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

by Burleigh, Michael

  ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All the peoples on earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states: ‘All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.’47

  He asked the crowd, ‘My fellow countrymen, have you understood?’ ‘Yes!’ the crowd roared back. Standing alongside Patti, General Giap gave a clenched-fist salute when the band struck up the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. The French were appalled by this. A more senior US team tried to pin down Ho’s political views, but was fobbed off with evasive vagaries: ‘I have difficulty remembering some parts of my long life. That is the problem of being an old revolutionary.’ Meanwhile his regime in Hanoi made short work of any ideological opponents. In addition to a new state security apparatus, the Communists encouraged the creation of ‘traitor elimination committees’ and an ‘Assault Assassination Committee’ whose victims were liberal nationalists, Trotskyites and women who had married French men.48

  As the new government established itself, 150,000 Chinese KMT Nationalist troops crossed into Vietnam under a drug-addict warlord Chiang was keen to divert from China. The Viet Minh tried to secure their good conduct by supplying him with opium, but the Chinese looted everything up to the roof tiles. Meanwhile, in the southern capital of Saigon, where the Viet Minh played a much weaker hand as part of a broader nationalist coalition, attempts to celebrate Independence Day led to violent clashes between French and Vietnamese residents. Watching the celebrations from high vantage points, the French ostentatiously refused to join in the applause when independence was proclaimed. French snipers started shooting, and in retaliation Europeans were assaulted and their business premises looted.

  Four days later 600 men from the 20th Indian Division arrived in Saigon under General Douglas Gracey to disarm 50,000 surrendered Japanese troops. He was not a political general and inflexibly followed his orders, with disastrous consequences. One of his first acts was to use his Gurkha guard to evict the Southern Provisional Executive Committee from the former Governor-General’s Palace, after they had tried to welcome him. He next rearmed liberated French internees, who promptly attacked any ‘native’ they encountered. Angry Vietnamese retaliated, slaughtering 150 Europeans. With fresh French troops slow to arrive, Gracey relied on his Gurkhas and surrendered Japanese to expel the Viet Minh. He declared martial law to break a general strike and used liberated French Foreign Legionnaires to impose their simulacrum of civil order.

  In a remarkable example of intra-Allied incivility Gracey ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Dewey, the senior OSS officer in Saigon, to leave Indochina because of the OSS’s ‘blatantly subversive’ involvement with the Viet Minh. Dewey was shot dead en route to the airport after Gracey forbade him to fly the Stars and Stripes on his Jeep and the Viet Minh mistook him for a Frenchman. The following day Gracey threatened Japanese General Numata with prosecution for war crimes if he did not order his men to help the British and French fight the Viet Minh; and so it was that the British coerced the soldiers who had humiliated them in 1942 to reimpose French rule over Vietnam, which the Japanese had overthrown seven months previously.49

  By early October 1945 there were sufficient French forces in Cochin China for Gracey to relinquish authority south of the 16th parallel to the Free French war hero General Philippe Leclerc, who re-established French rule in Cambodia and Laos, before turning his attention to the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By 20 January 1946 the British forces were gone. A French high commissioner designate, Jean Sainteny, was flown to Hanoi accompanied by Patti’s OSS team. They noted that Hanoi was swathed in red banners and bedecked with other banners which, in English, read ‘Independence or Death’ and ‘Vietnam for the Vietnamese’. Only a cordon of Japanese troops prevented the French from being lynched, but Patti and his team settled into a comfortable and unthreatened existence at the Hotel Metropole.

  Sainteny was bitter about the role of the Americans: ‘We seemed to the Americans incorrigibly obstinate in reviving a colonial past to which they were opposed, in the name of an infantile anti-colonialism which blinded them to almost everything.’50 Nothing is so simple, for there were also OSS agents of French-American extraction, or passionately Francophile veterans of the Gaullist resistance. But the Americans were certainly more popular than anyone else. One night Ho invited a relatively junior OSS agent to dinner. Major Frank White noticed to his horror that he was seated next to Ho himself in a room awash with Chinese and French dignitaries. The Chinese quickly became drunk and the French were uncommunicative and as stiff as broomsticks. When White remarked on the resentment caused by the seating plan, Ho replied, ‘Yes, I can see that – but who else could I talk to?’

  Leclerc despatched motorized and waterborne columns, one commanded by Colonel Jacques Massu, whom we will encounter later, to surprise Viet Minh troops in the countryside, which was then ravaged by follow-up infantry sweeps. Otherwise he was careful to minimize civilian casualties in ways which prefigured British hearts-and-minds efforts in Malaya. As far as northern Annam and Tonkin were concerned, Leclerc prevailed on the Chinese to withdraw – they were needed by Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Communists – in return for a renunciation of French concessionary enclaves in China. Ironically, Chiang had earlier declined Roosevelt’s offer to take over the whole of Vietnam.

