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

by Fredrik Logevall

  19 Edward M. Bennett, “Mandates and Trusteeships,” in Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Fredrik Logevall, eds., Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (New York: Scribner, 2002), 2:381–86.

  20 Kimball, Juggler, 131.

  21 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 428–29; Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 22–23.

  22 Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy During the Second World War, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 93.

  23 FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943, 448–50, 484–86.

  24 FRUS, Cairo and Tehran, 509–68 passim; Kimball, Juggler, 143. See also William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 283–86; Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 158–63; Gary Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 81–82.

  25 Hess, United States’ Emergence, 89–90. FDR quoted in Washington to FO, January 19, 1944, FO 371/41723, TNA.

  26 Cadogan minute, on minute by Strang, January 12, 1944, FO 371/1878, TNA. See also Eden to PM, December 23, 1943, CAB 121/741, TNA.

  27 See Anthony Eden’s memo, dated February 16, 1944, and accompanying annex, in CAB 121/741, TNA. See also Kimball, Forged in War, 302–3.

  28 Quoted in Ted Morgan, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War (New York: Random House, 2010), 25. See also David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2000), 256.

  29 Life quoted in Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942–1945,” American Historical Review 80 (December 1975), 1288.

  30 Harriman to Hopkins, September 10, 1944, Harriman file, Box 96, Hopkins Papers, FDR Library.

  31 The arguments of these “conservatives” in official Washington are ably explored in Lawrence, Assuming the Burden, 52–58.

  32 Charles de Gaulle, The War Memoirs, vol. 3: Salvation, 1944–1946 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1950), 187.

  33 Lawrence, Assuming the Burden, 31–32.

  34 Jonathan Fenby, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (San Francisco: MacAdam Cage, 2007), 287–88; Aglion, Roosevelt and De Gaulle, 177–78.

  35 Aglion, Roosevelt and De Gaulle, 180–81; Lacouture, De Gaulle, 1:537–45.

  36 NYT, July 11, 1945.

  37 Muggeridge quoted in Alistair Horne, La Belle France: A Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 375.

  38 See aide-memoir, August 25, 1944, FO 371/41719, TNA. On Franco-British scheming re this matter, see also Massigli to Foreign Ministry, October 2, 1944, Asie/Indochine, file 45, MAE.

  39 Mark Lawrence, “Forging the ‘Great Combination’: Britain and the Indochina Problem, 1945–1950,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 105–29.

  40 Stettinius memo, January 4, 1945, Record Group 59, Box 6177, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA); LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina,” 1291; Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 94.

  41 Washington to FO, January 9, 1945, FO 371/46304, TNA.

  42 Rosenman, ed., Papers and Addresses of Roosevelt, 13:562–63. See also Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 628.

  43 See, for example, George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 10.

  44 Quoted in Rossi, Roosevelt and French, 144.

  45 J. G. Ward minute, February 17, 1945, FO 371/46304, TNA. See also Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 50–52.

  46 Jim Bishop, FDR’s Last Year: April 1944–April 1945 (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 491–92; Stein Tønnesson, “Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship, and Indochina,” in Lawrence and Logevall, eds., First Vietnam War, 66. Tønnesson in this essay presents a powerful case that FDR did not give up his opposition to a French return in the final months of his life. See also Tønnesson’s larger work, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (London: Sage, 1991).

  47 De Gaulle quoted in H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 814.

  48 Kimball, Juggler, 154.

  49 See, e.g., British official documentation for fall 1945, much of which states forth-rightly that FDR went to his grave seeking to prevent a French return to Indochina, and which implicitly therefore sees historical importance in the FDR-Truman transition.

  CHAPTER 3: Crossroads

  1 Jean Decoux, À la barre de l’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1949), 328.

  2 David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13, 55–56; Stein Tønnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (London: Sage, 1991), 221; Decoux, À la barre de l’Indochine, 328.

  3 Summary of MAGIC intercepts, SRS 306, January 20, 1945, MAGIC Far East Summaries, Box 4, Record Group 457, NARA; Stein Tønnesson, “Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship, and Indochina,” in Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 65–66; G. Sabbatier, Le Destin de l’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1952), 138–39.

  4 John E. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur: The Ambivalence of French Foreign Policy toward the Far East, 1919–1945 (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1991), 239.

  5 Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War: Bernard B. Fall’s Last Comments on Vietnam (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 130; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 59; Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110.

  6 Tønnesson, Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, 242–43.

  7 Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 512; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 59.

  8 Sabbatier, Le Destin; Tønnesson, Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, 239; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 326–27.

  9 Ellen J. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, 1940–1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 41; Elliott, Sacred Willow, 110.

  10 John T. McAlister, Jr., Viet Nam: The Origins of Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 114–15; Tønnesson, Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, 244.

  11 Martin Shipway, The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944–1947 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1996), 68; Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 209–10.

  12 Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 621; Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 241; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 327; Hammer, Struggle for Indochina, 43.

  13 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. 1: From Colonialism to the Vietminh (New York: Praeger, 1967), 302; D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 193.

  14 Frédéric Turpin, “Le RPF et la guerre d’Indochine (1947–1954),” in De Gaulle et le Rassemblement du Peuple Français (1947–1955) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1998), 530–31; Marshall, French Colonial Myth, 195.

  15 Quoted in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 100.

  16 Shipway, Road to War, chap. 2; Hammer, Struggle for Indochina, 44.

  17 The declaration is excerpted in Philippe Devillers, Paris-Saigon-Hanoi: Les archives de la g
uerre, 1944–1947 (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1988), 53–54.

  18 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 329.

  19 Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940–1945 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007), 213; Hammer, Struggle for Indochina, 43–44; Philippe Devillers, Histoire du Viêt-Nam de 1940 à 1952 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 144.

  20 Shipway, Road to War, 60; Frederick Quinn, French Overseas Empire (New York: Praeger, 2000), 233.

  21 Tønnesson, Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, 315; Shipway, Road to War, 126; Buttinger, Dragon Embattled, 303.

  22 David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial: 1920 to 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 415–16; David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 33; Buttinger, Dragon Embattled, 294.

  23 See the analysis in Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83–85.

  24 William J. Duiker, “Ho Chi Minh and the Strategy of People’s War,” in Lawrence and Logevall, eds., First Vietnam War, 158–59. Ho quoted in Brocheaux, Ho Chi Minh, 83.

  25 Devillers, Histoire du Viêt-Nam, 111.

  26 Ho quoted in Hoang Van Hoan, A Drop in the Ocean: Hoang Van Hoan’s Revolutionary Reminiscences (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1988), 187–88.

  27 Elliott, Sacred Willow, 112–13; Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 416; William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 296.

  28 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 408; William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 45.

  29 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 96; Elliott, Sacred Willow, 107.

  30 Motoo Furuta, “A Survey of Village Conditions During the 1945 Famine in Vietnam,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in South-East Asia (Houndsmills, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998), 236–37; Nguyen Thi Anh, “Japanese Food Policies and the 1945 Great Famine in Indochina,” in Kratoska, Food Supplies, 211–21; Elliott, Sacred Willow, 107–8; and Marr, Vietnam 1945, 101. See also Robert Templer, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 48ff.

  31 Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133.

  32 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 104.

  33 Nguyen Thi Anh, “Japanese Food Policies,” 221; Elliott, Sacred Willow, 113; William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 90; Templer, Shadows and Wind, 50.

  34 The three were Laurence Gordon, Harry Bernard, and Frank Tan. On the GBT and its activities, see Dixee R. Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 63–94.

  35 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 407; William J. Duiker, U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 28.

  36 Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II through Dienbienphu (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 62; Elliott, Sacred Willow, 113.

  37 Fenn unpublished memoir, quoted in Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 154–55.

  38 Charles Fenn, Ho Chi Minh: A Biographical Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 132.

  39 Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 156–57; Fenn, Ho Chi Minh, 75–77.

  40 Fenn, Ho Chi Minh, 76–78; Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 156–57.

  41 Tran Trong Trung oral history, Hanoi, June 12, 2007 (I thank Merle Pribbenow for making this oral history available to me); Gary Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 170; and Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 293–94.

  42 See the fine account in Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 193–205. See René J. Défourneaux, The Winking Fox: Twenty-two Years in Military Intelligence (Indianapolis: ICA, 2000), 134–96; and Lisle Rose, Roots of Tragedy: The United States and the Struggle for Asia, 1945–1953 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), 53–54.

  43 This is a theme in Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh. And see also the recollections of Henry Prunier, a member of the mission, in Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003), 38–41.

  44 René J. Défourneaux, “A Secret Encounter with Ho Chi Minh,” Look, August 9, 1966, 32–33; Bartholomew-Feis, OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 205–15; Tran Trong Trung oral history, Hanoi, June 12, 2007. I thank interviewer Merle Pribbenow for making this oral history available to me.

  45 Quoted in Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam, 1946–1966 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 35.

  46 Ronald H. Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York: Random House, 2007), 96–101; T. O. Smith, Britain and the Origins of the Vietnam War: U.K. Policy in Indo-China, 1943–1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21–33.

  47 An indispensable account is Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 68–74. And see Causes, Origins, and Lessons of the Vietnam War: Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., June 9–11, 1972 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), 167, 175–76.

  48 Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 45.

  49 Spector, Advice and Support, 45; Hess, United States’ Emergence, 152–53; Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 95.

  50 Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 248–49.

  51 Ibid., 249–50.

  52 NYT, September 16, 1945; Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, trans. Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 926.

  CHAPTER 4: “All Men Are Created Equal”

  1 William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 77.

  2 Ibid., 95–96.

  3 Mark Sidel, Old Hanoi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 27.

  4 William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 316; David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 489.

  5 William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 48; see also Bui Diem with David Chanoff, In the Jaws of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 33–36.

  6 This is a main theme in Marr, Vietnam 1945.

  7 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. 1: From Colonialism to the Vietminh (New York: Praeger, 1967), 210; Duiker, Sacred War, 48; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997), 162.

  8 Xuan Phuong and Danièle Mazingarbe, Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam (Great Neck, N.Y.: EMQUAD, 2004), 53–54.

  9 Gilbert Pilleul, ed., De Gaulle et l’Indochine, 1940–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1982), 193.

  10 François Guillemot, “Viêt Nam 1945–1946: L’élimination de l’opposition nationaliste et anticolonialiste dans la Nord: Au coeur de la fracture vietnamienne,” 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), 1–9; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 316–17.

  11 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 529–31.

  12 Ibid., 532.

  13 Bernard B. Fall, ed., Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (New York: Praeger, 1967), 53–56.

  14 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 536.

  15 Vietnam: A Television History, episode 1: “Roots of a War,” PBS, transcript.

  16 Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 330; Marr, Vietnam 1945, 365.

  17 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 368.

  18 Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History, 38.

  19 Archimedes L. A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), 198; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 318; Françoise Martin, Heures tragiques au Tonkin (Paris: Éditions Berger, 1948), 152; Jean Sainteny, Histoire d’une paix manquée, Indochine 1945–1947 (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1953), 71–77.

  20 Michael Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War (New York: Avon, 1982), 12; Patti, Why Viet Nam?, 223–24. For the recollection of another American who was in the city then, see René J. Défourneaux, The Winking Fox: Twenty-two Years in Military Intelligence (Indianapolis: ICA, 2000), 197–202.

  21 Marr, Vietnam 1945, 500.

  22 Patti to Indiv, September 2, 1945, Record Group 226, Box 199, NARA; Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 134–35; Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 57.

  23 September 19, 1945, FO 371/49088, TNA.

  24 August 16, 1945, FO 371/49088, TNA. See also Antony Beevor, Paris: After the Liberation, 1944–1949, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), 206–7.

  25 Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945–1970 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 64; Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, trans. Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 910.

  26 Lisle Rose, Roots of Tragedy: The United States and the Struggle for Asia, 1945–1953 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), 51–52; Lacouture, De Gaulle, 64; De Gaulle, War Memoirs, 910–11.

  27 Harold R. Isaacs, No Peace for Asia (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 232–34. On the extraordinary esteem in which Americans were held in Vietnam at the end of the war, see the 1981 interview with Herbert Bluechel, who served in Saigon at the time, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 12, 2010). And see Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History, 34, 38.