Embers of War (20 page)

Sainteny’s frustration built as his team’s isolation continued, but he took comfort from the boisterous greeting he received whenever he came into contact with French civilians, who at this point numbered about twenty thousand in Hanoi. Though his relationship with Patti was marked by mutual suspicion, the two got on reasonably well and dined together on several occasions in those early days. They had, it turned out, a good deal in common. Both were in their thirties; both were veterans of their country’s intelligence services. Patti had fought in Europe alongside agents of the Deuxième Bureau (French military intelligence) as well as Britain’s MI5 and still felt, he later remarked, “a certain amount of allegiance.”
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On one occasion, Patti and Sainteny had just completed lunch at the Governor-General’s Palace when they saw three young French women walking by on the street, one dressed in blue, the middle one in white, and the other one in red. Tears welled up in Sainteny’s eyes at this imaginative act of patriotism, so similar in spirit to what he recalled from the German occupation in France. Patti commented that this was probably the first French flag they had seen since arriving in Hanoi, to which the Frenchman shot back, “Yes, but I give you my word that it is not the last.”
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The problem for France was how to get sizable numbers of French forces to Indochina in short order. The Pacific War had in effect ended too quickly, before Paris could dispatch forces to the region. A mere 979 men and seventeen vehicles were available in Ceylon (where the Fifth Colonial Regiment was stationed) for inclusion with the British and Indian contingents that would take charge of disarming the Japanese south of the sixteenth parallel. Another 2,300 in Madagascar could be ready to board ships within two weeks, while the 17,000-strong Ninth Colonial Division in France could embark by the middle of September. General Leclerc, newly arrived in Ceylon, requested an increase in the number of American-made C-47 Dakota transport aircraft allocated to Indochina. Without them, he said, or without shallow-draft landing craft, there would be no way to get French troops into Indochina north of the sixteenth parallel. The request was granted, and Paris also got permission from Washington to use Lend-Lease supplies, originally earmarked for operations against Germany and Japan, to equip the troops bound for Indochina.
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The fact remained, though, that France would not be able to exert meaningful influence on the ground in Indochina for several more weeks, during which time she would be at the mercy of the arriving Chinese and British forces. In the final days of August, the first advance units of a 150,000-strong Chinese army under Lu Han, a warlord of Yunnan province, crossed the frontier into Indochina. With them were an American military advisory team, under the command of Brigadier General Philip E. Gallagher. On September 9, the main force entered Hanoi. They looked haggard and malnourished, their yellow uniforms tattered—a marked contrast to the spit and polish of the Japanese troops. One Vietnamese observer of the scene that day recalled: “The Chinese looked as if they would steal anything not tied down. Almost immediately, they began to live up to the worst suspicions of them. They settled into the country like a swarm of locusts, grabbing up everything in sight.” Said Archimedes Patti: “Sidewalks, doorways, and side streets were cluttered with [Chinese] soldiers and camp followers hovering over bundles of personal belongings, with household furnishings and military gear strewn everywhere. Many had staked claims in private gardens and courtyards and settled down to brew tea, do household chores and start the laundry.”
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A detachment of about fifty Chinese soldiers marched into the home of Duong Van Mai Elliott’s family. “They herded us upstairs and took over the ground floor,” she remembered. “The peasant soldiers were not used to urban amenities and at first [her brother] Giu had to teach them how to turn on the electric lights and ceiling fans. They were so pleased that they would stand by the switches, turning them off and on and staring in wonder at the effect.”
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For Ho Chi Minh, the ragged appearance of the Chinese troops was less important than their ultimate aims. Officially they were there, as per the Potsdam agreement, to oversee the surrender of Japanese troops and preserve law and order north of the sixteenth parallel until a new administration could assume control. But what kind of government did Chongqing want? Over the years, Chiang Kai-shek had voiced periodic support for Roosevelt’s trusteeship idea and had offered assurances that China had no desire to seize Indochina for herself. Ho and other Viet Minh leaders, however, had little doubt that Chongqing would try to manipulate events to its own advantage, which could involve seeking a compromise with Paris. Viet Minh concerns on this score increased when Chinese foreign minister T. V. Soong told French authorities in August and again in September that his government did not oppose a French return to the peninsula.
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To complicate matters further for Ho and his allies, the Chinese troops were accompanied by sizable numbers of Vietnamese nationalists who had spent the war years in China and now were returning home intent on playing key political roles. None posed an immediate threat to the Viet Minh’s position in Tonkin—except in a few provincial towns in the north—but their mere presence added to Ho’s conviction that he had to move gingerly vis-à-vis the Chinese occupation authorities. He accordingly told Lu Han’s political adviser, as well as General Gallagher, that his government would cooperate with the Chinese, and he instructed Giap to place his small band of armed troops in such a way as to avoid a confrontation with the occupying force. He also dropped the emotive title of Liberation Army in favor of the blander National Guard (Ve Quoc Doan).
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Nor did Ho raise objections when Lu Han, upon arriving in Hanoi on September 14, unceremoniously took over the Governor-General’s Palace from the Sainteny team. (The Frenchmen, embarrassed and angry in equal measure, were forced to relocate to a much smaller villa downtown.) Lu Han responded by acting cordially, for the most part, toward Viet Minh officials and instructing the Vietnamese nationalists in his entourage to do the same. As the weeks passed, his occupation policy revealed a strong anti-French bias. French
colons
in Hanoi were stripped of their weapons while Vietnamese were allowed to keep theirs, and government buildings, communications, and almost the whole of the civil administration were kept in Viet Minh hands. The Chinese rejected repeated French requests to bring in French troops and administrators.
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V

HAD THIS SITUATION PREVAILED IN THE WHOLE OF VIETNAM, THE
long and bloody struggle for Vietnam, so injurious to all who took part, might have been over before it began. In the southern part of the country, however, which the Chinese soldiers did not enter, the situation was more fluid and much more favorable to French prospects. At the moment of Ho’s proclamation of independence in Hanoi, Cochin China was fractious, divided. A multiplicity of rival political and religious groups, some of which had collaborated with the Japanese or the French, competed with the Viet Minh for supremacy. In the aftermath of the abortive revolt in 1940, the French had decimated the Communists in the south, who were still in the process of rebuilding at the time of Japan’s surrender. They faced stiff challenges from the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects (the former an exotic mixture of spiritualism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Catholicism; the latter a fundamentalist Buddhist splinter group) that had achieved popularity in various parts of Cochin China since the prewar period. And they had to confront several Trotskyite groups, who had a sizable presence in the south. As well, the Viet Minh found few supporters among those southerners who had profiteered in the period of colonial rule and who planned for a return of the French.
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Saigon, as always, was the locus of the agitation. Under the French it had become a metropolis, much bigger than Hanoi, with a population in mid-1945 of well over a million, including the twin ethnic Chinese city of Cholon. Most Western visitors, however, saw only the tightly confined center of Saigon, which seemed to many a piece of France transplanted into a tropical and Far Eastern setting, complete with handsome boulevards and squares, cream-colored rococo administration buildings, gracious villas, and intimate sidewalk cafés and pâtisseries. Here many of the tree-lined streets were named for Frenchmen who had helped conquer Cochin China (Bonard, Charner, de la Grandière) or for famous World War I battles (La Marne, Verdun, De La Somme). And here stood Notre Dame Cathedral, built by the French in 1883 in neo-Romanesque style and featuring modest twin steeples. A statue of the Virgin Mary graced the entrance to the church, looking down rue Catinat (now Dong Khoi), Saigon’s legendary thoroughfare bearing the name of the French battleship that had steamed into Tourane (Da Nang) harbor in 1856 and opened fire on the harbor forts. The commercial stretch of rue Catinat ran no more than three hundred yards and was bounded by two hotels: on one end the Continental and on the other, overlooking the left bank of the dark and sullen Saigon River, the Majestic. In between them were shops displaying perfumes, cheeses, and frogs’ legs from Paris, and innumerable restaurants and bars, many of them packed deep into the night and offering every French dish from crêpes suzette to escargot. In daytime, there was the aroma of freshly baked baguettes and the
maisons de coiffeur
, where French women went to have their hair styled and set—a vain hope in this humid climate.
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Rue Catinat’s reputation had taken hold early. Visiting in 1893, the Frenchman Pierre Barrelon would write of walking down a street “famous for its splendid boutiques, decorated pubs, and unending movement of carriages.… The rue Catinat is remarkably animated.… Here the liveliness is entirely European, and I was going to say Parisian; long before me it has been said Saigon is the ‘Paris of the East.’ ”
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Now, though, fifty-two years later, Saigon and rue Catinat were becoming animated for a different reason. Although an ICP-dominated “Committee of the South,” led by Tran Van Giau, had seized control of the city and other parts of Cochin China, its control was precarious. Until early September, order was maintained, despite grumbling from the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Trotskyites over Tran Van Giau’s decision to negotiate with French representative Jean Cédile (the latter having parachuted into Cochin China on August 22). As the futility of the talks became widely known—the Viet Minh would discuss the country’s future ties to France only on condition that the French first recognize Vietnam’s independence, which Cédile refused to do—the frustration boiled over. French residents, afraid of losing their colonial privileges, braced for a struggle, while political skirmishing among the rival Vietnamese groups increased. In short order, Giau and the committee lost control of events.
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Even worse, they did so precisely at the moment when Allied troops were about to arrive in Saigon. The first contingent of British troops, largely comprising Nepalese Gurkhas and Muslims from the Punjab and Hyderabad in the Twentieth Indian Division, entered the city on September 12. On every street hung large banners: “Vive les Alliés,” “Down with French Imperialism,” “Long Live Liberty and Independence.” The troops’ orders were to disarm the Japanese and to maintain law and order. More broadly, though, British officials, in London as well as in Saigon, saw their task as facilitating a French return. Unlike in the Middle East, where France was a rival to British interests, in Southeast Asia she was a de facto ally, a partner in preserving European colonial control in the region.
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As ever, London strategists had to tread carefully, so as not to offend anticolonial sentiment in the United States or complicate relations with China. “We should avoid at all costs laying ourselves open to the accusation that we are assisting the West to suppress the East,” one junior official observed. “Such an accusation will rise readily to the lips of the Americans and Chinese and would be likely to create an unfavorable impression throughout Asia.” Other British analysts expressed similar concerns. But the course to be traveled was never in doubt. A failure to bolster the French in Vietnam could cause chaos in the country and also spur dissidence in Britain’s possessions—two very frightening prospects indeed. Hence the fundamental British objective: to get French troops into Indochina as quickly as possible, and then withdraw British forces with dispatch.
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The man assigned to this task, Major General Douglas Gracey, commander of the Twentieth, has been described by historians as miscast for his role, in view of his pro-French bias and his paternalistic philosophy that “natives” should not defy Europeans. An unreconstructed colonialist, born in and of the empire, Gracey had spent his whole career with the Indian Army. “The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French,” he said before leaving for Vietnam. “Civil and military control by the French is only a matter of weeks.” But if Gracey was unusual for his forthrightness, his thinking was fully within the mainstream of British official thinking in the period. Thus Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin could tell the Chinese ambassador in September: “We naturally assumed that Indo-China would return to France.” And thus Anthony Eden could recall that “an Anglo-Indian force under General Gracey occupied the southern half of the country until the French were able to resume control.”
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