Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  2 Ho did get a short, formal reply from an aide to Wilson’s representative Colonel House, dated June 19, 1919. See David A. Andelman, Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008), 124–25.

  3 See the excellent analysis in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  4 Quinn-Judge, Missing Years, 20.

  5 For the material covered in this chapter, helpful sources include Daniel Hémery, Ho Chi Minh, de l’Indochine au Vietnam (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Duiker, Ho Chi Minh; Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh; E. V. Kobelev, Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi: Gioi, 1999); Quinn-Judge, Missing Years; Paul Mus, Ho Chi Minh, le Vietnam et l’Asie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971); Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Thu Trang-Gaspard, Ho Chi Minh à Paris (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1992); and Alain Ruscio, ed., Ho Chi Minh: Textes, 1914–1969 (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1990).

  6 Ho’s official birth date is 1890, but his sister, when questioned by French officials in 1920, gave the year as 1892 or 1893. See Quinn-Judge, Missing Years, 260n25.

  7 For the making of French Indochina, see Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, trans. Ly Lan Dill-Klein et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). A broader study that places the French Empire in this period in context is Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), chaps. 10–11. Also useful is Frederick Quinn, The French Overseas Empire (New York: Praeger, 2001).

  8 Both quotes are from Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 14.

  9 Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); and J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  10 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 15–33.

  11 On the emergence of this opposition to French rule, see Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism; and William J. Duiker, The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976). On colonial prisons, see the rich and penetrating study by Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

  12 See note 6 above.

  13 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), 131.

  14 Daniel Hémery, “Jeunesse d’un colonise, genèse d’un exil: Ho Chi Minh jusqu’en 1911,” Approches Asie, no. 11 (1992), 82–157.

  15 A British official who had met him said Ho spoke excellent idiomatic English. Saigon to Foreign Office (hereafter FO), April 10, 1946, FO 959/7, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, London (hereafter TNA).

  16 Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 10; Luu Doan Huynh, interview with the author, Hanoi, January 2003.

  17 The date of his return to France has long been in dispute, with some authors maintaining it was late 1917 and others pointing to the spring of 1919, i.e., mere weeks before he presented the petition at the Paris Peace Conference. The French police, notably, concluded it was the latter. See Quinn-Judge, Missing Years, 20. Interestingly, Quinn-Judge also suggests he may have made another trip to the United States in the interval, i.e., in 1917–18, working for a wealthy family in Brooklyn.

  18 Quoted in Andelman, Shattered Peace, 128.

  19 See Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism,” in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–66, ed. Bernard B. Fall (New York: Praeger, 1967), 34.

  20 Ibid., 24.

  21 Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 6–7.

  22 Karnow, Vietnam, 132; Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 19.

  23 Quoted in Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 216. See also Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 20–21.

  24 Quoted in Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 22. Sternel was a pseudonym the activist used in his writings. I have not been able to identify his real name.

  25 Quoted in William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 27.

  26 Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, chap. 4.

  27 On the developments in these years, see, e.g., Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, chap. 5; Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism; Duiker, The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism.

  28 Zinoman, Colonial Bastille, chap. 9.

  29 A fine study articulating this argument is Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005). See here also Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 388.

  30 Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 242.

  CHAPTER 1: “The Empire Is with Us!”

  1 On the fall of France, two important and engaging studies are Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); and Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  2 Quoted in Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 224.

  3 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre: L’Appel, 1940–1942 (Paris: Plon, 1954), 78–80; David Schoenbrun, As France Goes (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 47–48, 214–15. See also Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre: De l’appel du 18 juin à la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

  4 Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001), 389.

  5 Despite de Gaulle’s conviction on this point, he was not an instinctive imperialist. Unlike many ambitious military officers, during the interwar period he sought as much as possible to avoid assignments to the colonies, and he viewed France as fundamentally a Continental power whose prime focus must be on the German frontier to the east. In the short term, however, de Gaulle understood his cause was intimately linked to France’s overseas possessions. See Julian Jackson, Charles De Gaulle (London: Haus, 2003), 80–81.

