only in key areas of the country, unless requested by French authorities or by authority of General Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander for the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC), which, from its headquarters in Ceylon, had helped to direct Allied operations in much of the region during the Pacific War. By implication, General Slim was assigning the southern half of Indochina back to the French.
Conditions in Saigon on Gracey’s arrival were also not optimal. With the surrender of the Japanese, the primary linchpin for maintaining law and order had been removed, and the city was now patrolled by Vietnamese police, who owed allegiance to no one. When, on September 8, Tran Van Giau had appealed to the local population for quiet and cooperation with the Committee for the South, he was severely criticized by militant nationalists, and even by some members of his own Party, who suspected him of being a “lackey” of the French. The next day, the committee was reorganized, and Giau resigned his chairmanship in favor of the nationalist Pham Van Bach. The composition of the committee was broadened, so that the Vietminh membership were only four out of thirteen. On September 12, French prisoners of war who had just been released from jail by newly arrived French troops in Gracey’s detachment began to carouse through the streets, looting stores and attacking Vietnamese pedestrians. Appalled by the anarchic conditions that he found in the city, Gracey turned to the only stable element he could find, ordering Japanese troops to disarm all Vietnamese and evict the Committee for the South from the governor-general’s residence in downtown Saigon. The British command headquarters then announced that British troops would maintain law and order until the restoration of French colonial authority.27
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