“I had continuous difficulties and many sharp antagonisms with him,” Churchill would write of his relationship with de Gaulle. “I knew he was no friend of England. But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, while I resented, his arrogant demeanor. Here he was—a refugee, an exile from his country under sentence of death, in a position entirely dependent upon the good will of Britain, and now of the United States. The Germans had conquered his country. He had no real foothold anywhere. Never mind; he defied all.”12
A very different attitude prevailed in Washington, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his advisers from the start kept their distance from de Gaulle and his cause. Shocked and appalled by France’s swift collapse against the Germans, despite having what on paper was arguably Europe’s strongest army, Roosevelt concluded that France had essentially ceased to exist. Thenceforth, during moments of pessimism (and not infrequently in happier times as well), he believed the worst about France and concluded she would never again regain her status as a leading power. Investing military might and diplomatic aid in trying to defend her was therefore pointless. Following the armistice, Washington chose a policy of expedience, maintaining diplomatic relations with Vichy in the hope that the French fleet and the Pétain government would not be driven totally into the arms of the Nazis. As for de Gaulle, he was as yet largely a nonentity for Roosevelt. In time, as we shall see, the American president would adopt toward the general an attitude of unremitting hostility.
II
IN INDOCHINA, WORD OF THE FRENCH DEFEAT HIT LIKE A BOLT FROM the blue. Already in 1939, after Germany’s attack on Poland, there had been murmurings in Saigon and Hanoi, among colons as well as literate Vietnamese, about whether Hitler could be stopped, and if he couldn’t, what it would mean for them. A 1938 French film shown on local screens asked Are We Defended? and left the answer disconcertingly open. Still, no one had imagined that the defeat of la belle France could ever occur so swiftly, so completely. The turn of events may have seemed especially dizzying in Indochina and elsewhere in the empire, for certain key details—that French forces fought hard and suffered huge losses at Sedan and elsewhere along the river Meuse, for example, or that the greater part of the French army was taken prisoner—emerged only slowly in the colonies.13
“Overnight, our world had changed,” recalled Bui Diem, a young French-educated Vietnamese in Hanoi who had breathlessly followed news accounts of the fighting. “Mine was the third generation for whom the universe had been bounded by France, her language, her culture, and her stultifying colonial apparatus. Now, in a moment, the larger world had intruded itself on our perceptions. Our ears were opened wide, straining to pick up signals from the outside that would give us some hint as to what this might mean.”14
In the governor-general’s residence in Hanoi, speculation was rife. General Georges Catroux, only a year into the job, was devoted to the empire and to keeping France in the fight against Hitler; for both reasons he was drawn immediately to de Gaulle’s cause. The two men went way back, having been prisoners of war together in a high-security camp in Ingolstadt, Germany, in World War I, and they maintained deep mutual respect. But Catroux, an intelligent and highly literate five-star general who as a young man had been an aide-de-camp in Hanoi but whose recent postings had been in North Africa, was powerless; his Indochina, isolated from the metropole by thousands of miles of ocean, faced growing pressure from Japan.15 For Tokyo authorities, the fall of France represented a perfect opportunity to remove several obstacles to their New Order in East Asia. Three years into a war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican China, the Japanese had long been bothered about American weapons and other Western supplies reaching beleaguered Chinese armies via the railway that ran from Haiphong to Kunming. The amounts were significant: An estimated 48 percent of all supplies came by this route. Catroux succumbed to Japanese pressure to sharply limit shipments of weapons, but food and other supplies continued to arrive, and the Japanese began to think that only by seizing Indochina could they stop the flow. Moreover, Indochina could provide imperial Japan with significant supplies of rubber, tin, coal, and rice—all important in ending her dependence upon foreign sources of vital strategic raw materials. Geostrategically, meanwhile, Indochina could serve as an advanced base for operations against the Far Eastern possessions of the other Western colonial powers. For senior Japanese leaders, in short, the events in Europe opened up glorious new possibilities. Hitler’s victories, American ambassador to Tokyo Joseph Grew noted, “like strong wine, have gone to their heads.”16
In Hanoi, Catroux moved cautiously, aware that he had few cards to play. In previous months, as Japanese gains in China brought them ever closer to Indochina, he realized how inadequate Indochina’s defenses were. He had only about 50,000 troops at his disposal, of which some 38,000 were native forces of suspect loyalty. The air force had only twenty-five modern aircraft in all of Indochina, while the navy possessed only a light cruiser, two gunboats, two sloops, and two auxiliary patrol craft. Munitions and other military supplies were negligently low. The Paris government, reeling under the Nazi onslaught, could offer no tangible assistance, he knew, and neither could Britain, focused as she was on the German menace and the defense of Singapore and Malaya. In April and again in May and June, British officials cautioned Catroux against taking any action that might risk war with Japan. Even if His Majesty’s government wanted to provide military assistance, Sir Percy Noble, commander of the British Far Eastern Fleet, told Catroux in late April, it could not; it had no resources to give. The same message was reiterated repeatedly in the weeks thereafter.17
The United States was Catroux’s last hope. On June 19, the day after de Gaulle’s speech, René de Saint-Quentin, the French ambassador in Washington, put two questions to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. What would the United States do if Indochina came under Japanese attack? And in the meantime, would Washington provide immediate military assistance to Indochina, in the form of 120 aircraft as well as antiaircraft guns? Welles’s reply echoed that of the British. The United States, he said, would do nothing that might provoke the outbreak of hostilities with Japan and therefore would not act to thwart an attack on Indochina. She would provide no planes or weapons. In that case, asked Saint-Quentin, what choice did Saigon have but to accept the Japanese demands? “I will not answer you officially,” Welles said, “but that is what I would do in your place.”18
Saint-Quentin and Welles didn’t know it, but hours earlier Japan had issued an ultimatum to Catroux. The Tokyo government demanded an end to the shipment through Tonkin of trucks, gasoline, or other goods of military use to China, as well as the establishment of a Japanese control commission in Indochina to supervise the implementation of the agreement. Catroux ordered Saint-Quentin to make one more appeal to the Americans; when that too failed, he decided to accept the Japanese terms, hoping to forestall a Japanese invasion and preserve French control over Indochina. Already by June 29, Japanese checkpoints had been established in Tonkin at Haiphong, Ha Giang, Lao Cai, Cao Bang, and Lang Son. Perhaps, Catroux reasoned, Tokyo leaders hoped to avoid a costly—in yen and men—occupation of Indochina; perhaps he could temporize and hold on, waiting for a more favorable turn in the war. He cabled his government on June 26: “When one is beaten, when one has few planes and little anti-aircraft defense, no submarines, one tries to keep one’s property without having to fight and one negotiates. That is what I have done.”19
Who could blame him? His regime was isolated, his defenses hopelessly inadequate. Moreover, Catroux’s reading of the Japanese intentions proved correct, at least in the short term. Tokyo officials had a full-fledged colonial project, dating to the late nineteenth century and revived in the early 1930s, but in Indochina they were happy to practice the type of informal imperialism that the United States and other world powers had on occasion embraced—they were content, that is to
say, to move patiently into Indochina with the consent of the French. Had the Japanese merely wanted to stop the transfer traffic to China, they could have conquered Tonkin, taken over railroad traffic, and used Vietnamese air bases to bomb transport routes like the Burma Road, linking Burma and China. Had they wanted to take outright colonial control over all of Indochina, they probably had the means to do that as well (though at the risk of a major depletion of manpower). But their chief aim was to use the country’s installations for future military projects and to get at Indochina’s coal, rubber, tin, and, above all, food supplies. These the Japanese could most easily and efficiently secure if they left the French nominally in charge and avoided taking on the complicated task of day-to-day governing. “The Japanese government,” foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka informed the Vichy ambassador to Tokyo, “has every intention of respecting the rights and interests of France in the Far East, particularly the territorial integrity of Indochina and the sovereignty of France over the entire area of the Indochinese Union.”20
