Japanese prevailed on him to head an ‘independ-
ent’ Vietnam in March 1945. Ho Chi-minh saw
that Bao Dai’s royal standing in the eyes of the
peasantry made him a potential rival, but decided
that it would be best to appear to recruit his
authority to the Marxist cause. Bao Dai, with no
army to protect him, had little choice after the
surrender of the Japanese but to accept what Ho
Chi-minh demanded of him. He abdicated,
passed the Mandate of Heaven to Ho Chi-minh’s
emissaries and was appointed his supreme
adviser.
August 1945 was a critical time. What author-
ity would replace the Japanese after their surren-
der on 14 August and before the French could
return? Ho Chi-minh played his cards well. The
French and Japanese had stockpiled grain; the
Vietminh led raids on the granaries to relieve the
famine. General Vo Nguyen Giap’s small fighting
force, trained by the US to fight the Japanese, was
soon in control of Hanoi and Saigon. On 2
September 1945 in Hanoi, in constitutional lan-
guage borrowed from the American Declaration
of Independence in 1776 and France’s revolu-
tionary Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791,
he proclaimed the Independent Democratic
Republic of Vietnam with himself as president.
He was looking for American support. Roosevelt
before his death had been sympathetic to Ho Chi-
minh’s nationalist cause, and General Joseph
Stilwell (commander of US forces in China,
Burma and India) had supported his irregular
troops. At that time Washington was more con-
cerned with the evils of colonialism in Europe’s
former empires than with the global threat of
communism. All that would change under
Truman’s administration with the onset of the
Cold War. It was not the Americans, but the
British and French, in a determined effort, who
frustrated Ho Chi-minh’s plans for a Marxist
unified and independent Vietnam.
The country south of the 16th parallel, that is
all of southern and much of central Vietnam, fell
by earlier Allied agreement into Lord Louis
Mountbatten’s sphere of command. What fol-
lowed is one of the most extraordinary episodes
of the post-war period. If the south had been per-
mitted to follow the north and the independence
of the whole of Indo-China had been accepted by
the British, the trauma of the longest war in Asia,
which led to at least 3.4 million deaths and untold
misery, might have been avoided. Mountbatten
personally sympathised with the Asian peoples’
desire for independence. But General Douglas
Gracey, the British commander sent to southern
Indo-China, took a different view. He was deter-
mined not to treat with local independence
leaders in Saigon and to do all he could to restore
French rule. There were no French troops at first
in Indo-China and Gracey had only a few
hundred Indian and British soldiers at his dis-
posal. So he ‘restored order’ with the only avail-
able well-disciplined soldiers – the Japanese. Far
from disarming them, he arranged for the
Japanese divisions, with their own officers but
under British command, to fight the local south
Vietnamese during the summer and autumn of
1945 in a startling reversal of alliances. The
Americans could do nothing. General MacArthur
fumed: ‘If there is anything that makes my blood
boil it is to see our allies in Indo-China and Java
deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little
people we promised to liberate.’ By Christmas
1945, some 50,000 French troops had been
brought to Indo-China to take over from the
British and Indians, who were able to withdraw.
The British motivation is not difficult to
understand. In London there was great suspicion
of American intentions: if the French were to be
deprived of their colonies in the name of libera-
tion, what claims would the British have to the
restoration of their colonies in southern Asia,
especially Malaya? France, furthermore, was a vital
future ally in Europe, the only potentially strong
power to defend the continent against a resurgent
Germany or a Soviet threat at a time when the
Americans were withdrawing. But the French
were not likely to act in Europe with Britain if
Britain helped to deprive France of Indo-China.
Yet these all proved short-term and wrong-
headed calculations. For France, its return to
Indo-China was to lead to defeat and humiliation;
and the Americans, who eventually replaced the
French, were ironically to suffer here their only
defeat in war and even greater humiliation. The
Vietnamese suffered most of all.
1
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE 387