  6 Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007).

  7 Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, trans. Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 160.

  8 The armistice divided France into an occupied zone and an unoccupied zone. Occupied France included Paris and the entire Channel and Atlantic Seaboard. The south of the country, below a heavily guarded demarcation line, made up the unoccupied (Vichy) zone. The French Navy was to be deactivated. In November 1942, the German Occupation would be extended to cover the whole of France.

  9 On Vichy and the empire, see Jacques Cantier and Eric Jennings, eds., L’Empire colonial sous Vichy (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004).

  10 François Kersaudy, Churchill and de Gaulle (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 85.

  11 Andrew Shennan, De Gaulle (London: Longman, 1993), 54; Jackson, Dark Years, 392.

  12 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (London: Cassell, 1948–53), 3:682.

  13 Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940–1945 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007), 38. The French Army lost approximately 100,000 killed, roughly equal to the rate of casualties at Verdun in 1916. In addition, the Germans took some 1.6 million POWs.

  14 Bui Diem with David Chanoff, In the Jaws of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 15. See also David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 79–80; and Thomas A. Bass, The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangero
us Game (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 31.

  15 Henri Lerner, Catroux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 52–54. For Catroux’s version of events during these months, see his book, Deux actes du drame indochinois (Paris: Plon, 1959).

  16 On Japanese decision making in this period, see Minami Yoshisawa, “The Nishihara Mission in Hanoi, July 1940,” in Saya S. Shiraishi and Motoo Furuta, eds., Indochina in the 1940s and 1950s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992), 9–54; Hata Ikuhiko, “The Army’s Move into Northern Indochina,” in James W. Morley, ed., The Fateful Choice: Japan’s Advance into Southeast Asia, 1939–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 155–63; and Sachiko Murakami, “Japan’s Thrust into French Indochina, 1940–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1981. Grew is quoted in H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 570.

  17 Jean Decoux, À la barre de l’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1949), 41–46; FO to Consul General (Saigon), June 29, 1940, FO 371/24328, TNA.

  18 Memcon Saint-Quentin and Welles, June 20, 1940, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1940, The Far East (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), IV:29. See also Hornbeck memorandum, June 20, 1940, FRUS, 1940, Far East, IV:29; New York Times (hereafter NYT), August 2, 1945; John E. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur: The Ambivalence of French Foreign Policy toward the Far East, 1919–1945 (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1991), 196; and Catroux, Deux actes du drame indochinois, 54–55.

  19 Catroux quoted in Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 197–98. See also Catroux, Deux actes du drame indochinois, 62–66.

  20 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. 1: From Colonialism to the Vietminh (New York: Praeger, 1967), 235; and Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 32. Yosuke Matsuoka is quoted in William Morley, Fateful Choice, 302.

  21 Thomas, French Empire at War, 48–49; Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 48.

  22 Jean Chauvel, Commentaire (Paris: Fayard, 1971), 238–39; Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 203–4.

  23 Francois Charles-Roux, Cinq mois tragiques aux affaires étrangères (21 mai–1 novembre 1940) (Paris: Plon, 1949), 255; and Paul Baudouin, The Private Diaries of Paul Baudouin (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), 198–99, 223–24.

  24 Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 45. On U.S. thinking in the interwar period, see also, in a broader context, Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

  25 Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 208–13; Georges Gautier, 9 mars 1945, Hanoi au soleil de sang: La fin de l’Indochine française (Paris: SPL, 1978), 43–45.

  26 Hata, “Army’s Move,” 194–98; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 19.

  27 David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial: 1920 to 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 400; Histoire de la révolution d’août (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 19–22.

  28 Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 70–73; William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 250–57; and Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York: Random House, 1968), 74–78.

  29 Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 259–63.

  30 Ho Chi Minh, “Letter from Abroad” (1941), in Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (Hanoi, 1960), 2:153.

  31 Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 74.

  32 Ibid., 75. On this point, see also Daniel Hémery, “Ho Chi Minh: Vie singulière et nationalisation des esprits,” in Christopher E. Goscha and Benoît de Tréglodé, eds., Le Viêt Nam depuis 1945: États, contestations et constructions du passé (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2004), 135–48.

  33 An excellent source on Decoux’s policies is Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 130–98. See also Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, 1940–1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 31; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 74; and Patti, Why Viet Nam?, 33.

  34 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 78; Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 188–94.

  35 Decoux, À la barre de l’Indochine, 444.

  36 Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 145. On the persecution of Gaullists in Indochina as compared to the rest of the empire, see the recollections of Philippe Devillers, who spent part of the war in Indochina: Devillers, Histoire du Viêt-Nam de 1940 à 1952 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 86. Historian Martin Thomas concludes that Decoux’s government was “the most actively repressive within the Vichy empire.” Thomas, French Empire at War, 196.

  37 Colonel Jacomey to Tonkin Command, May 19, 1941, 1K401/C1, Service historique de l’armée de terre, Vincennes; Richard J. Aldrich, The Key to the South: Britain, the United States, and Thailand During the Approach of the Pacific War, 1929–1942 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1993), 288–93; Thomas, French Empire at War, 196–97.

  38 F. C. Jones, Japan’s New Order in East Asia, 1937–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 260–63; Stein Tønnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (London: Sage, 1991), 38; Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 216.

  39 In September 1940 a joint team of army and navy cryptographers had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, allowing them to read what Tokyo was telling its diplomats around the world. The operation was known as MAGIC and the cryptographers as the “magicians.”

  40 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 509–11; Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), 513–18.

  41 Quoted in Jonathan Fenby, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (San Francisco: MacAdam Cage, 2007), 79–80.

  CHAPTER 2: The Anti-Imperialist

  1 William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R.: 1942–1945 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 166. See also Robert Daniel Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (New York: Pyramid, 1965); and Raoul Aglion, Roosevelt and De Gaulle: Allies in Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1988). For Hull’s views, see Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 2:961–62.

  2 Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The War President, 1940–1943 (New York: Random House, 2000), 379.

  3 Mario Rossi, Roosevelt and the French (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), 67–68.

  4 David B. Woolner, “Storm in the Atlantic: The St. Pierre and Miquelon Affair of 1941,” M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1990; Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 706–10; and Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940–1945 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007), 133–39.

  5 See Georges Catroux, Dans la bataille de la Méditerranée (Paris: Plon, 1949), 278–79.

  6 Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1946), 115; Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Macmillan, 1938–50), 10:69.

  7 Willard Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World Order (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1959), 102–4; Foster Rhea Dulles and Gerald Ridinger, “The Anti-Colonial Policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Political Science Quarterly (March 1955): 1–18.

  8 Paul Orders, “ ‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History’: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism,” in David Ryan and Victor Pungong, eds., The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Dulles and Ridinger, “The Anti-Colo
nial Policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  9 Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World Order; Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 109.

  10 Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), 50–51.

  11 Kimball, Juggler, 130.

  12 Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 37; Davis, FDR: War President, 269–73; and Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), 1163. On the differing Anglo-American conceptions of empire in this period, see also Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic, 2003): 291–94.

  13 Kimball, Juggler, 133. A fine study of the charter and the broader context in which it was articulated is Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 14–86.

  14 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 209.

  15 Foreign Ministry Report, “L’Amerique et les colonies,” March 12, 1945, Y-International, file 655, Ministère des affaires étrangères, Paris (hereafter MAE). An excellent summary of the report is in Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 24–25. See also Jasmine Aimaq, For Europe or Empire? French Colonial Ambitions and the European Army Plan (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996), 101.

  16 Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 1:394–402; Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow, 1998), 173–74.

  17 Memo–Hopkins, Eden visit, March 27, 1943, Box 138, Harry Hopkins Papers, FDR Library.

  18 Minutes of Subcommittee on Political Problems, April 10, 1943, quoted in Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 25. See also John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 124–25.