A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  The Vietnamese officers ordered their troops to try to distinguish Kitts’s team from the large number of French in the city and not to shoot at the Americans. This became increasingly difficult for the average Viet Minh soldier, despite the U.S. Army markings and American flags on the teams’ vehicles, as more French troops arrived, the French demands grew proportionately, and the shooting incidents proliferated. “How do you tell a Frenchman from an American when the Frenchman is driving the same jeep and wearing the same uniform?” Kitts said. One evening the jeep Kitts and a couple of other officers were driving back to their quarters came under fire from a Viet Minh roadblock. They managed to tumble out in time to avoid being shot, but the vehicle was mangled. The next day Kitts found the young Viet Minh captain responsible for the area. Kitts explained that he and his teammates had to drive these particular streets to and from the harbor and would the captain please ask his men to look more carefully before shooting in the future? The captain apologized and promised to alert his men once more to the route that Kitts and his companions took. He would instruct them to use more restraint and be sure they were not mistaking Americans for Frenchmen. “But my men are so eager,” he said. Kitts laughed. He had no sympathy for the French. The Vietnamese captain laughed too.

  By July 1946, the skirmishes had become so frequent that it was highly dangerous to keep the team in Haiphong. Kitts and his teammates were instructed to turn over responsibility for repatriating Japanese soldiers to the French and were evacuated. Three words some Vietnamese who knew English had painted on the wall of a building in the harbor stayed with Kitts down the years. The letters spelled out: “We Want America.”

  America did not want them. For Ho Chi Minh the years of 1945 and 1946 were a repetition of the disappointed hope and frustration he had experienced from the Americans right after World War I. Then the president of the United States had been Woodrow Wilson. This time the president was Harry Truman. Their names were different, and another war and a quarter of a century had passed, but they behaved in the same way.

  When Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, Ho took the man and his proclamation seriously. Wilson said that subject peoples had a right to self-determination and that in the settlement “of all colonial claims … the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight” with the claim of the colonial power. The American people had joined the peoples of Britain and France and the other Allies in this “culminating and final war for human liberty,” Wilson declared, because the Allied Powers stood for the “evident principle” that ran throughout his Fourteen Points: “It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” The League of Nations that he was founding would perpetuate this just treatment of all peoples, Wilson said.

  Ho was sufficiently impressed to spend some of the sparse wages he earned painting fake Chinese antiques and retouching photographs in a Paris studio to rent a set of formal attire and present himself at the Paris Peace Conference, where Wilson and the other Allied statesmen were negotiating the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations the treaty contained. In the Paris of the day, he was a ridiculous figure, this twenty-eight-year-old Vietnamese with the oddly intense eyes aping a European gentleman in white tie and tails. Ho carried with him a petition he had drawn up listing the grievances of the Vietnamese against the French colonial regime. He had also mimicked Wilson in his petition by organizing it into an eight-point program that would give the Vietnamese an opportunity to recover from the wrongs done them in an autonomous state within the French empire. He was not asking for independence, just autonomy. No one from the American delegation or any of the other Allied delegations would receive him. Ho discovered that Wilson’s self-determination applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe who had been under German and Austro-Hungarian domination, not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa. Wilson’s fifth point on “colonial claims” meant in practice the divvying up among the victors of the German colonies in Africa and Asia.

  On August 15, 1945, the day Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of his country over Radio Tokyo, Ho began asking Truman to make good on his wartime rhetoric and on the pronouncements of his deceased predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. He had the Viet Minh representative in Kunming, China, send Truman a message through the OSS station there asking “the United States, as a champion of democracy” to make Vietnam an American protectorate “on the same status as the Philippines for an undetermined period” before full independence. Two weeks later, on September 2, 1945, the day the Japanese delegates were bending over a green-baize-covered table on the deck of the battleship Missouri to sign the documents of unconditional surrender, Ho read the Vietnamese declaration of independence and proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to a crowd of 500,000 people assembled in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. He began with words from the declaration Jefferson had written for the Thirteen Colonies: “All men are created equal …” In the midst of his proclamation a flight of U.S. P-38 fighter planes appeared high overhead. The curious pilots swooped down for a look. The crowd mistook the coincidence of the pass-over for an American salute to the Vietnamese nation.

  There was no reply to Ho’s request that the United States make Vietnam a temporary protectorate, but Truman’s public words encouraged him to keep trying. The president’s first major postwar foreign policy statement in a Navy Day speech on October 27, 1945, was a twelve-point declaration in the best Wilsonian tradition. “The foreign policy of the United States is based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and justice,” Truman said. He then listed the twelve “fundamentals” of his foreign policy. Three seemed to apply directly to the Vietnamese:

  —We believe in the eventual return of sovereign rights and self-government to all peoples who have been deprived of them by force.

