Of average height and with a thin, angular face, Thierry d’Argenlieu was fifty-six years old when he arrived in Saigon, on the final day of October 1945, to take up his post as high commissioner for Indochina. He immediately installed himself in the Norodom Palace, symbol of colonial pomp and splendor, and set about meeting his charge from de Gaulle to reestablish French authority. “It is the sacred duty of France to reestablish order, respect for law, freedom to work, and security for all wherever she extends her authority,” he declared at an early point. France, he said, was coming to liberate the Vietnamese. On some occasions in the early weeks, d’Argenlieu sounded notes of conciliation, but over time his pronouncements became harsher, perhaps as a result of pressure placed on him by many colons in Saigon—administrators, planters, professionals, military officials—virtually all of whom pushed a hard-line policy. Or perhaps this increased toughness resulted more from the success of Gracey and Leclerc in extending military control over Cochin China in late 1945 and early 1946.3
Whatever the cause, by the early weeks of the new year, the high commissioner had a well-earned reputation for unwavering firmness in his dealings with Vietnamese nationalists. Aloof, haughty, and bitingly sarcastic, he terrified his underlings and was known to reduce bureaucrats to quivering compliance. An autocrat to the core, d’Argenlieu also sought to project an air of mysticism and almost religious veneration. Largely unemotional up to a certain point, he could then launch into passionate oratory and bring himself to tears. His worldview was Manichean, black-and-white with few shades of gray. Good had to prevail over evil. Far-reaching compromise was out of the question. As 1946 progressed, more than a few observers, including some who shared the desire to reclaim French control over Indochina, would comment on this rigidity of mind, this lack of intellectual dexterity. As one wag on his staff quietly put it, d’Argenlieu had “the most brilliant mind of the twelfth century.” The problem was that he was about to be faced with one of the most delicate political and historical problems of the twentieth—decolonization—and he didn’t have the breadth of mind to understand the forces against him.4
This matters enormously in the story of 1946 in Vietnam, because as the year began, Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi had reached a sobering conclusion: He had no option but to seek a negotiated settlement with France. Always conscious, even during the glorious days of August 1945, of the obstacles that lay in the way of real independence for Vietnam, the veteran nationalist knew full well that the first essential task of any revolutionary party is to establish power throughout the country and to create the machinery that will solidify that power and ensure that it is accepted by, if not the whole population, at least the vast majority of it. Equally important, Ho believed, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) had to create her own laws and schedule elections. Hence his government’s early efforts, beginning already in September, to strengthen its position. It moved quickly, for example, to abolish an iniquitous head tax and the land taxes on small landowners, while carefully avoiding a general redistribution of land that might antagonize Vietnamese landlords. Some landholdings of the French, however, along with those of “traitors,” were confiscated and given to landless peasants. Forced labor was outlawed, and the eight-hour workday became law. An ambitious literacy campaign was launched.
