by Harper, Tim
Before the Japanese surrendered in August, their last political act was to recognize a more radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the balcony of Hanoi’s baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent invective against the French: ‘They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood… To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.’9 For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power, organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which jostled for power with other armed popular groupings.
The nationalists in Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: ‘You are defeated, now it is our turn to fight the white imperialists.’10 Terauchi refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon’s twin port city, French and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like organization called the Binh Xuyen. Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the Japanese, who held power. Inside Cholon, the large French population was restive. Colonel Jean Cédile had parachuted into the country and represented Free French authority until the arrival of a French commissioner. He established strained relations with the Viet Minh authority, which was itself split between moderates who were prepared to co-operate and radicals who wanted an immediate attack on the returning colonialists. When the surrendered Japanese representatives visited the British headquarters in Rangoon in late August they said frankly that they could not control the population of southern Vietnam.
Into this minefield moved General Gracey’s 20th Indian Division, a crack unit of the 14th Army, with some trepidation and little knowledge. French Indo-China had never figured strongly in the British mental map of the East, even though it adjoined Burma and Malaya and was home to substantial numbers of Indians and the same southern Chinese communities who traded in Singapore and Rangoon. British minutes of 1945 waffled about the ‘Annamite character’ with its ‘ceremoniousness’ and ‘veneration for age’.11 Nor, apparently, were the British very interested in replacing these comfortable stereotypes with more solid information about the roots and nature of Vietnamese identity. Earlier in the year Paul Mus, the soldier sociologist, had been parachuted into Vietnam in an extension of Force 136 activities. In a rice field he had a sudden vision of a resurgent Vietnam in which Ho Chi Minh, bearded father of his people, appeared to him as a true representative of Vietnam’s ancient culture and long tradition of independence. Mus seemed to have understood before many of his compatriots that the Japanese had destroyed the illusion of French power and that it could never be repaired. He prepared an eloquent sociological minute on the issue for a British general in Calcutta. The latter dismissed it brusquely as ‘nothing important, just ideas!’12 The British therefore entered the country with fixed assumptions and simple tasks in mind. Their first objective was to secure Japanese forces attached to Count Terauchi’s Southern Army HQ in Singapore. They had to release Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. They had to arrest ‘black’ and ‘grey’ Japanese ‘war criminals’ and notorious French Vichy collaborators including local mayors, merchants and purchasing agents. They were to maintain the ‘writ of law’ in the south and this quite soon came to be seen as a French writ, not a Vietnamese one. This whole operation was to be carried out in isolation from events in Hanoi and the north where Chiang’s forces and their American advisers were much more inclined to respect the authority of Ho and the Viet Minh.
The first of General Gracey’s troops to arrive from Rangoon was a detachment of Gurkhas. They were accompanied to Saigon by a Polish photojournalist, Germaine Krull. She contrasted the banners welcoming the Allies, but pointedly not the French, with the empty streets where ‘a few sullen, stormy-eyed Chinese and Annamites [Vietnamese]’ watched them furtively. The French population mobbed them, seeking news of France. They had been out of touch for four years and reported that since March relations with the local population had become even worse. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this Annamite trash?’ someone asked.13 The Japanese still maintained the fragile truce. The 14th Army was well aware that the Japanese in French Indo-China did not regard themselves as a defeated army, even though they had received a direct order from the emperor to surrender unconditionally. As in Burma immediately after the dropping of the bomb, some local resistance was expected from ‘dissident units or individuals’.
One of Gracey’s first orders was to stop Japanese soldiers from wandering around in search of entertainment in the port city of Cholon as they had been wont to do. On the other hand, these were ‘surrendered personnel’ and not prisoners of war. As such they were to keep their own officers. The British took this point seriously. It was made quite clear that Japanese commanders from Count Terauchi downwards should maintain strict discipline. They were expected to provide men for ‘labour tasks such as reconstruction, rehabilitation and general maintenance, as required by commanders’.14 They became in effect a huge coolie labour force. This was the reality of total defeat. Later, they were again required to risk their lives as frontline troops when the British war with the Viet Minh broke out. British commanders were advised to tell their forces to hold the Japanese at arm’s length. There was to be no camaraderie, drinking sessions or musing over the events of the Burma campaign. The Japanese were a defeated enemy and were to be constantly reminded of this until they were sent back to Japan at the expense of the Japanese taxpayer. All the same, a degree of tacit co-operation took place between British, Indians and Japanese, occasionally directed against the French. The Japanese did not regard the French as victors in war and ‘viewed them with veiled contempt’. In one incident Major Hagimura, a Japanese officer in control of medical stores, gleefully apprised his British opposite number that a French officer had come in search of stores: ‘French officer look stores. No authority. Me throw officer out.’15 Despite the British order against fraternization, there were cases where officers swapped memories of the great battles at Imphal and Kohima in the previous year.