  —We believe that all peoples who are prepared for self-government should be permitted to choose their own form of government by their own freely expressed choice, without interference from any foreign source. That is true in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

  —We shall refuse to recognize any government imposed upon any nation by the force of any foreign power.

  Ho therefore protested to Truman in another communication after the United States arranged for France to represent the Vietnamese and the Cambodian and Laotian peoples on the newly formed United Nations Advisory Commission for the Far East. France, Ho said, had lost any moral or legal claim to sovereignty over Indochina because the World War II Vichy government “had ignominiously sold Indochina to Japan and betrayed the Allies” in 1940, cooperating with the Japanese until the occupiers had decided to oust the French colonial administration and rule directly in March 1945. The Viet Minh, in contrast, had “ruthlessly fought against Japanese fascism” in alliance with the United States. Ho sent Truman and Truman’s first secretary of state, James Byrnes, eleven telegrams and letters of appeal over an eighteen-month period after his establishment of a Vietnamese government in Hanoi. None was acknowledged. He made similar pleas for rescue to Clement Atlee, the new prime minister of Britain; to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek of Nationalist China; and to Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union. They also did not answer.

  By September 1946, with the French Army in the North, Ho was reduced to a conversation with the first secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Paris. He was in Paris to make a last attempt at negotiating a compromise with the confident and ever more belligerent French. He offered to turn Vietnam into “a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.” He hinted that he would give the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, one of the finest natural deep-water harbors in the world—where the U.S. military was to build a massive air base, port, and warehousing and maintenance complex to fight the second war in Vietnam—if only the United Sta
tes would protect the Vietnamese from the French. He signed a “modus vivendi” with France on September 14, 1946, and returned to Hanoi.

  In October the French reneged on the agreement by asserting control over customs inspection and the collection of revenues at Haiphong. Their intent was to discredit the sovereignty of Ho’s Viet Minh government. Twenty French soldiers were killed in an ensuing dispute in November over the goods of a Chinese trader. The French general in command, Jean Etienne Valluy, decided to take advantage of the incident to teach “a severe lesson … and so bring the leaders of the Vietnamese to a better understanding of the situation.” He had the local commander, a Colonel Debes, whom the U.S. vice-consul in Hanoi described in a report to the State Department as “notorious for graft and brutality,” subject the city on November 23, 1946, to a daylong bombardment by French warships, American-supplied planes, and artillery. Six thousand Vietnamese civilians were killed. The Viet Minh studied the lesson carefully and prepared in secret their “understanding of the situation.” Ho summed up, in a remark during this last year in which he reached out to the Americans, what the Vietnamese had finally been forced to conclude: “We apparently stand quite alone; we shall have to depend on ourselves.”

  At 8:04 P.M. on the night of December 19, 1946, Viet Minh commandos stormed the central power station in Hanoi and threw the city into darkness. The extinction of the lights in the capital was the signal for full-scale assaults on the French garrison there and those in the other cities and towns of the North and in Central Vietnam. There was no turning back now from the first war for Vietnamese independence.

  Ho had been sending his letters and telegrams to a file drawer for historians. The United States had abandoned the Vietnamese and the other peoples of Indochina to the French well before he cited the American Declaration of Independence and the P-38S dipped low over Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. The fact that Ho and his disciples were Communists had nothing to do with the original American decision. Popular history has it that the United States opposed European colonialism in Asia. The belief is a myth. The fable grew out of the Wilsonian rhetoric of Roosevelt and Truman, the private thoughts of Roosevelt, and the personal antipathy of a number of American leaders, such as Douglas Mac Arthur, to old-fashioned colonialism. The United States as a nation, expressing itself through its government, did not attempt to dismantle the European colonial empires in Asia at the end of World War II.

  Franklin Roosevelt wanted to free the Indochinese peoples through a slow process that was to begin by placing the colony under a twenty-five-year trusteeship after the war. As late as January 1944 he remarked to Cordell Hull, his Secretary of State: “France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. … The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”

  Churchill and much of the British Establishment could not see that the sun was setting on the lands of Rudyard Kipling. They feared that trusteeship for Indochina would undermine their hold over India and the rest of their empire, which was precisely what Roosevelt also had in mind. De Gaulle, traumatized by the defeat of 1940 and the collusion of most of the French armed forces and the middle and upper classes of France with the Nazis and the Japanese under the Vichy regime, was obsessed with his vision of restoring the glory of the French empire and continuing France’s mission civilisatrice in Indochina. British opposition and de Gaulle’s insistence persuaded Roosevelt to give up his trusteeship scheme. On January 5, 1945, he indicated to Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, that he would not object to Britain’s reinstalling the French in Indochina. He simply wanted to be relieved of having to publicly approve a French reoccupation. At the Yalta Conference a month later he went another step by accepting as official policy a State Department proposal for the restoration of French rule.

