Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Sometimes Vien would sing in a deep, sad voice, perhaps about his mother who had died in the previous year. Then, as a special treat, he led his small followers down to the riverbank and played in succession the bugle calls of the army, ‘some that made our hearts thrill to the notes, others so sad that they made one want to cry’. Then came a day in 1951 when Hai’s family moved to Hanoi, taking all their possessions aboard the aged district bus. Vien was commanding a picket by the roadside, and gave him parting gifts of two pieces of chewing gum and a gentle tug on the ear. As the bus pulled away, the boy saw him waving through a cloud of red dust behind, as houses, paddy fields, bamboo groves and da trees at the end of the village disappeared from his own life forever. Hai embarked upon a succession of journeys, exiles, a few joys and many misfortunes, such as were the shared experience of the Vietnamese people for half a century. Though he himself became a soldier, never again would warriors be imbued in his eyes with the glow of romance conferred upon them by Sergeant Vien and his bugle.

  Vietnam endured a thousand years of rule by the Chinese before their expulsion in 938; they returned several times, and were finally driven out only in 1426. Thereafter the country enjoyed independence, though by no means stability or good governance. Rival dynasties controlled the north and south respectively until 1802, when Emperor Gia Long imposed unity, ruling from the city of Hue. During the late-nineteenth-century scramble for empires, France fixed its attentions on Indochina, and by force of arms established a progressive dominance, initially in the south, Cochinchina. In May 1883, when the National Assembly in Paris voted five million francs for an expedition to consolidate the region as a ‘protectorate’, the conservative politician Jules Delafosse proclaimed, ‘Let us, gentlemen, call things by their name. It is not a protectorate that you want, but a possession.’ So it was, of course. The French committed twenty thousand troops to securing Tonkin – northern Vietnam. Achieving this after a year’s hard fighting, they imposed a ruthless governance. While they abolished the old custom of condemning adulteresses to be trampled to death by elephants, the penalty of beheading, formerly imposed only upon thieves, was extended to all who challenged French hegemony. Opium consumption soared after the colonial power opened a Saigon refinery.

  Vietnam comprises 126,000 square miles, a few more than Italy or metropolitan France, most of which are mountainous and shrouded in exotic vegetation, or flatland of extraordinary seasonal wetness and fertility. Almost every visitor who escaped the penance of exertion in the clinging heat was awed by its beauty and penned lyrical descriptions, celebrating views of ‘paddy fields in which water buffalo grazed, almost every one with a white egret perched on its back picking at insects; of vegetation so bright and green that it hurt the eyes; of waits at ferries beside broad rivers the colour of café crème; of gaudy pagodas and wooden homes on stilts, surrounded by dogs and ducks; of the steaming atmosphere, the ripe smells and water everywhere, giving a sense of fecundity, of nature spawning, ripening and on heat’.

  Westerners rejoiced in the sublimity of Vietnamese weaving skills, manifested in thatch, basketwork and conical coolie hats. They peered curiously at the exotic dead creatures purveyed on street stalls, the profusion of fortune-tellers, dice-throwers, spices. Jungle butterflies grew as big as bats. There was a glorious water culture: sampans glided up rivers and canals where carts could not creak; fishing was fun, as well as a prolific source of food. Visitors described cockfights and gambling hells; glittering ceremonies in the imperial palace at Hue where the French indulged a puppet emperor who held banquets surmounted by roast peacock, said to taste like tough veal. The coastal region around the old capital was regarded with considerable suspicion by inhabitants of the Mekong delta, who said ‘The mountains are not high nor the rivers very deep, but the men are deceitful and the women over-sexed.’ A Westerner who loved the Vietnamese wrote that they spoke in cadences that made them ‘sound to me like charming ducks: their monosyllabic language comes out in a series of sweet quacks’.

  Among fifty ethnic groups, the wildest tribes shared the wildest regions of Annam with tigers, panthers, elephants, bear, boar and a few Asian rhino. Two great deltas, those of the Red River in the north and the Mekong in the south, yielded prodigious agricultural produce. A boom in the rice export trade prompted a French land-grab at the expense of native peoples, matching those conducted by Americans in their own West and by British colonists across swathes of Africa. The peoples of Indochina were taxed to fund their own subjection, and by the 1930s 70 per cent of peasants were reduced to tenantry or smallholding. French planters – a few hundred families who accumulated colonial Indochina’s great fortunes – adopted in the twentieth century an uncompromising attitude towards the Vietnamese, in the words of a British visitor ‘identical with that of any of the old slave-owning aristocracies. It is one of utter contempt; without which effective exploitation would probably be impossible.’

  French plantocrats, rubber magnates and coal-mine owners were indulged in institutionalised cruelty towards their workforces by the colonial administration, which also imposed an artificially high exchange rate for the franc against the local piaster that further enriched the Paris exchequer. The invaders were successful in imbuing many Vietnamese with their language, education and culture. A schoolboy recalled being taught in class that his forebears were Gauls. He learned better only when his father, an NCO in the French army, told him sternly and proudly, ‘Your ancestors were Vietnamese.’ An Australian surgeon wrote of a consciousness, even among relatively humble people, ‘of their long unbroken history and ancient civilization’.

  Their circumstances were slightly better than those of the Congolese ruled by Belgium; somewhat worse than those of Indians under the British. There was a contradiction about the lives of upper- and middle-class Vietnamese. Compulsorily immersed in a European culture and language, they nonetheless saw little of French people outside working hours. Nguyen Duong, born in 1943, grew up with a passion for Tintin and French spy stories. Yet like all Asians, to whom a physical blow is the worst of insults, at his school he recoiled from French teachers’ habitual slapping of dunces. He never knew his parents to entertain a colon family, nor to dine out with such people. Norman Lewis described Saigon as ‘a French town in a hot country. It is as sensible to call it the Paris of the Far East as it would be to call Kingston, Jamaica, the Oxford of the West Indies. Its inspiration has been purely commercial and it is therefore without folly, fervour or much ostentation … Twenty thousand Europeans keep as much as possible to themselves in a few tamarind-shaded streets.’

  Colonial life seemed to most of its beneficiaries infinitely comfortable and agreeable – for a time. Those who lingered too long, however, risked worse diseases than malaria or dysentery: the crippling lassitude of the East, compounded by opium and access to many servants. Old French hands – les anciens d’Indo – spoke of le mal jaune. Mastery did not spare them from the disdain of Indochina’s upper-crust native inhabitants. It was a Vietnamese tradition to blacken teeth with enamel, which caused them to regard white fangs with disdain: an emperor demanded, on receiving a European ambassador, ‘Who is this man with the teeth of a dog?’ Norman Lewis wrote: ‘They are too civilized to spit at the sight of a white man, but they are utterly indifferent … Even the rickshaw coolie, given – to be on the safe side – double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil.’

  Few Vietnamese regarded French rule with equanimity, and local revolts were commonplace. In 1927 the Mekong delta village of Vinh Kim spawned a remarkable band of teenage performers called the United Women’s Troupe, which staged anti-colonialist shows and plays. The 1930s witnessed rural demonstrations, crop-burnings, insurgencies. A relentless debt squeeze caused some peasants to be imprisoned for non-payment of taxes, others to be so harrowed by loan sharks that by 1943 almost half of Vietnam’s land was in the hands of l
ess than 3 per cent of its farmers. The colonial authority was confident that repression was the best medicine. A Vietnamese sûreté officer taunted an arrested revolutionary: ‘How can a grasshopper kick an automobile?’

  Guerrilla and bandit groups nonetheless persisted in the country’s many wildernesses – ‘les grands vides’. On the terrible prison island of Poulo Condore, cells were seldom empty. There was little pretence of due process for Vietnamese consigned there, and the place became known as ‘the revolutionary university’. Many of those who later played prominent roles in the independence struggle served time there. Indeed, the man who became their leader, one of the most famous revolutionaries of the twentieth century, was among the few who did not.

  Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in a central Vietnamese village in 1890. His father had risen from being a mere concubine’s son to mandarin status, but then abandoned the court to become an itinerant teacher. Ho, like Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong and Ngo Dinh Diem later, attended Hue’s influential Quoc Hoc high school, founded in 1896, from which he was expelled in 1908 for revolutionary activity. He cast off family ties, and after a brief period teaching in a village school, in 1911 became a stoker and galley boy aboard a French freighter. For three years he roamed the world, then spent a year in the United States, which fascinated him, before taking a job as an assistant pastry chef in London’s Carlton Hotel. He became increasingly politically active and met nationalists of many hues – Irish, Chinese, Indian. He spoke English and French fluently, together with several Chinese dialects and later Russian.

  In 1919 he drafted an appeal which was delivered to US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace conference, soliciting his support for Vietnamese independence: ‘All subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilization against barbarism.’ He attended the 1920 French socialist congress, at which he delivered a speech that later became famous: ‘It is impossible for me in just a few minutes to rehearse to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina by the bandits of capitalism. There are more prisons than schools … Freedom of the press and opinion does not exist for us … We don’t have the right to emigrate or travel abroad … They do their best to intoxicate us with opium and brutalize us with alcohol. They … massacre many thousands … to defend interests that are not [Vietnamese].’ Ho became a prolific pamphleteer and contributor to left-wing journals, often quoting from Lenin.

  In 1924 he travelled to Moscow, meeting Russia’s new leaders and spending some months at the so-called University of Oriental Workers before moving on to Canton, where he became an interpreter for the Soviet adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. Three years later, after Chiang turned on the communists, Ho fled back to Europe. A French acquaintance described a conversation on a bridge over the Seine, during which the Vietnamese said reflectively, ‘I always thought I would become a scholar or writer, but I’ve become a professional revolutionary. I travel through many countries, but I see nothing. I’m on strict orders, and my itinerary is carefully prescribed, and you cannot deviate from the route, can you?’

  ‘Orders’ from whom? There are many mysteries concerning Ho’s life. He never married, and his emotional needs appear to have been fulfilled by commitment to political struggle. Who funded his global travels? Was he a paid servant of Moscow, or did he merely receive ad-hoc financial assistance from political fellow-travellers? It is unsurprising that he became a communist, because the world’s capitalists were implacably hostile to his purposes. He was less remarkable for his own writing and thinking, which were unoriginal, than for an extraordinary ability to inspire in others faith, loyalty and indeed love. A Vietnamese student wrote of a first meeting with Ho some years later in Paris: ‘He exuded an air of frailty, a sickly pallor. But this only emphasized the imperturbable dignity that enveloped him as though it was a garment. He conveyed a sense of inner strength and generosity of spirit that impacted upon me with the force of a blow.’

  In 1928, Ho appeared in Bangkok, a rendezvous for exiled Indochinese nationalists. The following year he moved to Hong Kong, where he presided over a meeting of leaders of rival Vietnamese factions, held in a football stadium during a match to evade police attention. He persuaded his compatriots to unite under the banner of the Indochinese Communist Party, which in 1931 was formally recognised by the Moscow Comintern. During the years that followed, a series of revolts took place in Vietnam. The French responded with bombings of suspected insurgent villages, and guillotinings of identified leaders. Though Ho was not directly linked to the risings, he was now a wanted man, pursued through the European powers’ colonies. After a series of adventures, he escaped into China by persuading a Hong Kong hospital employee to have him declared dead. Thereafter he commuted between China and Russia, suffering chronic privations and recurrent sicknesses. A French communist agent who met him during his odyssey described Ho as ‘taut and quivering, with only one thought in his head: his country’.

  Early in 1941, after an absence of three decades, he secretly returned to Vietnam, travelling on foot and by sampan, and assuming the pseudonym by which he would become known to history – Ho Chi Minh, or ‘Bringer of Light’. He took up quarters in a cave in the hills of the north, where he met young men who embraced this fifty-year-old as ‘Uncle Ho’, among them such later heroes of the revolution as Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap at first introduced Ho to the little guerrilla group by saying, ‘Comrades, this is an old man, a native of this area, a farmer who loves the revolution.’ But they quickly realised that this was no local, and certainly no farmer. Ho drew maps of Hanoi for those who had never seen it, and advised them to dig latrines. A veteran recalled: ‘We thought to ourselves, “Who is this old man? Of all the things he could tell us, he gives advice about how to take a shit!”’ Nonetheless Ho was readily accepted as leader of the group, and indeed of the new movement, which they called the Vietnam Independence League, shortened to Vietminh. Its leaders did not disguise their own ideological commitment, but only much later did they explicitly avow communism as their only permitted creed.

  Nazi mastery of western Europe drastically eroded France’s authority in its colonies, and intensified peasant suffering. In Indochina the French requisitioned to meet their own needs such basic commodities as matches, cloth, lamp oil. In the Mekong delta there was a brief 1940 communist-led rising in which several French officials were killed, army posts seized. Rice granaries were occupied and their contents distributed, bridges broken down by insurgents waving hammer-and-sickle flags. The so-called Nam Ky insurrection lasted just ten days, and only a small minority of local people participated, yet it emphasised the rage latent in the countryside.

  From the summer of 1940 onwards, Tokyo exploited its regional dominance to deploy troops in Indochina, first to sever the Western supply route to China, later progressively to establish an occupation, which provoked President Franklin Roosevelt to impose his momentous July 1941 oil embargo. Although the French retained nominal authority, the Japanese thereafter exercised real power. They craved commodities to supply their domestic industries, and insisted that the Vietnamese should curtail rice-growing in favour of cotton and jute. This, together with enforced export of foodstuffs, created increasing hunger among the inhabitants of the richest rice-producing area in South-East Asia.

  In 1944, a drought followed by floods unleashed a vast human tragedy. At least a million Vietnamese, one in ten of Tonkin’s population, perished in a famine as disastrous as the contemporaneous East Bengal disaster in British India. There were credible reports of cannibalism, yet no Frenchman is known to have starved. The famine remained in the memory of many northern Vietnamese as the most dreadful experience of their lives, not excluding subsequent wars. One peasant’s earliest memories of life in a village near Hanoi were of his mother scolding the children if they wasted food: ‘You wouldn’t do that if you remembered 1945.’

  Another peasant described deserted hamlets and
desperate people: ‘Skinny bodies in rags roamed every country road and city street. Then corpses began to appear along roadsides and in pagoda yards, church grounds, marketplaces, city parks, bus and railway stations. Groups of hungry men and women with babies in their arms and other children at their sides invaded every accessible field and garden to search for anything they thought edible: green bananas, cores and bulbs of banana trees, bamboo shoots. The people of my own village had to defend their land by force.’ Oxcarts carried away corpses, to be interred in mass graves. One day his three-year-old sister was eating a rice cake outside their house when an emaciated young man ‘who looked like a ghost in ragged clothes’ sprang forward, snatched the morsel from her hand and darted away.

  In some areas charity food kitchens were established to provide gruel for the starving, and long queues gathered before them. Van Ky, a Tonkin teenager who became a famous Vietminh balladeer, said later: ‘When you opened the front door in the morning, you might see a corpse lying there. If you saw a big flock of crows, that meant a body underneath.’ It is unsurprising that such experience bred revolutionaries, including Ky himself. He was born in 1928 into a peasant family, but grew up in the unusually literate household of an uncle, from whom he learned La Fontaine’s fables and performed little plays based on them. He read such books as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. By the age of fifteen, Ky was distributing leaflets for the communists. He became chief of his local secret militia, serving until it was decided that he had artistic talents more useful to the Revolution than his military ones. Communist propagandists exploited music to great effect, resetting traditional folk songs to fit their own message, delivered by travelling troupes. Ky later wrote a ballad entitled ‘Hy Vong’ – ‘Hope’ – which became one of the favourite tunes of the Resistance. His experience demonstrated a notable aspect of the independence struggle: that a respect for French culture was no barrier to a determination to see France quit Vietnam.