Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  In the event, by May 1942 the Japanese had overrun the Philippines, forcing the US to surrender its forces after dogged rearguard actions at Bataan and Corregidor. MacArthur was evacuated, accompanied on his retreat to Australia by the Commonwealth’s President Manuel Quezon. The Japanese stationed an enormous occupation force, some 625,800 soldiers, in the Philippines, which were rightly regarded as crucial to defence of the home islands and to the entire Japanese position in South-east Asia. Few members of the Hispanic elites who had collaborated with the Americans had qualms about switching their allegiance. The Japanese met them halfway, explaining, ‘Like it or not you are Filipinos and belong to the Oriental race. No matter how hard you try, you cannot become white people.’33 Tokyo offered its collaborators independence more rapidly than the defeated Americans had done. In July 1943 they were instructed to draft a constitution, the quid pro quo being that they declare war on the US, which after much foot dragging they did in September 1944.

  Meanwhile, large numbers of brave Filipinos retreated to the hills to wage guerrilla war against the occupiers. The largest group was the Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon (People’s Anti-Japanese Army), known as Hukbalahap (Huks) for short. The Huks had their roots in several pre-war militant peasant groups that had coalesced to defend the traditional rights of peasant tenant farmers on the central plain of Luzon, in an area bounded by the Candaba Swamps, the lone peak of Mount Arayat, and the longer ranges of the Sierra Madre and Zimbales. Their desire was to ‘get what was just if landlords were honourable and good men’; for, like most peasant movements in history, they were nostalgic for supposedly venerable customs and times when the patron wore a human face. The trend was otherwise: landlords took up to 50 per cent of each rice harvest, charging extortionate interest rates in return for emergency loans, and introduced machines to replace men. They also abused land registration to appropriate land with insecure titles, getting away with it because of their corrupt influence in the courts and the Constabulary. On haciendas they had their own strongarm squads to rough up troublesome peasants.34

  The complex relationship between the Huks and the Philippines Communist Party will be discussed separately. Many of the Huks were in their twenties and had witnessed Japanese brutality at first hand when their relatives were raped, tortured or shot. One in ten of them were young women, although they usually acted as couriers, instructors and nurses rather than as guerrilla fighters. Their weapons were those they took from the Japanese, which they taught themselves to use. It was a desperately savage conflict, in which the Japanese relied on hooded informants to identify Huk sympathizers, while the Huks kidnapped, tried and shot local mayors and policemen who collaborated with the occupiers. The US also inserted its own force into this conflict, recruiting guerrillas whose task was to keep a watching brief on Japanese troop movements, but increasingly they also came into conflict with the Huks. All of this would be replayed after MacArthur’s grandiose return and the liberation of the Philippines, when the pre-war elite was restored to power.35

  Indochina

  Indochina was a French colony, consisting of the petty kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos, as well as the southern colony of Cochin China, and the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin in the north. These last three comprised ‘Vietnam’ in the eyes of nationalists, a very long country about a thousand miles north to south, and wider in the north and south than in a middle, where it narrows to thirty miles. It is roughly the length of California but half the width, and much of it consists of mountainous jungle. Forty thousand French ruled twenty-three million indigenous peoples, the bureaucrats mostly ensconced in the administrative capital of Hanoi in the north, and the settlers concentrated in Saigon in the south, to be near their coffee, rubber and tea plantations. The overseas Chinese constituted the majority of the urban entrepreneurial class.36

  In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt famously commented to Stalin that ‘after a hundred years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants are worse off than they had been before’.37 This was because the ramified interests of the Banque d’Indochine syphoned off the nation’s wealth, so that Indochina was actually an economic and political liability. Roosevelt’s preferred solution was to place such dysfunctional colonies under international trusteeships, to be supervised by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China, for in his view France did not merit a place in such exalted company. China’s manifold incapacities were the first blow to this solution, while on the altar of inter-Allied solidarity he eventually bowed to Churchill, who supported the exiled Free French leader Charles de Gaulle from 1940 onwards as much to pre-empt US threats to Britain’s own colonial interests as to restore France. As Churchill said, he had not become prime minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Roosevelt also reluctantly awoke to the probability that the colonial issue might compromise the larger security architecture he envisaged for the post-war world, chiefly by weakening the already debilitated imperial metropolises by stripping away their overseas resources.38