  After Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, Harry Truman facilitated the French venture of reconquest. The new president and those who advised him thought they had sufficient reason to sacrifice the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Lao to French notions of the white man’s burden. Although the United States was courting the assistance of the Soviet Union for the final campaign to crush Japan in April 1945, Truman and his associates already saw Russia as a future menace. W. Averell Harriman, another of the architects of the postwar foreign policy, who was then ambassador to Moscow, rushed home in a B-24 bomber specially outfitted for him as a long-range transport plane to alert Truman that they might well face a “barbarian invasion of Europe.” To construct a postwar Western Europe where Soviet power would be excluded and American power firmly entrenched, Truman and his statesmen needed the cooperation of France. They wanted the use of French ports, airfields, and military bases to counter the presumed threat from Stalin’s Red Army. They believed that France’s nineteenth-century colonialism was probably unworkable in the postwar world. They felt morally uneasy about their connivance in its return to Indochina, and they were worried that France might be stepping into a conflict of indefinite duration and cost. Nevertheless, Truman confirmed Roosevelt’s decision. In May 1945, four months before anyone could know what sort of Vietnamese government would appear in Hanoi, he permitted Georges Bidault, de Gaulle’s foreign minister, to be told that the United States had never questioned, “even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.” Truman followed FDR’s inclination and let the British take the public onus for bringing back the French. They were happy to do so in the hope of stabilizing their own possessions. It was a joke among American officers in the China-Burma-India Theater that the initials of Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies.” This was, in fact, the command’s main purpose.

  Maj. Gen. Douglas Gracey arrived in Saigon on September 13, 1945, with a mixed force of Gurkhas, other Indian Army troops, and French parachutists. He freed and rearmed the French soldiers of the Vichy garrison, whom the Japanese had disarmed and imprisoned that March after four and a half years of collaboration, and ordered the Japanese to join with his forces and the French to drive the Viet Minh out of the city. The disarming of the 17,000 Japanese troops in the South was postponed for several months so that they could assist in suppressing the Vietnamese. Everything was done in the name of “restoring order.” At the beginning of October, more French soldiers sailed up from Trincomalee, the Royal Navy base on Ceylon, in British transports, accompanied by the French battleship Richelieu, which would lend the men ashore the support of her big guns, and a destroyer aptly named to inspire confidence at such a moment, Triumphant. Gen. Jacques Philippe Leclerc, the liberator of Paris, flew to Saigon to take charge. He started pushing out of the city in mid-October, reinforced by the British Indian troops and the Japanese, and penetrated far enough into the Mekong Delta to seize My Tho on October 25. Can Tho, the main city in the Delta, fell at the end of the month. By the beginning of December 1945, Leclerc had 21,500 French troops in the South, including the 2nd Armored Division and its American tanks, which he had used to liberate Paris. Truman approved a British request to turn eight hundred Lend-Lease jeeps and trucks over to the French. He claimed that it would be impractical to remove them from Vietnam. The French also obtained through U.S. Lend-Lease most of the many landing craft and a number of the large warships that they deployed to Indochina to launch the reconquest. The first French aircraft carrier to bomb the Viet Minh, the Dixmunde, was an American vessel and her pilots flew American planes—Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers made famous by the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the fall of 1945 the U.S. Navy helped open the way for the French landing at Haiphong and the penetration of the North that Kitts was to witness in the spring of 1946. Employing Japanese minesweepers and crews for part of the work, the Navy cleared the Haiphong harbor channel of American mines that had been sown during the war to block Japanese and Vichy French shipping.

  With seized German aircraft and other materiel to add to their
World War II American gear, the French had enough implements of combat to carry them through 1946. Three weeks after the war of no return began in Hanoi that December, the State Department informed the French government that it could buy what arms it wished in the United States, “except in cases which appear to relate to Indochina.” This meant that France could divert all of the weapons and ammunition it still held in Europe and elsewhere to Indochina and replenish stocks with new American armament. In 1947, Truman granted France a $160 million credit to buy vehicles and related equipment explicitly for Indochina. That same year the Marshall Plan began to revive France’s economy with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, making the colonial war less of a strain. The State Department classified all of Ho Chi Minh’s letters and telegrams and the memorandum of his last conversation with a first secretary at the Paris embassy Top Secret and locked them away. They were not to be published until a quarter of a century later in the Pentagon Papers.

  Requirements of high strategy were not the full explanation for American behavior. There were other, less seemly reasons. Yellow and brown men forgot in listening to the rhetoric of American presidents that the United States was a status quo power with a great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests. The emergence of the United States as the world’s leading status quo power with its victory in World War II had enlarged this capacity to rationalize beyond any apparent limits. Hopeful Asians who looked to the United States for protection also did not understand that American attitudes toward them were influenced by a racism so profound that Americans usually did not realize they were applying a racist double standard in Asia. The lyrics of the World War II ditty sung on the assembly lines of America had been: