A COLD WAR

In Hanoi, a new provisional coalition government was established on January 1, 1946. Ho Chi Minh was to be named president and Nguyen Hai Than from the nationalist VNQDD party as vice president. The Vietminh and the Chinese controlled the north. The French controlled the South, with the full support of the Americans and British, and they prepared to send troops to the north as well. On March 6, the Vietminh and the French, under intense Chinese pressure, signed a “Preliminary Convention,” wherein the French recognized the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state” within the Indochinese Federation and French Union. Everyone who met Ho came away impressed with his sincerity, intelligence and commitment to his cause. Perhaps surprisingly, the one person who wasn't supporting Ho was Stalin, even though Ho was leading the first Communist revolution outside of the USSR.

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Peter Dewey was the first of nearly 60,000 Americans to be killed in Vietnam. Truman sells out the Vietnamese to keep De Gaulle happy. And the French arrive back in their old colony.

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After Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in September 1945, the British and Chinese troops arrived in Saigon and Hanoi to disarm the Japanese and prepare the return of the French - and the shooting begins. Some scholars thing that *this* was the beginning of the First Indochina War. Meanwhile, Ho continues to try to get Truman's support. But who will Truman stand behind? A people wanting self-determination? Or the French colonialists?

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* As they grew stronger, Giáp's forces took more territory and captured more towns

* And then on 15 August they heard that the Japanese Emperor had declared his country's unconditional surrender to the allies.

* Unfortunately for Ho and Giap, the U.S. had a new President.

* Truman didn’t care, or maybe even know, about FDR’s plans for Indochina.

* And the French, of course, saw their opportunity to get in good with the new administration.

* And they wanted to make sure they would be able to reclaim colonial control after the war.

* The Truman administration wanted France to help them block Soviet expansion after the war.

* And so they decided to allow France to take back Indochina.

* When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not raise the issue of trusteeship for Indochina.

* On the contrary, U.S. secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured French foreign minister Georges Bidault that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the U.S. government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina."

* A report prepared for Harry Truman on June 2 acknowledged that “independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong” but declared that “the United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina."

* When Truman met Chiang Kai-shek in Washington some weeks later, he dismissed any notion of trusteeship for Indochina.

* So much for The Atlantic Charter.

* Then came the Potsdam conference.

* DeGaulle wasn’t invited, because he annoyed the fuck out of everyone.

* And because he’d sent forces to the old French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, despite the Allies telling him not to.

* And at Potsdam the Vietnamese got well and truly shafted.

* In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divide the country in half at the 16th parallel.

* Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same in the south.

* And they agreed to return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina).

* Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia will once again become French colonies following the removal of the Japanese.

* But in the meantime, the Chinese occupation of the north meant the Vietnamese had time to consolidate their position before the French came back.

* And the fact that China and Britain needed to do the cleaning up of the Japanese reinforced the idea in the minds of the Vietnamese that France was now a second rate power.

* Then, when Japan surrendered in August, it created a power vacuum which the Viet Minh were able to exploit.

* As Ho had always said, they had to wait for the right moment to strike.

* And this was it.

* DeGaulle, in the meantime, made a typically clueless speech.

* On August 15, he sent a message from “the Mother Country to the Indochinese Union,” expressing France’s “joy, solicitude, and gratitude” for Indochina’s “loyalty to France” and her resistance to the Japanese.

* Even as he uttered those words, however, in the jungles of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh readied to make a triumphant entry into Hanoi.

* Their message to the crowds awaiting them: With Japan defeated and France prostrate, the moment of liberation was at hand.

* Hanoi is a city in the north of Vietnam.

* Near the coast.

* The name means “inside the river"

* Hanoi has been inhabited since at least 3000 BCE

* And was the administrative center of the colony of French Indochina.

* The French had built a new part of the city which was in Baron Haussmann, the man who designed modern Paris

* It had wide boulevards, shady trees, an opera house and formal gardens, French shops, sidewalk cafes.

* It was the Paris of Asia

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* Ho believed the army’s job was largely going to be propaganda until the conditions were right for war.

* But he also decided that for propaganda purposes, they had to win a military victory within a month of being established, so on 25 December 1944 Giáp led successful attacks against a couple of French outposts.

* Two French lieutenants were killed and the Vietnamese soldiers in the outposts surrendered.

* The Viet Minh suffered no casualties.

* A few weeks later, Giáp was wounded in the leg when his group attacked another outpost at Dong Mu.

* Through the first half of 1945, Giáp's military position strengthened as the political position of the French and Japanese weakened.

* On 9 March the Japanese removed the titular French regime and placed the emperor Bảo Đại at the head of a puppet state, the Empire of Vietnam.

* Bao Dai was the 13th and final Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling family of Vietnam

* he renamed his country "Vietnam"

* He was 32

* Ho summed up the situation like this: “The Japanese became the real masters. The French became kind of respectable slaves. And upon the Indo-Chinese falls the double honor of being not only slaves to the Japanese, but also the slaves of the slaves—the French.”

* By April the Vietminh had nearly five thousand members, and was able to attack Japanese posts with confidence.

* In one of the ironies of history, between May and August 1945 the United States, keen to support anti-Japanese forces in mainland Asia, actively supplied and trained Giáp and the Viet Minh.

* The U.S. will work with anyone who is the enemy of their enemy.

* Just like they worked with Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

* Captain Charles Fenn of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sought out a meeting with Ho in early 1945.

* He had heard about Ho’s organization and about Ho’s role in helping locate downed American pilots and providing intelligence on Japanese troop movements.

* According to Fenn, Ho saved 17 US pilots before the war ended.

* He also heard that when Ho got out of prison in China, he used to drop by the Office of War Information in Kunming in Southern China to read Time Magazine.

* Ho was still hoping to get the support of the US.

* He believed they would be even more eager than the Soviets to help him get rid of the colonialists.

* After their first meeting in March 45, Fenn wrote the following description of the meeting in his diary:

* Ho came along with a younger man named Fam. Ho wasn’t what I expected. In the first place he isn’t really “old”: his silvery wisp of beard suggests age, but his face is vigorous and his eyes bright and gleaming. We spoke in French. It seems he has already met Hall, Blass, and de Sibour [OSS officers in Kunming], but got nowhere with any of them. I asked him what he had wanted of them. He said—only recognition of his group (called Vietminh League or League for Independence). I had vaguely heard of this as being communist, and asked him about it. Ho said that the French call all Annamites communists who want independence. I told him about our work and asked whether he’d like to help us. He said they might be able to but had no radio operators nor of course any equipment. We discussed taking in a radio and generator and an operator. Ho said a generator would make too much noise—the Japs were always around. Couldn’t we use the type of set with battery, such as the Chinese use? I explained they were too weak for distant operation, especially when the batteries run down. I asked him what he’d want in return for helping us. Arms and medicines, he said. I told him the arms would be difficult, because of the French. We discussed the problem of the French. Ho insisted that the Independence League are only anti-Jap. I was impressed by his clear-cut talk; Buddha-like composure, e

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* Welcome to #100!

* And we are still talking about 1944!

* When we finished last time, Ho Chi Minh was making his way to the Red River Delta.

* The Japanese have chased the French out of Vietnam and didn’t bother to protect the northern regions.

* So Ho and the ICP are getting ready to make their move.

* Surprisingly, they talk about a “post coup euphoria”.

* Apparently the Vietnamese were so happy to see the end of the French, they were happy to replace them with the Japanese.

* They realised the Japanese were probably going to lose the war, which is a good thing for the Vietnamese.

* In October 1944, Ho wrote a “Letter to All Our Compatriots,” in which he analyzed the current situation and said “the opportunity for our people’s liberation is only in a year or a year and a half. The time approaches. We must act quickly!”

* So the ICP decided to start with introducing the Viet Minh flag and doctrine to the people.

* And preparing themselves for a general uprising once the Japanese had been defeated by the Allies.

* Which even THEY knew was going to happen sooner or later.

* And the Viet Minh would be the force greeting the Allies when they came to Vietnam.

* They had already started to build connections with the Americans.

* On November 11, 1944, a U.S. reconnaissance plane piloted by Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw had engine trouble while flying over the mountains along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.

* Shaw was able to parachute to safety, but was spotted by French authorities stationed in the vicinity, and patrols were sent to locate him.

* But Members of a local Vietminh unit got to him first, and they decided to deliver him to Ho.

* For the next several days, the Vietminh troops led him over mountains and jungle trails toward Pac Bo, the jungle location of Ho’s HQ cave, walking at night and resting during the day in caves to avoid the enemy.

* In the end, it took almost a month to cover a distance of only forty miles.

* None of Shaw’s escorts had been able to communicate with him

* according to his own account, they communicated only when he said “Vietminh! Vietminh!” and the Vietnamese responded, “America! Roosevelt!”

* but when he arrived at Pac Bo, Ho greeted him in English: “How do you do, pilot! Where are you from?”

* Shaw was reportedly so excited that he hugged Ho and later said to him, “When I heard your voice, I felt as if I were hearing the voice of my father in the United States.”

* Despite the fact that Wilson ignored his attempts to get the League of Nations to address Vietnam back in 1919, Ho was still hopeful that they would come to his aid.

* He had probably read about FDR’s position on Indochina.

* For example, he had said “France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”

* Another thing that helped the VM was the famine of 1944-45.

* The northern regions of the country had relied on rice to be shipped from the south.

* But then in 1944, a combination of French and Japanese policies, typhoons, drought, insect plagues, and Allied bombings, meant the south couldn’t produce enough rice for the country.

* The Japanese had also mandated shipments of rice to Japan

* and they ordered farmers in the north to shift their crops from rice to oil seeds, peanuts, cotton, and jute.

* Do you know what jute is?

* I had to look it up.

* plant or fiber that is used to make burlap, hessian or gunny cloth.

* The French and the Japanese, like the British in India, stockpiled rice for themselves while the native population starved.

* In 1944 when US bombing cut off northern supplies of coal to Saigon, the French and Japanese used rice and maize as fuel for power stations.

* The French authorities refused to reduce taxes or to increase the price of obligator

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* On December 7 1941, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbour.

* And the world celebrated.

* As De Gaulle said “that’s it, the war’s over."

* He was totally confident in U.S. superiority.

* He must have been part American.

* Unfortunately FDR’s confidence in de Gaulle was much lower.

* He hated him.

* And the more powerful de Gaulle became, the less sure FDR was that the French should get their colonies back after the war.

* But if Indochina and potentially other colonies should not be returned to the colonial powers after the war, what should happen to them?

* Roosevelt proposed a trusteeship formula by which the colonies would be raised to independence through several stages.

* Those not ready for independence—which in FDR’s view included all of France’s possessions—would be placed under a nonexploitive international trusteeship formed by the United Nations.

* In laying out this plan to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March 1943, the president singled out Indochina as an area that should be controlled by this new system.

* Eden, who would end up playing a huge role in Britain’s Indochina policy for the next dozen years, wondered outlaid whether FDR was being too harsh on the French.

* FDR just ignored him and said that France should be prepared to place part of her overseas territory under the authority of the United Nations.

* Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the man who wrote the original draft of the UN charter, Mr Ol’ Black Threesome himself, asked "But what about the American pledges to restore to France her possessions?"

* Roosevelt replied that those pledges applied only to North Africa.

* Sumner thought “hmmmm I bet there’s a lot of blacks in North Africa…."

* FDR’s trusteeship sounded a lot of like Wilson’s mandate system that divided up the Middle East after WWI.

* But this was going to be totally different.

* Because it had a different name.

* The way he saw it, the enforcement mechanism would be a greater degree of international accountability.

* As before, the core principle was that a colonial territory is not the exclusive preserve of the power that controls it but constitutes a “sacred trust” over which the international community has certain responsibilities.

* Eden knew that this was old wine in new bottles, and he didn’t like the taste.

* He and others in the Foreign Office suspected the Americans of seeking to use trusteeships to their own economic advantage—the “international supervision of colonies” would simply be a smoke screen by which America could facilitate access to the economic resources of the colonies and spread her influence globally.

* And the British didn’t like the sound of “international supervision”, especially of their own colonies.

* He suggested other countries would, at most, had an advisory capacity.

* FDR though insisted that it be an international trusteeship.

* So the Brits just changed the subject, talked about black threesomes, and that was that.

* So FDR went to Cairo for his only wartime meeting with Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China’s Kuomintang nationalist government.

* FDR wanted Chiang on board with his trusteeship program.

* But Chiang resisted, expressing a preference for outright independence for Indochina and other Asian colonies.

* Probably because it would make them easier for him to take over.

* FDR tried to sweeten the deal by saying he supported the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule.

* So Chiang said “go tell Winny The Poo that, then come back and talk to me about Indochina."

* Meanwhile, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong, who had been waging an intermittent struggle against Chiang’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government since

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* Ho’s speech to the French socialist congress in 1920 was 12 minutes long and delivered without notes.

* It got some applause but that was about it.

* He realised that French socialists were more worried about affairs at home than they were about colonialism in a distant land.

* When a group of socialists broke off to form the French Communist Party, Ho went with them.

* He had read Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” a document that attracted him as a means of liberating Vietnam and other oppressed countries from colonial rule.

* Other Marxist writers whose work he knew seemed concerned only with how to achieve a classless utopia.

* Only Lenin spoke powerfully about the connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the potential for nationalist movements in Africa and Asia.

* Only Lenin offered a cogent explanation for colonialist rule and a viable blueprint for national liberation and for modernizing a poor agricultural society such as Vietnam’s.

* Lenin’s message was simple and direct.

* In their struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in advanced industrial countries, Communist parties in the West should actively cooperate with nationalist movements in colonial areas in Asia and Africa.

* He understood that Many of these movements were controlled by the native middle class, who, in the long run, were not sympathetic to social revolution.

* But the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

* Who said that first?

* The earliest known expression of this concept is found in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, which dates to around the 4th century BC, while the first recorded use of the current English version came in 1884

* The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror's territory is termed the enemy.

* The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).

* So any alliances with bourgeois nationalist groups should be implemented with care, and only on the condition that local Communist parties maintain their separate identities and freedom of action.

* But given such limitations, Lenin viewed the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa as natural, albeit temporary, allies of the Communists against the common enemy of world imperialism.

* It was the ability of the Western capitalist countries to locate markets and raw materials in underdeveloped countries that sustained the world capitalist system and prevented its ultimate collapse.

* Cut off the tentacles of colonialism in the far-flung colonies, and the system itself could be overthrown.

* Ho Chi Minh assured his Vietnamese allies in Paris that Communism could be applied to Asia,; more than that, it was in keeping with Asian traditions based on Confucian notions of social equality and community.

* On top of that, Lenin had pledged Soviet support, through the Comintern, for nationalist uprisings throughout the colonial world as a key first step in fomenting worldwide socialist revolution against the capitalist order.

* What could be more relevant to Indochina’s situation?

* Years later speaking of Lenin’s pamphlet, he said “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me. I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’ ”

* Ho stayed in Paris for a few years - writing plays, writing articles for many magazines, reading victor Hugo and Voltaire and Shakespeare.

* Then he finally came to the conclusion that the French Communists cared for the plight of the Vietnamese only slightly more than the other French socialists, so in 1923 he moved to Moscow, hoping to meet Lenin.

* U

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In 1919 a 29 year old Vietnamese man wrote a list of demands for political rights for his people to present to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Nobody paid him any attention. His name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He devoted the rest of his life to achieving those demands. History remembers him as HO CHI MINH.

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* America’s approach to providing financial aid wasn’t popular with some of their allies either.

* Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, resented American dollar diplomacy, in particular the linking of desperately needed financial assistance to London’s submission on political matters central to British sovereignty.

* The American loan agreement, signed in December 1945 after nearly four months of difficult and often humiliating negotiations in Washington, required Britain to accept American air and naval bases on British and Commonwealth territory.

* Bevin’s decision to support the manufacture of British nuclear weapons was driven not by a German or Soviet threat, but by his belief that the country “could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of the new development.”

* So, in other words - he wanted the UK to have nuclear powers to defend themselves against America.

* Britain, as Bevin saw his country, was “the last bastion of social democracy,” standing against both “the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.”

* This is coming from a country that, until recently, had imperial control over 25% of the world.

* Mmmmm smell that social democracy.

* Another recent ally was also suspicious.

* Russia.

* The Kremlin was receiving a constant flow of intelligence from highly placed British sources—among whom Guy Burgess at the Foreign Office in London and Donald Maclean at the British embassy in Washington.

* Maclean, who had access to all of the embassy’s classified cable traffic, was reporting that “the goal of the Marshall Plan was to ensure American economic domination of Europe.”

* The spies also warned Stalin that the Brits and Americans were getting ready to announce that they were going to renege on the Yalta agreement regarding reparations.

* They were going to cut off German reparations to the USSR, which at the time was the Soviet’s only source of foreign income.

* Instead, they were going to re-build Germany.

* Well the parts under their control, anyway.

* And the Marshall Plan aid was to be implemented outside the United Nations framework, because they wanted some of it to go to Germany - and Germany was not a member of the U.N.

* And the Soviets needed the German money and goods to finance their efforts to control Eastern Europe.

* And - in the early stages, the ERP funds were going to be offered to Eastern European countries and even the U.S.S.R.

* The United States offered immense grants of cash and material aid to all of the European nations, not just those in the West, on the sole condition that the recipient nations agree upon a common economic plan to use these resources.

* Of course, this economic plan had to be based upon market capitalism, a stipulation not mentioned formally in the proposal but obvious nevertheless.

* Eastern European nations that accepted the American offer, as many were initially keen to do, would therefore have become incorporated into the American economic system, gravitating naturally into the U.S. orbit as their material fate became dependent upon American, not Russian, alliance.

* In addition, the terms of the Marshall Plan, when released, as we’ve discussed, gave the Americans a very high degree of say in how the money was spent.

* And it forced the recipients to buy products from American companies.

* And to give up their own funds for the Americans to spend however they saw fit.

* SPECIAL PROVISIONS: The Administrator is authorized to use funds made available to promote an increase in production in participating countries of materials required by the U. S. where there are actual or potential shortages in the U. S.

* This involved strategic goods needed for military purposes, and it prevented recipients from selling these things to Moscow or Eastern European cou

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