first to sever the Western supply route to China, later progressively to establish an occupation, which provoked President Franklin Roosevelt to impose his momentous July 1941 oil embargo. Although the French retained nominal authority, the Japanese thereafter exercised real power. They craved commodities to supply their domestic industries, and insisted that the Vietnamese should curtail rice-growing in favour of cotton and jute. This, together with enforced export of foodstuffs, created increasing hunger among the inhabitants of the richest rice-producing area in South-East Asia.
In 1944, a drought followed by floods unleashed a vast human tragedy. At least a million Vietnamese, one in ten of Tonkin’s population, perished in a famine as disastrous as the contemporaneous East Bengal disaster in British India. There were credible reports of cannibalism, yet no Frenchman is known to have starved. The famine remained in the memory of many northern Vietnamese as the most dreadful experience of their lives, not excluding subsequent wars. One peasant’s earliest memories of life in a village near Hanoi were of his mother scolding the children if they wasted food: ‘You wouldn’t do that if you remembered 1945.’
Another peasant described deserted hamlets and desperate people: ‘Skinny bodies in rags roamed every country road and city street. Then corpses began to appear along roadsides and in pagoda yards, church grounds, marketplaces, city parks, bus and railway stations. Groups of hungry men and women with babies in their arms and other children at their sides invaded every accessible field and garden to search for anything they thought edible: green bananas, cores and bulbs of banana trees, bamboo shoots. The people of my own village had to defend their land by force.’ Oxcarts carried away corpses, to be interred in mass graves. One day his three-year-old sister was eating a rice cake outside their house when an emaciated young man ‘who looked like a ghost in ragged clothes’ sprang forward, snatched the morsel from her hand and darted away.
In some areas charity food kitchens were established to provide gruel for the starving, and long queues gathered before them. Van Ky, a Tonkin teenager who became a famous Vietminh balladeer, said later: ‘When you opened the front door in the morning, you might see a corpse lying there. If you saw a big flock of crows, that meant a body underneath.’ It is unsurprising that such experience bred revolutionaries, including Ky himself. He was born in 1928 into a peasant family, but grew up in the unusually literate household of an uncle, from whom he learned La Fontaine’s fables and performed little plays based on them. He read such books as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. By the age of fifteen, Ky was distributing leaflets for the communists. He became chief of his local secret militia, serving until it was decided that he had artistic talents more useful to the Revolution than his military ones. Communist propagandists exploited music to great effect, resetting traditional folk songs to fit their own message, delivered by travelling troupes. Ky later wrote a ballad entitled ‘Hy Vong’ – ‘Hope’ – which became one of the favourite tunes of the Resistance. His experience demonstrated a notable aspect of the independence struggle: that a respect for French culture was no barrier to a determination to see France quit Vietnam.
2 THE VIETMINH MARCH
The last phase of the world war had momentous regional consequences. In March 1945 the Japanese staged a coup, deposing the French puppet regime and assuming full mastery over Vietnam. Colonialism was sustainable only as long as it appeared to subject peoples as the inevitable order, a perception changed forever in South-East Asia. Vietnamese recoiled from the new rulers’ brutalities, but were impressed by the spectacle of fellow-Asians wielding authority: some called the Japanese ‘oai’ – ‘awe-inspiring’. In July the Office of Strategic Services – US sponsor of guerrilla war – dispatched to Indochina a team of paramilitary agents led by Major Archimedes Patti, who pitched camp with Ho Chi Minh. Those callow young men, like so many of their kind both American and British in occupied countries around the world, were grateful to find friends in a hostile environment: they fell in love with the romance of their circumstances, and with their hosts. A twenty-two-year-old guerrilla told one of the OSS men with jocular humour that he should not show himself outside their camp at Tan Trao, ‘because if the Japanese catch you, they will eat you like a pig!’ When he chortled to Giap about this sally, however, he was reprimanded: ‘We are revolutionaries, and the members of this team are our allies, so we must talk to them in a cultured and civilised way.’
Washington’s Indochina policy-making was fumbling and erratic. The allied warlords were preoccupied with completing the defeat of Germany and Japan. From Yugoslavia to Burma, however, and from Greece to Vietnam, local nationalists focused their ambitions almost exclusively upon securing political control, once Axis forces were gone. Colonial subjects saw no merit in securing liberation from fascist suzerainty, only to bend once more beneath the yoke of their former masters, whether French, British or Dutch. The OSS team with Ho became fascinated by his personality, and allowed themselves to suppose that the arms with which they supplied him were being used to harry the Japanese. In truth, the Vietminh staged a few small showpiece actions against the occupiers, but focused upon building their organisation and husbanding weapons to fight the French. Ho’s appointed military chief was Giap. This former teacher and avid student of history had no military training whatsoever when, on 22 December 1944, he formed the so-called Vietnamese Liberation Army Propaganda Unit, just thirty-four strong, three of them women. On 15 May 1945 this body was absorbed into an embryo ‘Liberation Army’.
Modern Hanoi histories record with glee the manner in which communist cadres exploited Western arms and training to pursue their own purposes. In 1943, following the Allied occupation of French Madagascar, the British secret warfare organisation Special Operations Executive recruited seven Vietnamese prisoners whom its officers found languishing in a Vichy prison. These men assured the liberators of their eagerness to return home to fight, without mentioning that they numbered the French among the fascist foes. A later Vietminh account asserted: ‘The seven intelligence men appeared to be Allied agents, but their hearts and minds belonged to communism.’ After the usual training in the black arts they were parachuted back into Vietnam, fearing rejection by the Party for having accepted service with SOE. Instead they received a warm welcome, and were promptly ordered to signal Calcutta for more arms, wirelesses and medical supplies.
The suddenness with which the war ended in August 1945 enabled Ho to seize the initiative, to fill a power vacuum that yawned widest in the north. His emissaries persuaded Bao Dai, Vietnam’s whimsical and indolent young puppet emperor, to write to the Paris government asserting that the only way to safeguard France’s position was ‘by frank and open recognition of the independence of Vietnam’. Gen. Charles de Gaulle, interim master in Paris, declined to respond to this missive, but was obliged grudgingly to notice that before abdicating on 25 August Bao Dai had invited Ho to form a government. The Vietminh leader marched his followers into Hanoi, Tonkin’s capital, and on 2 September 1945 proclaimed before a vast and ecstatic crowd in the city’s Ba Dinh square the establishment of a Vietnamese state. He declared: ‘The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated, our people have broken the fetters which for over a century have tied us down.’
The news was broadcast throughout the country, and a schoolboy who lived south of Hue later recalled: ‘Our teachers were so happy. They told us we must go out and celebrate independence. They said that when we are old men … we must remember this as a day of celebration.’ Ho in his speech quoted from the US Declaration of Independence, and secured a propaganda coup when the OSS group allowed itself to be photographed saluting the Vietminh flag-raising ceremony. By chance, at that moment a flight of USAAF P-38 fighters roared overhead: in the eyes of thousands of beholders, the US thus laid its blessing upon the new government.
In truth, of course, a cluster of idealistic young State Department and OSS men merely exploited Washington’s lack of a policy to make their own weather. Patti, upon whose considerable vanity Ho played like a lute, described the Vietminh leader as ‘a gentle soul’, and another American said, ‘We felt that he was first a nationalist, second a communist.’ The major admitted long afterwards, ‘I perhaps was somewhat naïve with respect
