had a legitimate gripe or claim, to really govern themselves. After all what was [the Second World War] all about?’
Charismatic leadership is a determinant in most revolutionary struggles – consider India’s Gandhi and Nehru, Kenya’s Kenyatta, Cuba’s Castro. Ho Chi Minh established a legitimacy that proved impregnable even when the shortcomings and indeed barbarities of his regime became apparent, because in 1945 he seized sole ownership of Vietnam’s independence movement. Sixteen-year-old Nguyen Cao Ky wrote later that in those days in Hanoi ‘the one name on my lips, as well as those of nearly everyone of my generation, was Ho Chi Minh’. Many households began to display his portrait: in the words of another young Vietnamese, ‘We were hungry for a hero to worship.’ The French had made no attempt to foster an indigenous political class with any sympathy for the aspirations of its own people: rich and educated Vietnamese existed in a world entirely alien from that of the peasantry. While Ho and his intimates knew that few would endorse an avowed communist prospectus, he was able to unite a great swathe of his people behind expulsion of the French. In the years that followed, he achieved a mystic stature unrivalled by any fellow-countryman.
During the early years of the independence struggle, in ‘liberated zones’ land was compulsorily transferred from landlord to peasant ownership. Ho and his associates did not reveal that they viewed redistribution as a mere transit stop, pending collectivisation. Political cadres painted a glowing picture of Russia as an earthly paradise, which Vietnam should aspire to emulate. Ho himself exuded an aura of dignity and wisdom that impressed all those who met him, and proved a brilliant political manipulator. Beneath a veneer of benignity, he possessed the quality indispensable to all revolutionaries: absolute ruthlessness about the human cost of the courses he deemed appropriate for his people. It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane. A remark attributed to Giap answered this question for the Vietminh: ‘Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die upon this earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.’
Ho Chi Minh’s conduct reflected the same conviction, though he was too astute a politician ever to be recorded by Westerners as expressing it. There has been much debate about whether he was a ‘real’ communist, or instead merely a nationalist driven by political necessity to embrace Lenin’s creed. Evidence seems overwhelming in favour of the former view. He was never the Titoist some of his Western apologists suggested: he repeatedly condemned Yugoslavia’s 1948 severance from the Soviet bloc. He avowed an unflagging admiration for Stalin, though the Russian leader never reciprocated either by trusting the Vietminh leader or by providing substantial aid to him.
It seems narrowly possible that Vietnam’s subjection to communism could have been averted if France in 1945 had announced its intention to quit the country, and embarked upon a crash transition process to identify credible indigenous leaders and prepare them to govern, as did the British before quitting Malaya. Instead, however, the French chose to draft a long suicide note, declaring their ironclad opposition to independence. The colonialists’ intransigence conceded to Ho Chi Minh the moral high ground in the struggle that now began to unfold.
De Gaulle bore chief responsibility for this blunder. In March 1945 he overrode the views of Pierre Messmer, his liaison officer in the Far East, who argued the necessity of parleying with the Vietminh. Instead, the haughty general committed the restoration of French authority to the intractable colonialist Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, who became high commissioner in Saigon. In some parts of the world, Africa notable among them, a dearth of credible nationalist movements enabled European empires to cling to their power and privileges for a further generation. In Vietnam, however, as elsewhere in Asia, foreign hegemony became unsustainable once local leaders found voices that could not be silenced, together with audiences to heed them. This was the reality that France spent the ensuing decade attempting to deny.
On 12 September 1945, less than a month after the Vietminh appropriated authority in Hanoi, British and Indian troops landed in Saigon. They freed the embittered French colonialists from their prisons, and dismissed the Vietminh aspirants to power amid messy and bloody skirmishing, in which some Japanese were deployed alongside the allies. The British commander, Maj. Gen. Douglas Gracey, asserted: ‘The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French.’ One of his officers described a first encounter with the Vietminh: ‘They came to see me and said “welcome” and that sort of thing. It was an unpleasant situation and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously communists.’ Gracey is sometimes criticised for using his troops to suppress Ho’s people. Yet he was merely a relatively junior soldier, no Caesar nor even Mountbatten, mandated to emulate many of his peers around the world in those days: use bayonets to restore the pre-war order.
At Washington’s behest 150,000 Chinese troops, Chiang Kai-shek’s men, descended upon northern Vietnam to assume a share of the allied occupation role. The Vietnamese dubbed them tau phu – the ‘swollen Chinese’ – because they all seemed to have bulging feet, perhaps from beriberi. The newcomers behaved more like locusts than warriors, stripping the countryside of everything edible or portable. They interfered little with Ho’s energetic extension of his political authority, and obligingly sold weapons to the Vietminh. Early in October 1945 the first French troops appeared in Saigon, but more than a year elapsed thereafter – a delay priceless for the communists and fatal to the imperialists – before they reasserted control in the north.
At the age of sixteen, student Pham Phu Bang was an enthusiastic revolutionary who saw the Vietminh exclusively as an independence movement: ‘I knew nothing about communism.’ When the Japanese swept over the country, at first he found it thrilling to see fellow-Asians humiliate the French colonial power – ‘like two great water buffaloes locking horns’. After Japan’s collapse Bang started his own revolutionary career, stealing weapons from careless Chinese soldiers, writing posters and banners proclaiming ‘Up with Ho Chi Minh’, ‘Long Live Free Vietnam’. One day he joined a train taking rice north to famine-stricken areas, which became trapped at a bridge wrecked by allied bombing. Its Vietminh escort enlisted local villagers to hump sacks across the river, but soon found the train besieged by a throng of starving people. Young Bang was accosted by a skeletal figure who had been given a can of rice for himself, but pleaded desperately for one more for his child. ‘We argued a lot among ourselves about who was to blame for these terrible things – the Japanese who ruled; the French who took as much food as they wanted to feed themselves; or the Americans who had bombed the railways. We decided it was all three. We asked each other: why did our small, fragile country have so many enemies?’
In the course of 1945–46 the Vietminh took over the non-communist Vanguard Youth movement and suppressed other opposition groups in the north. Many of the rival leaders were jailed, and in the countryside some thousands of alleged ‘enemies of the people’ were liquidated. The Vietminh hustled to announce its own triumph in a 4 January 1946 national election, as assuredly rigged as was every other ballot in Indochina through the decades that followed. For a brief season while the Chinese army and allied representatives were conspicuous in the north, a semblance of free speech was tolerated. By mid-June, however, most of Chiang’s men were gone, and purges resumed.
Ho’s people moved swiftly and effectively to secure control of rural areas, especially in the remotenesses towards the Chinese border. In the Mekong delta, by contrast, early in 1946 the French reasserted themselves, so that insurgent structures had to evolve secretly, alongside the colonial administration. Among Vietminh returnees from imprisonment was Le Duan, who two decades later would become ruler of his country. As the French expelled the Vietminh from urban areas, he was among those who established himself in the delta countryside, where guerrillas began to fight. And the colonial power fought back.
France’s adoption of this doomed course derived in significant measure from its humiliation in the Second World War. A similar disaster was averted in India, probably only because British voters at their 1945 election displayed the wisdom to endorse