  Wartime Indochina had special complexities, largely because the colonial power fractured into two inimical groupings: adherents of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime and the Free French followers of Charles de Gaulle. From 1940 to 1944, Vichy French forces coexisted with 65,000 Japanese troops, a minor concession being that they were not obliged to salute each other. For the Japanese, Indochina was the pivotal hinge of the fan they used to spread across South-east Asia, as well as a means of preventing Allied supplies reaching Nationalist China overland. As the war turned against them, the Japanese feared a US invasion from the liberated Philippines, which might be co-ordinated with a local French uprising, after Vichy influence had been subverted by de Gaulle’s Free French.

  In March 1945 Japanese commander General Tsuchihashi Yuichi swept the colonial regime aside. He gave Admiral Jean Decoux two hours to ponder whether to subordinate French troops to the Japanese. When Decoux asked for more time, the Japanese took over all French bases and installations, crushing such French resistance as arose. Wherever French troops baulked at this coup, as they did at Lang Son in the far north, they were captured and beheaded, poignantly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Those French troops who escaped to a remote north-western airfield at Dien Bien Phu found that their requests for US arms fell on deaf ears. They eventually straggled into southern China, barefoot and hungry.

  In Indochina the French had ruthlessly suppressed every manifestation of anti-colonial sentiment, from mutinous troops via rebellious peasants to striking schoolboys, but there was one implacable opponent who eluded them for three decades: Ho Chi Minh. This was the final iteration of multiple aliases Ho would use. Nguyen Tat Thanh (He Who Will Succeed) was born in about 1890 to a farmer’s son who had joined the mandarin elite, achieving the equivalent of a doctorate. Whether because of pride or temperament, Ho’s father refused to work directly for the puppet emperor who ruled supposedly autonomous Annam, working instead as a rural teacher and then as a magistrate. In 1910 in a drunken rage he caned the wrong person to death and was dismissed from office. He died poor in Saigon.

  The future Ho was a bright boy who shed the long hair that marked him out as a country bumpkin at school. He realized early on that a mastery of Western culture – including its revolutionary tradition – was the way to defeat Western imperialism. By his late teens Thanh was involved in anti-French demonstrations, which resulted in expulsion from his French school. Already marked out by the colonial police, he eventually embarked for France, as ‘Ba’, an assistant cook and stoker on a small liner bound for Marseilles. A truly remarkable odyssey had begun.39

  When Ho arrived in Marseilles in July 1911, he noted that ‘the French in France are better and more polite than in Indochina’. In cafés waiters called him ‘Monsieur’. He applied without success for a scholarship to attend the Colonial School. After he had opted for the merchant marine his movements were necessarily opaque; but, wherever he ventured ashore, he moved in political circ
les as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot).

  In July 1923 he slipped his French police shadows through the rear exit of a Parisian cinema and boarded a train to Hamburg and on to Russia by ship as the Chinese merchant ‘Chen Vang’. In Moscow he enrolled in the University of the Toilers of the East, which was informally known as the Stalin School since it was under his Commissariat of Nationalities. By July 1923 Ho was deemed important enough to move into the Lux Hotel, albeit into a small room with a bed infested with bugs. In January 1924 his face and fingers were damaged after queuing for hours in deep winter to view Lenin’s body. After impressing his Comintern comrades at the Fifth Congress in 1924, speaking of the need to strike imperialism in the colonies from which it drew its resources, he persuaded his superiors to send him to Canton to organize exiled Vietnamese revolutionaries.40