If Catroux thought he had little choice but to accept Japan’s demand, his superiors in France felt differently. On their knees before Hitler, barely settled in Vichy amid extraordinary confusion, they were deeply attached to the empire as one remaining manifestation of French greatness, as proof positive that Vichy was more than a mouthpiece of a defeated nation. They frowned dismissively on Catroux’s surrender and summarily sacked him. In his place they appointed Vice Admiral Jean Decoux, commander in chief of French naval forces in the Far East, who had the virtue of already being on the scene in Indochina. Decoux could also be expected to be reliably pro-Vichy, unlike Catroux, whom many officials around Pétain thought dangerously pro-British and prode Gaulle. Outraged by his dismissal, Catroux pretended not to receive the order to step down and blithely continued governing and negotiating with the Japanese. It took a second order from Vichy for him to relinquish power, and not until July 20 did Decoux assume control. Catroux promptly joined de Gaulle and the Free French in London, the first high-profile official to do so.21
Why, it may be asked, given these Gaullist sympathies, did Catroux not try harder to rally Indochina to the Gaullist side in those final days of June and early July, while he still held power? It is difficult to be sure, but he appears to have suspected that most of the colons in Indochina would not in the end defy Vichy, particularly when neither Britain nor the United States was likely to come to their aid. More important, Catroux was convinced that an open commitment to the British and the Free French would merely provide Japan with a pretext to seize the colony. Sympathetic though he was to the Free French cause, Catroux attached the highest importance to keeping Indochina under French control.
That became Decoux’s chief objective. After he arrived in Vietnam to assume leadership, he maintained Catroux’s policy of playing for time. Though unswervingly loyal to Pétain, Decoux was no friend of the Axis powers, and he worked tenaciously to limit Japanese gains. In August 1940, when Tokyo demanded use of Tonkin’s airports and seaports, as well as transit rights to the Chinese border, the admiral calculated that a U.S. pledge of diplomatic support for the French position might enable Vichy to resist. Some in Vichy agreed, notably Jean Chauvel, head of the Far Eastern Division in the Foreign Ministry. The Roosevelt administration, Chauvel pointed out, had been “surprised and mortified” by the French collapse in Europe, but saw little that could be done in that arena in the short term. In the Far East, however, Washington could be expected to assert its interests. French resistance in Indochina might induce Roosevelt to take a firmer line against Japan. Chauvel insisted that the European war and the Asian crisis were part of one global struggle, and that the United States would eventually become a belligerent, via the Pacific. If additional concessions to Japan became absolutely essential, he concluded, “we must on each occasion drive the United States into a corner, to lead them to recognize their impotence to help us, to make them admit that the maintenance of a French presence … was preferable to an eviction which had left all freedom to their adversary.”22
Other officials saw little hope in playing the American card. Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, a former manager of the Bank of Indochina who was married to a Vietnamese, argued that France would be powerless if Japan opted to invade. “The position is unhappily very simple,” he wrote in his diary. “If we refuse Japan she will attack Indo-China which is incapable of being defended. Indo-China will be a hundred percent lost. If we negotiate with Japan, if we avoid the worst, that is to say the total loss of the colony, we preserve the chances that the future may perhaps bring us.” Meaningful American assistance was simply not a realistic proposition, Baudouin insisted. That was the message given him by Washington’s chargé d’affaires in Vichy, Robert Murphy, and the line articulated by senior officials in Washington. On August 22, Sumner Welles told Ambassador Saint-Quentin that the United States could not come to Indochina’s assistance but that she “appreciated the difficulties with which the French Government was faced and did not consider that it would be justified in reproaching France if certain military facilities were accorded Japan.” In other words, if you know what’s good for you, make concessions.23
Wartime calculations drove this U.S. decision, but no doubt it also mattered that few Americans in 1940 had any experience with Indochina. The peninsula was on the periphery of the periphery of interwar American foreign relations, and neither businessmen nor diplomats took much interest in Indochinese affairs. For the public, Indochina entered their consciousness only through articles in National Geographic, or old newsreels, showing exotic but dutiful natives in colorful dress. Fewer than a hundred Americans lived in Indochina before World War II, and most of them were missionaries seeking to spread God’s word from small missions scattered about Vietnam. Until 1940, a single consul based in Saigon represented U.S. interests in the colony, and even he found himself with a good deal of leisure time on his hands.24
On August 29, Vichy concluded an agreement with Japan that recognized Japan’s “preeminent position” in the Far East and granted Tokyo special economic privileges in Indochina. Japan also received transit facilities in Tonkin, subject to agreement between the military officials on the spot. In exchange, Japan recognized the “permanent French interests in Indochina.” Negotiations continued in Hanoi in September and went slowly, as French negotiator General Maurice Martin held out hope for an American naval intervention that would cause Japan to scale down her demands. Increasingly impatient, the Japanese warned Martin that Japanese troops from the Twenty-second Army, based in Nanning, would enter Indochina at 10 P.M. on September 22, whatever the outcome of the negotiations. At 2:30 P.M. on the twenty-second, the negotiators signed an agreement authorizing the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin north of the Red River; to use three Tonkin airfields; and to send up to 25,000 men through Tonkin into Yunnan in southern China.25
The agreement stipulated that the first Japanese units would arrive by sea. But the Twenty-second Army was intent on moving its elite Fifth Infantry Division across the Chinese border near Lang Son at precisely 10 P.M. Not long after crossing the frontier, the Japanese units became engaged in a fierce firefight near the French position at Dong Dang. Almost immediately, skirmishing also began at other frontier posts. For two days the battle raged, with the key French position of Lang Son falling on the twenty-fifth. The French forces had suffered a major defeat—two posts were gone, casualties were significant (estimates run to 150 dead on the French side), and hundreds of Indochinese riflemen deserted in the course of the battle. It might have been much worse had not Decoux and Baudouin appealed directly to Tokyo and had not the emperor personally ordered his troops to halt their advance. The Japanese apologized for the incident and termed it a “dreadful mistake,” but they had made their point: Governor-General Decoux and the French might still be the rulers of Indochina, but they operated at the mercy of Japan.26
Decoux did his best to pretend otherwise. To anyone who would listen, he
claimed that the Japanese were not an occupying force but were merely stationed in the country; that the French administration functioned freely and without impediment; and that the police and security services were solely in French hands. The tricolor, he noted, continued to fly over his headquarters in Hanoi. And indeed, French authority in Indochina remained formidable, as Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party learned firsthand in the fall of 1940. Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin and Cochin China against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed. In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process. Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed. Not until early 1945 would the party’s southern branch recover from this defeat.27
III
YET IN THIS GLOOMIEST OF HOURS FOR THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNISTS would occur one of the key developments in the thirty-five-year struggle for Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had objected to the uprisings, considering them premature, but he was convinced that, with international events moving fast and Decoux’s government isolated from metropolitan France, the potential for revolution in Vietnam was much enhanced. Along with other party leaders, he determined that there should be a plenary meeting of the party’s Central Committee in the spring of 1941. For symbolic reasons, they agreed, the meeting should occur on Vietnamese soil. In the early weeks of that year, Ho Chi Minh slipped across the frontier from China by sampan and set up headquarters in a cave near the hamlet of Pac Bo, in Cao Bang province. It was the first time in three decades he had set foot in his native country. And it was not far inside either—Pac Bo, which Ho reached by traversing forty miles through thick jungle growth and over steep mountains, was less than a mile from the Chinese frontier. Near the cave ran a small stream that Ho named for his hero Lenin and a massive outgrowth that he dubbed Karl Marx Peak.
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 5