ADMIRAL D’ARGENLIEU INSPECTS TROOPS AT SAIGON’S TAN SON NHUT AIRPORT, JUNE 1946. (photo credit 5.1)
The government also announced that general elections based on universal suffrage would be held, in order to elect a national assembly that would be the supreme political body representing the will of the people. Women candidates would be encouraged to run. To attract moderate elements and to avoid alienating the Chinese occupying army, Ho declared that the new government would include all “patriotic elements” in the society, not merely workers and peasants. Later, in November, he formally dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party (which continued to operate behind the scenes). This action too was designed to reassure the Chinese occupiers, who in their own country were engaged in open warfare against Communists, but Ho said nothing of that motivation, or of the related one of easing U.S. concerns about his ideological convictions. The ICP, he merely said, was no longer needed. His country was his party.5
Not everyone embraced these measures. Ho Chi Minh personally had broad support, not merely in Tonkin and Annam but in the south as well, and the army won widespread devotion for its perceived discipline and for its stated willingness to fight wherever and whenever ordered. But many were warily skeptical regarding the new government in Hanoi as well as the local administrative committees. Among the substantial Catholic minority, roughly 10 percent of the population, some leaders supported the DRV, but many Catholics worried about being harassed for their faith and for their historical links to the French. As evidence, they pointed to the government’s use of military tribunals to punish hundreds of “counterrevolutionaries” by jailing or even executing them (the latter at the hands of specially formed “honor squads for the elimination of traitors”). Though Ho proved quite skillful in alleviating these fears, partly through conciliatory statements directed at the Catholic clergy, suspicions remained, particularly given the penchant of local committees for ignoring central directives and seizing land, harassing property owners, and outlawing numerous traditional customs.6
But severe weaknesses in the economy and in military preparedness, more than anything, pushed Ho toward seeking some kind of deal with the French. Late in the year, another terrible famine in the north was barely averted by a range of short-term measures; thousands nevertheless starved to death. The Hanoi government’s revenues remained meager, partly because, in keeping with Viet Minh promises, various taxes had been abolished. The government had to resort to a public appeal for contributions to the treasury, a scheme that brought a pittance until Ho personally asked for the people’s help. All over Tonkin in late September, during what was called “Gold Week,” individuals appeared at collection points with offerings of gold and silver family heirlooms, necklaces and weddings bands, wristwatches, and precious gems. One eighty-year-old woman secured a place in the national mythology by donating her life savings: a gold ingot wrapped in red silk. According to Vo Nguyen Giap’s recollection, in a few days the government collected twenty million piasters and 370 kilograms of gold.7
A significant sum, but hardly more than a fraction of what the new government needed, particularly given the monumental task of creating a national army. From the moment of the DRV’s founding, her leaders determined that they would have to build a modern regular army capable of defending the entire territory of Vietnam, from the Chinese border in the north to the Ca Mau peninsula in the south. Recruitment for this National Defense Guard (the renamed Vietnamese Liberation Army) in the fall of 1945 went well—by the end of the year, Giap had some fifty thousand soldiers, a tenfold increase from August. In addition, major efforts were made in these months to organize self-defense and guerrilla units throughout the northern and central provinces. In Hanoi, the self-defense militia (tu ve) comprised virtually all the young men in the city and numbered in the tens of thousands.8
But how to supply these various units with weapons and ammunition? The problem was acute, perhaps even insoluble. The government had managed to accumulate some firearms from various sources, including the surrendering Japanese troops, but not nearly enough. Many units had to train only with sticks, spears, and primitive flintlocks turned out by local blacksmiths. With reluctance, Ho agreed to use proceeds from Gold Week to purchase thirty thousand rifles and two thousand machine guns from the Chinese. Giap also sent underlings to Hong Kong and Bangkok to barter gold, opium, and rice shipments for weapons. All of it helped, but Ho and Giap understood that critical shortages remained, particularly with respect to ammunition. The rapid gains made by Gracey and Leclerc in Cochin China against the underequipped units of Tran Van Giau made clear how formidable the military test would be.9
Another fact weighed on Ho Chi Minh’s mind: His Viet Mi
nh, though already an inspiration to nationalists all over the colonial world, stood alone where it counted, among the big players on the international stage. Stalin’s Soviet Union was not merely uninterested but had been prepared to accept the future of Southeast Asia in Chiang Kai-shek’s hands. The French Communist Party, though the largest in France, followed the Stalinist line and counseled patience and moderation; its leader, Maurice Thorez, vice president in de Gaulle’s government, said he did not intend “to liquidate the French position in Indochina.” Stalin raised no objection. He moreover continued to suspect Ho of being too independent, too much the nationalist, and too desirous of American support. (Stalin had been told of the Viet Minh–OSS cooperation in 1945.) The British, for their part, were actively helping the French reclaim Cochin China, while the Americans seemed to have settled on a neutral policy that—in effect if not in intention—leaned toward France. Ho continued to send letters to the White House asking for support; with each nonreply, he lost a bit more faith.10
Add to all this Ho’s concern about Chinese occupation forces north of the sixteenth parallel, and it’s easy to understand his resort to diplomacy. He told anxious comrades not to forget that the last time the Chinese came, they had stayed a thousand years. Moreover, he added, Lu Han’s forces had given aid and comfort to Ho’s main nationalist rivals, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD, or Vietnamese Nationalist Party) and the Dai Viet, who had been thrown on the defensive by the Viet Minh’s superior organization and boldness but who might yet rebound. Better by far to put up with the French for a time. True, it meant delaying full national independence for some time to come, and retarding the progress of the revolution in the south, but what real alternative was there?