The trouble the British expected from the Japanese or the French never came. Instead, it was the Vietnamese who caused them grief. The situation deteriorated even before Gracey had got much of his force on the ground. On 2 September the Viet Minh hopefully celebrated Independence Day. People listened to Ho’s speeches from the north and marched proudly down Paris Commune Street in Saigon. Suddenly shots rang out. The Vietnamese were convinced that French agents provocateurs had fired into the crowd.16 Whatever the truth, Vietnamese radicals beat up many French people in retaliation. Vietnamese wives or mistresses of Frenchmen were also targeted: ‘the enemy was yesterday’s houseboy and coolie seeking revenge on his former masters’.17 A French professor who had once sympathized with Vietnamese aspirations told Krull that his domestic servant had suddenly hit him over the head with a stick: ‘I would never have believed it possible. I can understand revenge, but not this blind, wild fury,’ he said.18 There was a serious riot in Rue Catinat at the elegant heart of Saigon. The head of the Viet Minh police tried to calm the situation by arresting people he deemed troublemakers, such as Trotskyites or members of the Cao Dai and other armed religious sects. But the French settlers were already d
angerously on edge.
When Gracey’s main force arrived the city was draped with nationalist banners proclaiming ‘Welcome British and Americans, but we have no room for the French’.19 On 17 September the Viet Minh closed down Saigon and Cholon with a strike. This was an impolitic move since it gave the green light to bandit elements in Cholon to stage further attacks on French property. Gracey bluntly declared that the ‘Annamite government was a direct threat to law and order through its armed Police Gendarmerie and its armed Guard Civile’. On 21 September he issued a draconian declaration of martial law, warning wrongdoers that they would be ‘summarily shot’. This applied not simply to Saigon but to the whole of southern Indo-China. Mountbatten was especially shocked by its harshness. Gracey also closed down the Vietnamese press, which he believed was being stirred up by communists, announcing that ‘all newspapers at present published in Saigon–Cholon in any language will be suspended immediately’. This was more drastic than the press restrictions imposed on frontier areas in India at the height of the war. It grated with the many European and American journalists in Asia who had been under the impression that the war had been fought for democracy and free speech.20
The Viet Minh were enraged, rightly feeling that they had lost everything gained over the previous months and that their legitimate authority was being swept aside. They immediately made plans for armed resistance. But Gracey outmanoeuvred them. On the prompting of Jean Cédile, the Free French representative, he surreptitiously armed more than a thousand French POWs and internees and stood back while they staged a coup against the Viet Minh People’s Committee. On Sunday 23 September 1945 the French suddenly moved. Vietnamese guards were shot, committee members were imprisoned and some were hanged. Many nationalists were savagely beaten, while one French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in mainland France. Germaine Krull was disgusted by the violence of the disorderly mob of non-uniformed French soldiers who ‘wandered through the streets as if celebrating 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their lips’.21 On Rue Catinat she ‘saw soldiers driving before them a group of Annamites bound, slave-fashion to a long rope. Women spat in their faces. They were on the verge of being lynched.’22 This meant war, she thought.
The violence achieved little other than to inflame the situation. Cholon witnessed a counter-massacre of French residents and looting of their businesses by the bandit Bin Xuyen. At least 150 French men, women and children were brutally murdered there and in Saigon, setting in train a pattern of vicious French revenge. A British journalist reported that the terrified French population of one part of Saigon retreated to the Continental Palace Hotel as sniper bullets flew through the streets. The Vietnamese cooks and servants had run away so some Dutch former POWs, who had been imprisoned in Saigon by the Japanese, undertook to give the refugees a meal: ‘Hot soup and stew was provided for hundreds of people in the hotel. As there was no light except a few candles the scene with crashing rain outside was ghastly and rather dramatic.’23 Soon French, Indian, British and Viet Minh forces were engaged in scattered firefights across southern Indo-China. Still weak in numbers, the British rearmed and deployed their erstwhile enemies, the Japanese, against what most Vietnamese saw as the legitimate forces of a national government. General Philippe Leclerc, the French commander, wired his government that ‘any signs of weakness or lack of agreement [among the Allies] would play the game of the Japanese and lead to grave consequences for the future of the white races in Asia’.24 Leclerc was the tough Free French general who had liberated Paris from the Nazis along with General de Gaulle the previous year. Leclerc and other French officers believed that the Japanese were still surreptitiously aiding the Viet Minh. Though there is little evidence that this represented any kind of policy of Terauchi or his commanders, some Japanese deserters were probably fighting alongside the Vietnamese.25
Fighting went on until early in the new year of 1946, by which time most Viet Minh resistance in the south had been driven underground. There were several attempts at negotiation and several truces, all of which broke down. One of the first was made by the irrepressible Tom Driberg, who decided to spend a weekend in Saigon before flying back to Britain for the new parliamentary session. He quickly sized up the situation. The French, he wrote in Reynolds News, had behaved with ‘maximum ineptitude and considerable cruelty’.26 Not only had their municipal police fired on the local population amid ‘disgraceful scenes of vengeance against helpless Annamites’, but ‘equally trigger-happy French degenerates haunt the opium dens’. Driberg later boasted that he had nearly prevented the Vietnam War. What he had actually done was to use his old London communist connections to try to arrange a meeting between the British authorities and the Viet Minh. Driberg had written to Mountbatten about this but the letter had reached South East Asia Command in Singapore only after Mountbatten had left for London. Driberg was convinced that Gracey had deliberately held it back.27 Over the next two years Driberg continued to argue the case of the Vietnamese nationalists in Parliament, in the press and even in Paris.28 Through Vietnamese connections in Paris he contacted Ho Chi Minh. But he could do little to influence events.