  Ho was careful to do nothing to upset the Franco-Chinese negotiations. As he explained to his sceptical Party comrades: ‘Can’t you understand what would happen if the Chinese stayed? You are forgetting our past history. Whenever the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French, on the other hand, can stay for only a short time. Eventually they will leave.’ His summing up was less delicate: ‘Better to sniff French shit for a while than to eat China’s for the rest of our lives.’51 To that end Giap led talks with Sainteny at the mountain resort of Dalat, although there was little trust on either side. The French agreed to a Democratic Republic of Vietnam, within the French Union, with the possible future inclusion of Cochin China subject to a referendum – although in reality the French had no intention of relinquishing control. Almost as soon as the Vietnamese thought they had a deal, the French tried to write their continued control of justice, economic planning and communications into it. Ho even agreed to allow the French to station 15,000 troops in the north for a five-year period. At a rally where Ho explained his strategy to activists, someone threw a grenade, forgetting to take the pin out.

  While Leclerc was commander-in-chief Indochina, de Gaulle’s new High Commissioner was Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, a militant right-wing Catholic and former Carmelite friar. A member of his staff said he ‘had one of the greatest minds of the twelfth century’. He intended to restore French rule in Cochin China and, unlike Leclerc, refused to negotiate with Ho over the fate of the North. While Ho flew to Paris to finalize the settlement drafted with Leclerc, on 1 June 1946 d’Argenlieu returned from home leave and unilaterally proclaimed a new Autonomous Republic of Cochin China to scupper the talks in France. While he had the backing of businessmen and colonists, the Admiral had no authorization from Paris to do this. In November 1946, when Ho was still engaged in talks at Fontainebleau, the Admiral ordered the French cruiser Suffren to shell Haiphong, killing around 6,000 people, under the pretext of interdicting arms shipments.

  In retaliation, Giap ordered the killing of about 350 village headmen who refused to co-operate with the Viet Minh, and the slaughter of the entire leadership of the nationalist movement who were members of the coalition government of the Democratic Republic. At Fontainebleau the talks collapsed and after Sainteny had sta
ted that the French must triumph militarily, Ho replied: ‘You will kill ten of my men while we kill one of yours, but you will be the ones to end up exhausted.’ The larger irony involved in this story was that the Radical, Socialist and Christian Democrat French politicians who were at the forefront in advocating a federal Europe were the most intransigent supporters of an authoritarian and centralized colonial empire. Empire was essential to France’s ongoing pretensions to be a global power after years of defeat and humiliation and dependence on the Anglo-Saxons for liberation.52

  Emboldened by increasing numbers, in Hanoi the French troops acted in a cavalier fashion towards what was a democratically elected northern government. Giap readied the population for rebellion, with holes drilled in trees into which dynamite could be inserted to create instant roadblocks. After Ho returned in December, he reluctantly called for a war of resistance. Sainteny was an early casualty when a mine destroyed his armoured vehicle, and another forty French nationals were also killed. Although the French gained control of the capital, the night of 19–20 December 1946 was when the first Indochina war between the French and Viet Minh formally began.

  The Communists fell back on their former liberated areas in Viet Bac near the Chinese border, around eighty miles from Hanoi, in a country where moving a couple of miles could take a month. Ad hoc arms factories churned out weapons to supplement old British or Japanese stocks, or those purchased from the Chinese, who also supplied modern radio communications equipment. Japanese instructors taught the Viet Minh how to use modern weaponry, and in some cases joined operations against the French. Giap rigorously applied the basic principles of modern insurgency warfare which he had acquired through a reading of Mao’s works on guerrilla warfare. He added some tactical tips of his own:

  If the enemy advances, we retreat.

  If he halts, we harass.

  If he avoids battle, we attack.

  If he retreats, we follow.

  He was a keen student of domestic French politics and knew that the here-today, gone-tomorrow caravanserai of squabbling Fourth Republic politicians would always go for a quick fix, that the French public had little appetite for the drip of death thousands of miles away, and that much of the equipment that arrived in Vietnam would be sabotaged by a fifth column of French Communist workers. In this war of wills, it would be a rash man who would put money on the French. Leclerc was among those who realized that there was no military solution. Shortly before his death in Africa in 1947 he wrote: ‘France will no longer put down by force a grouping of 24 million inhabitants which is assuming unity and in which there exists a xenophobic and perhaps a national ideal . . . The main problem is political.’53

  The French drifted into war against a masterly tactician leading a people whose warlike propensities had been evident – to their neighbours – since the Middle Ages.54 But there were signs that the French would not be fighting alone. As Al Patti’s OSS team was withdrawn from Indochina on 30 September 1945, he had already realized how far US policy was changing from Roosevelt’s coolness towards colonial regimes. He felt that a new policy had evolved almost by stealth after Truman took over. By January 1946, this favoured the French, as evidenced when the State Department approved a British request to give the French 800 US military vehicles from their Lend-Lease pool. The ‘Made in America’ markings disappeared, in a minor concession to the disregarded anti-colonial line. This was the first step on a winding road, which would lead, over the protracted agony of France’s involvements in Indochina, to the US taking on Giap and his steely troops themselves.55

  Indonesia

  Starting in late December 1941 and concluding in March 1942, successive attacks by the Japanese resulted in their conquest of the resource-rich archipelago of the Netherlands East Indies (modern Indonesia). In March 93,000 men of the Dutch colonial army surrendered, not bothering to consult their Australian and British allies, who joined many European and Australian civilians in brutal and degrading captivity. The Dutch had made no attempt to arm native Indonesians, typical of a colonial regime that had managed to educate 207 native children a year to high-school level from a total population of sixty-seven million.

  The 300,000 Japanese troops based on these islands managed to make Dutch neglect seem benign. Native women were abducted to work in military brothels, while men were deployed as slave labour on railways, roads and the like. Of a quarter of a million Javanese abducted to work for the Japanese, only 70,000 came home alive. Drought, typhoons and Japanese rice requisitioning caused the death by starvation of two and a half million Javanese. Sumatra was administratively detached and merged into a Southern Region with Malaya, all ultimately governed by Tokyo from Singapore, renamed Syonan or ‘Light of the South’. Suspected of aiding Chiang or Mao, the large ethnic Chinese community was treated with appalling brutality, with 40,000 of them murdered. Richer Chinese saved their skins by paying a $50 million levy in ‘atonement’ for past support of Chiang Kai-shek. This was not the only respect in which domestic Chinese politics had contaminated the diaspora. In Malay forests, the Japanese corralled villagers in stockades to isolate them from Communist guerrillas who were supported by Force 136 sent by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).56

  By a unique accident, the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies laid the foundations for an independent nation. Although the Japanese navy swept the Dutch and their British and American allies aside with ease, one Allied submarine managed to sink a transport carrying half the trained administrators sent by Tokyo to take over the government of the vast Indonesian archipelago – it is as wide as the United States, and Sumatra alone is the size of California. Among some Indonesians the Japanese, and their erasure of Dutch-language street signs and place names, were welcomed, although their earliest actions included the dissolution of political parties and the prohibition of the red and white Indonesian nationalist flag. However, the mass internment of Dutch administrators and the deaths of their Japanese replacements meant that educated Indonesians filled thousands of middle- and upper-echelon administrative and technical jobs. These officials soon gained confidence and realized that they did not need Dutch – or Japanese – tutelage to run their country.57

  The middle-aged civil engineer and nationalist activist Sukarno (Javanese has no first names) was one of the first to beat a path to the Japanese high command; he left the meeting in a Buick loaned to him to facilitate his collaborative activities. Yet he was not quite the Quisling the Dutch claimed him to be to discredit him with the Americans. With one eye towards a post-imperial future, Sukarno calculated that it was better to collaborate with the Japanese, whose overstretched empire seemed potentially ephemeral, than to support what even in defeat he regarded as more durable European empires. Although he was as aware as many other nationalists of the nature of Japanese imperialism, unlike the others he had not been educated in metropolitan Holland and had no residual loyalty to the Dutch, who had repeatedly imprisoned and exiled him in the preceding years.

  Everywhere they conquered, the Japanese authorities created submissive local claques to replace nascent political parties. They invariably involved the word ‘New’ in their titles. In China there was Wang Jinwei’s New Citizens’ Movement; in the Philippines the Association for Service to the New Philippines. In Indonesia the Japanese crudely tried to co-opt both modernized and traditional Islam by requiring their adherents to bow towards Tokyo’s Imperial Palace rather than Mecca. They also established a Triple A movement: Japan the Leader of Asia; Japan the Light of Asia; and Japan the Protector of Asia. The limited appeal of this movement afforded Sukarno his chance; he offered to associate Indonesian nationalism with the conqueror-liberators through a movement called Centre of the People’s Power or Putera, the Indonesian word for Son of his Mother. ‘Long Live Japan! Long Live Indonesia!’ was its slogan.

  As the tide of war turned, the Japanese conceded limited representative institutions, perhaps with a view to lumbering the
Allies with the most awkward customers among the latter’s former colonial subjects while reducing the number of problems they had to deal with themselves. In September 1943 Sukarno was appointed president of a Central Advisory Council, at whose sessions Indonesians could raise grievances as they simultaneously rubber-stamped Japanese demands for labour or rice levies. As similar bodies were elaborated down to local level, so an embryonic national administration emerged. Collaborating also licensed Sukarno to traverse Indonesia, which in itself enabled him to become a national figure. He may have been strident in his denunciations of the Americans and British, and extravagant in his praise of the Japanese, but he did so in an elliptical Indonesian tongue via a national network of ‘singing trees’ or village radios suspended from branches. It was easy in these speeches to bamboozle the largely monoglot Japanese, but they had also learned – too late – that a policy of ruthless exploitation was counter-productive. One senior Japanese commander wrote:

  If we judge the trend of native sentiments correctly and, while advancing their education, promise in the near future to meet their desires, the extremely sensitive natives will be impressed and although there may be material shortages they will tolerate this and steadily strengthen their cooperation . . . On the other hand, if we regard the natives as ignorant people and err in the ways of winning their hearts, we shall receive an unexpected counterblow – as the saying goes, ‘Even a small work has a large spirit’ – and we must then be prepared to partake of the same bitter cup suffered by the former Dutch regime at the time of its collapse.58