II
THE TALKS BEGAN IN MID-OCTOBER 1945, WITH THE FIRST SUBSTANTIAL session occurring on December 1. Ho’s interlocutor was Jean Sainteny, who had remained in Hanoi after his frustrating experience in August and been appointed French commissioner for Tonkin and northern Annam (above the sixteenth parallel). The two men would form, in the months that followed, if not a genuine bond as is sometimes claimed, at least a smooth working relationship. Ho Chi Minh came to trust Sainteny more than other Paris officials with whom he met, and to like him more. He came to see what others saw in the Frenchman (in addition, that is, to his matinee-idol looks): a deep intelligence that was matched by a personal modesty and capacity to listen. No doubt it helped that Sainteny also possessed a thorough knowledge of Indochina, having been a colonial official in the interwar period. For his part, Sainteny found Ho to be a “strong and honorable personality” who was “not basically anti-French.” In his book Histoire d’une paix manquée (Story of a Lost Peace), published in 1953, Sainteny would speak of “his vast culture, his intelligence, his incredible energy, his asceticism,” and the incomparable prestige this gave him among the Vietnamese people. But Ho was also patient, Sainteny stressed, willing to maintain an association with France for some specified period: “He had struggled towards [independence] for 35 years; he could certainly wait a few years more.”11
Léon Pignon, a brilliant career colonial officer with a Machiavellian cast of mind who accompanied Sainteny to many of the negotiating sessions, was more skeptical of Ho’s sincerity and more determined to reclaim full French sovereignty over Indochina. To him, Ho was “a great actor” who possessed a “Communist face” and would not long stomach a close association with France; Paris therefore should seek to build up other nationalists rather than work with Ho. But even Pignon, a graduate of the French École Coloniale who had served his first stint in Indochina in 1933–36 and whose sister taught at the Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi, developed a grudging respect for the Viet Minh leader and did not dispute Sainteny’s characterization of Ho as a man of moderation who favored compromise over violence. Where Sainteny and Pignon perhaps most differed was in the relative weight they gave to Ho’s humility and pride: Sainteny emphasized the former, Pignon the latter.12
From the start the negotiations were complicated by the ongoing Viet Minh–sponsored resistance movement in Cochin China, and by Ho’s insistence on the inclusion of the term independence (doc lap) in any final agreement. Sainteny, meanwhile, was instructed to gain Viet Minh assent to the entry of French troops into Tonkin, where about twenty thousand French nationals still lived, in exchange for a French vow to bring about the departure of the Chinese occupation force under Lu Han. Regarding the future status of Cochin China, Paris ordered Sainteny to insist that it be viewed as distinct from Tonkin and Annam, and that its people be allowed to choose their own destiny. The talks soon settled into a pattern, with the two men pressing their respective positions in a smoke-filled meeting room in a villa on Paul Bert Square in Hanoi. Sainteny would puff on his pipe, and Ho would smoke whatever cigarettes (Chinese, American, French) were available. Back and forth they would go, two men with considerable mutual respect and even affection, debating the meaning of particular French and Vietnamese words and phrases. They made little headway.13
Gradually, though, as 1945 turned into 1946, both sides softened their position. The outcome of the Vietnamese national elections on January 6 bolstered Ho Chi Minh’s legitimacy—the Viet Minh fielded the vast majority of candidates and won a decisive victory. At the same time, however, General Leclerc continued to strengthen the French military position in Cochin China, to the point that by February he seemed poised to turn his attention northward. Diplomatically too, Ho had reason to worry, as the parallel Sino-French negotiations to secure a Chinese withdrawal from Tonkin were beginning to show real promise. The French, it now seemed clear, were advancing north, come what might. Yet to fight them on the battlefield was quite out of the question: Giap’s forces were too ill equipped and too undertrained. To remain intransigent in the talks, on the other hand, and if necessary withdraw the DRV government from Hanoi as the French advanced, risked losing the initiative to the anti–Viet Minh and pro-French Vietnamese groups in Hanoi.
Ho, aware that a conciliatory posture included risks of its own—it would threaten popular support for the DRV among many nationalists, some of whom were more anti-French than he was—chose to press harder for a deal. He truly wanted a negotiated solution. No doubt he was also motivated by the abrupt resignation, on January 20, 1946, of Charles de Gaulle as head of the French government. De Gaulle’s departure, unrelated to the empire and caused by his frustration with parliamentary squabbling in Paris, removed what Ho took to be a major obstacle to an acceptable deal, and he had some reason to believe that the new government under Socialist Félix Gouin would be less intransigent.
On the French side, General Leclerc had the same hope. He did not advocate wholesale concessions to the Vietnamese, and he continued to affirm the righteousness of the French cause. (Leclerc was never as conciliatory, never as moderate, as many historians have suggested.)14 But he grasped that the military means at his disposal were limited and that he faced not one but two potential foes in Tonkin—the Viet Minh as well as the Chinese occupying forces under Lu Han. This necessitated some kind of agreement with the DRV, the general believed, though from his perspective the accord need not necessarily come before French troops landed in the north. It might indeed be preferable to sign the deal after that landing, since this could prevent Ho Chi Minh and his government from leaving the capital and taking to the hinterland to commence an interminable guerrilla war in both north and south. Such a war, Leclerc believed, would be a disaster for France.
Publicly Leclerc conveyed confidence, telling the press on February 5 that “the pacification of Cochin China and southern Annam is all over.” The following month he estimated that his troops controlled not just the cities but the vast majority of villages as well. Inside, however, he feared that the task in the north would be infinitely larger and that even in the south his success could prove fleeting. He needed no reminder that he had benefited from the presence of Japanese as well as British forces in the early clashes, and that this assistance was now ending. Nor di
d he need anyone to tell him that relative strength of non–Viet Minh elements in Cochin China—notably the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects with their backing in the countryside, and the Trotskyites with their urban supporters—could in time dissipate. The very ease of the military victories thus far achieved worried Leclerc. Few real battles had taken place, as the guerrillas simply vanished into the jungle, perhaps with the intention to return to fight another day. Leclerc would not have quibbled seriously with historian Bernard Fall’s later assertion that in early 1946, France gained control of Cochin China—but only “to the extent of 100 yards on either side of all major roads.”15
For Leclerc, then, military force had to be coupled with subtle diplomatic maneuvering if France was to reclaim—as he very much wanted—her predominant position in Indochina. Accordingly, taking advantage of d’Argenlieu’s temporary absence from Saigon (he had returned to Paris to report on his policies), Leclerc in mid-February appealed to Paris to agree to concessions, including use of the word independence, which both de Gaulle and d’Argenlieu had vehemently opposed. The restoration of substantial French control over the south, the general contended, meant that France could now agree to mutual concessions, the better to limit Viet Minh ambitions. Paris might well have accepted this line of argument had not Sainteny reported from one of his meetings with Ho that the DRV leader might accept something less than “independence.” Sainteny accordingly received instructions—drafted by d’Argenlieu—to offer Ho “self-government” within the framework of the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. In return, Ho must accept the stationing of French troops in Tonkin and agree to various cultural and economic privileges for France. On the pesky question of Cochin China’s future, Sainteny should offer a compromise: A plebiscite would be held in all three regions of Vietnam to determine whether the population wished to affiliate with the new state or make a separate deal with France.16
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 16