Later attempts by the British to end the fighting were equally unsuccessful. On 10 October, for instance, Gracey and his commanders attempted to explain themselves to Dr Pham Ngoc Thach and ‘Mr Kien Cong Cung’, who called themselves the ‘heads of the civilian resistance’. ‘The British have no interest in the politics of the country as between you and the French,’ Gracey stated. But he went on to threaten the rebels with ‘armed cars, guns, mortars and aircraft’, adding that the British troops ‘are today the finest trained troops in the world… You are fools if you think your troops can oppose them successfully.’29 In response ‘the Annamites said (with some justification) that, although we say we have no political interest in this country and are impartial, we are in fact being used to cover the concentration of large French forces’. The next day a Viet Minh spokesman said that the nationalists had no wish to impede the British in their laudable aim of disarming and repatriating the Japanese. ‘Our only purpose,’ he added, ‘is to forbid French people or soldiers to get out of the region of Saigon or Cholon. So we beg you not to mix in your army any French soldiers, who after returning back to your bases, would occupy by force our towns and villages, as they did some days back in Saigon.’
On this occasion, Gracey claimed that the Viet Minh broke the truce. They staged marches and ‘PT [Physical Training] parades’ in the city. He admitted that the demonstrations were peaceful and that when they encountered massed British forces the demonstrators did little more than salute and turn about. What really concerned him was the possibility that armed insurgents were moving back into the city under the cover of the civilians who were slowly returning from their villages following the panic induced by the French coup. Gracey’s letters give the impression that, while these events were unfolding, he was concerned above all with the lives of his own soldiers and then with the security of the European population of the city. These practical concerns apparently drove his actions from the declaration of martial law through to the final withdrawal of the 20th Indian Division in early 1946. But his hard line against the Viet Minh also had a doctrinaire aspect to it and this became clearer as he pondered the operation after it had finished. He saw himself very much as a representative of ‘the Allies’, not just a British commander, and ‘the Allies include the French’, as he told the Viet Minh. A new France ‘had fought gloriously to free their own country’ and this was unknown to the ‘Annamites’. Indo-China was without ‘legal writ’ and the only legality at hand was that of the French. He considered the extremist and hooligan reaction sparked off by Viet Minh demonstrations as barbaric and was soon asking for permission to ‘bump off’ – after summary trials – the perpetrators of ‘flagrant’ cases of murder.30 He was also enraged that Hanoi Radio was broadcasting more and more an
ti-British and anti-French propaganda. He tried to get General Wedemeyer, the American commander of the Chinese forces in the northern sector, to have the nuisance stopped.
Mountbatten’s position is clearer than when George Rosie wrote his diatribe in 1970, though his private papers – now open to researchers – are not particularly revealing. Mountbatten was clearly taken aback by Gracey’s declaration of martial law on 21 September, above all by its catch-all character. He also rebuked Gracey for making the proclamation apply to the whole of southern Indo-China and not simply Saigon. He resented the fact that Leclerc had apparently gone back on his personal undertaking to him that he would not attack the Viet Minh without authority. Mountbatten was, however, a realist. He had always given his local commanders such as Slim and Leese a good deal of room for manoeuvre. He was aware that the 20th Indian Division was heavily outnumbered by resentful French and Japanese. To intervene and attempt to rein in Gracey might actually result in a sharp deterioration of the situation on the ground and lead to the loss of British and Indian lives, and the tying down of soldiers who were badly needed in Malaya, Borneo and India itself. Ultimately, he resolved, ‘since you have taken this line and you are the man on the spot, it is my intention to support you’.31 Moreover, Mountbatten had his doubts about the Viet Minh. They were probably communists, he thought, stirred up by the Chinese. They had been put in power by the Chinese nationalists and Japanese respectively. They had not fought against the latter as had the Burma Independence Army. There was, at least in southern Vietnam, no Aung San equivalent, only a group of distant and inscrutable politicians whom the French regarded as bandits.