  Ho moved into the Canton villa of Mikhail Borodin, the leader of twenty Bolshevik agents attached to the United Front of the KMT and CCP (that is, the Chinese Communist Party). He became ‘Ly Thuy’ to confuse the French Sûreté officers operating from the French enclave. Officially a journalist, his covert Comintern activities involved recruiting members of an exiled Vietnamese Anarchist group called Tam Tam Xa (Society of Beating Hearts) who, shortly before his arrival, had attempted to assassinate Martial Merlin, the new Governor-General of Indochina, at a banquet, with a bomb that sent knives and forks into the bodies of five other guests. These radicals became the initial recruits of an Indochinese Nationalist Party attached to the CCP and the KMT, but also the covert kernel of a separate Vietnamese Communist group. In early 1925 Ho founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League, the feeder pool for a future Vietnamese Communist Party. The mandarin’s son gave a distinctly Confucian ethical stamp to a movement that blended nationalism and Marxist-Leninism, at a time when the relationship between the two was unresolved by the Soviets.

  His relatively stable life in Canton with wife and child ended when in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT broke with the Chinese Communists, many of whom were tracked down and shot. Ho fled to Hong Kong, where he was refused entry, then to Vladivostok and back to Europe. One night in Paris a friend met him on a bridge, looking down sadly into the Seine. ‘I always thought I would become a scholar or a writer, but I’ve become a professional revolutionary,’ he said. ‘I travel through many countries, but I see nothing. I’m on strict orders, and my itinerary is carefully prescribed, and you cannot deviate from the route, can you?’41

  He eventually took ship to Siam, home to 20,000 Vietnamese exiles. In 1929 the French colonial authorities sentenced him to death in absentia. When three rival Vietnamese Communist parties emerged, Ho was smuggled into Hong Kong in February 1930 to resolve their differences. This resulted in the formal foundation of the Dang Cong san Viet Nam, the Vietnamese Communist Party. Arrested and put on trial by the British, Ho eventually fled to the Soviet Union, where he remained until 1938.

  Lengthy British custody meant that he laboured under suspicion of being a spy in the years when Stalin murdered 650,000 of his comrades, in purges which reached into the foreign denizens of the Lux Hotel, who got used to sleeping with one eye open. Ho survived because Stalin did not regard Indochina as a serious place, and by shrinking into near invisibility. In 1938 he was allowed to leave for China, where the CCP and KMT had re-formed their alliance to resist the Japanese. He used the name Hu Guang first in Yan’an, where the CCP were massed, and then in Guangxi, whence he repaired to establish closer links with his homeland.

  By 1940 he was in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where he met two fellow sons of Vietnamese mandarins: Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguygen Giap. The former had spent years in the notorious ‘tiger cages’ of the French prison of Poulo Condore, the latter was a law graduate who had developed a fascination with military history, in particular guerrilla warfare. Giap’s father and sister had died in, or just after release from, French jails by the time he reached ten years of age. His sister-in-law was executed by the French and in 1943 his young wife would perish in Hanoi’s Central Prison – later known to captured Americans as the Hanoi Hilton. These experiences left him a cold, unforgiving man wholly dedicated to the cause of armed struggle, in which he was to reveal military genius.42

  The fall of France in June 1940 triggered a new stage in a hitherto spasmodic revolution. By then Ho had thoroughly studied the strategy and tactics of the Chinese Communist Party and he had read Mao’s works on guerrilla warfare. He decided that the first priority should be to build a political infrastructure throughout the country, while creating a small military force that, when the moment came, could launch insurrections which would trigger a general uprising. While Ho had close contacts with the Chinese Communists, and in particular with Zhou Enlai, he also needed to maintain good relations with the Kuomintang, who would be providing Ho’s forces with a safe rear area in southern China. He cleverly negotiated his way through the complex eddies of Chinese politics, by stressing a simple anti-imperialist line, in which the enemy was the Japanese and the French. Moving nearer to the border with Tonkin, Ho helped form a united patriotic front or League for the Independence of Vietnam, which in Vietnamese was the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh – better known as Viet Minh. In 1941 he was the lead instructor at a camp at Jingxi on the Vietnamese border at which Giap provided the military training. The course ended with a kiss of the red flag with its gold star, after which graduates were sent back to Vietnam, gathering in a mountainous area called the Viet Bac. In early 1941 Ho returned to Vietnam for the first time in thirty years, setting up an HQ in a limestone cave near the remote village of Pac Bo. By this time he had adopted the identity of a Chinese journalist and the name Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens).43

  Although Ho was not Party general secretary, the French police had eliminated most of his internal Vietnamese rivals and he enjoyed enormous prestige not just as the Comintern’s senior man, but because of the sacrifices his life had manifestly entailed. In Vietnamese terms he was also quite old, and hence deserving of the affectionate name Uncle. The final incarnation had occurred: Uncle Ho. Ever in character, he dodged French checkpoints and patrols by pretending to be a shaman, dressed in a black robe and equipped with magic texts, joss sticks and a live chicken for sacrifice.

  Japanese destruction of French rule forced crucial decisions on the Viet Minh. It also provided the Americans with an opportunity to use the Vietnamese to fight the Japanese. The US began dropping arms from aircraft based in southern China, while the Viet Minh provided valuable weather reports and helped locate shot-down US aircrew. In March 1945 the OSS sent ‘Deer Team’ into Vietnam to liaise with the ‘old man’ who led the Viet Minh. One of these agents, Archimedes ‘Al’ Patti, penned an account of their stay in a jungle encampment. The emaciated Viet Minh leader, already tubercular, lay ill with dysentery and malaria, but rallied enough to chain-smoke Patti’s Chesterfields after the team doctor had treated him.44 The OSS agents taught guerrillas, commanded by Giap – ‘a wiry little man with large calculating eyes and a perpetually angry look’ – how to use modern weapons. The Americans spent many agreeable hours with Ho Chi Minh, who at one point inquired in English: ‘Your statesmen make eloquent speeches about helping those with self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I different from Nehru, Quezon, even your George Washington? Was not Washington considered a revolutionary? I, too, want to set my people free.’45 Privately he thought that the Americans were all about business. As Ho heard news of the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender that August, he and Giap decided to launch their insurrection, their task aided by widespread peasant anger over a famine in the winter of 1944–5 that killed a million people, after the Japanese had refused to stop exporting rice to Japan from their state granaries.46

  Then the Japanese managed to cause a political crisis. Following their disarming of the French in March 1945, they encouraged Emperor Bao Dai to declare Vietnamese independence, a step they urged neighbouring Cambodia
’s Prince Sihanouk to follow. Bao Dai’s authority was entirely notional in northern Tonkin, where real, lethal power was increasingly exercised by the Viet Minh from their Viet Bac bases, from which they sortied to cut communications and terrorize government officials and policemen.

  The Potsdam conference arranged in the summer of 1945 to reorder the world is often viewed through an exclusively European optic, as reflected in the fact that the Big Three were actually the Big Four, for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was present along with Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt’s successor), Stalin and Churchill. The conference was concerned with winning the ongoing war with Japan and unmaking its empire in South-east Asia. It was decreed that China and Britain should occupy Indochina above and below the 16th parallel, but Al Patti’s OSS units returned to Vietnam, nominally to secure Allied POWs and civilian internees still in Japanese captivity. This gave them a ringside seat to observe how Ho created a fait accompli to pre-empt the restoration of colonial authority. He sent his men into Hanoi across the Doumer Bridge over the Red River to force the abdication of Bao Dai. The capital of Tonkin was bedecked with lanterns, flowers and red banners with the five golden stars, all under the eyes of 30,000 Japanese troops. On 2 September 1945 at a massed meeting on Place Puginier in front of the former Governor-General’s Hanoi Palace, Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence. There were some deliberate nods to his OSS friends in the wording of his speech: