Embers of War (22 page)

Leclerc himself began to suffer nagging doubts or at least an awareness that the task ahead was complex. He reflected on something Mountbatten had told him in Ceylon, where Leclerc had stopped en route to Indochina: that postwar Asia was very different from the prewar variety, and there was no going back. Leclerc soon came to agree. “One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution. Any hope of imposing such a solution would require a vastly larger French fighting force, which Paris was in no position to provide, now or in the foreseeable future. The task of French forces, therefore, would be to reassert French control and thereby give negotiators a base from which to proceed to a generalized political settlement involving mutual concessions.
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It was a prescient assessment but it fell on deaf ears. As 1945—the year historian David Marr has called the most important in modern Vietnamese history—drew to a close, most French officials concerned with Indochina, far from seeing major obstacles ahead for the objective of reclaiming control of the colony, saw reasons for optimism.
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Didn’t Leclerc’s own actions, after all, show that things were moving in the right direction? His troops had gained control of much of Cochin China and were poised to move north. In Cambodia, meanwhile, French efforts to reestablish authority were proceeding well. Diplomatically too, the signs seemed to point in the right direction and not merely with respect to the welcome support from the British. Negotiations had begun with the Chinese that, French officials hoped, would in short order result in an agreement allowing for the withdrawal of Lu Han’s forces from Tonkin. The Americans, though not to be trusted—in both Paris and Saigon, French observers suspected Washington of seeking to undermine French interests in Indochina—were for the moment sticking to a neutral policy that tilted to France.

More than anything, though, it was the presence of one man, a brand-new arrival in Vietnam, that ensured the failure of any French move to an early political settlement. That was Leclerc’s civilian counterpart, Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, the high commissioner, who like the general had been instructed by de Gaulle to brook no defiance from any Vietnamese and who was determined to live up to that instruction. He was a man of the cloth, a former monk, whose appointment had been criticized by some
colons
on the grounds that as a cleric he might be too liberal, that he might give away the store. They need not have worried. For the high commissioner who set foot in Saigon on October 31, 1945, quickly showed himself to be a warrior monk. His policy decisions in the year that followed would set the conditions and the course for the outbreak of a full-scale war.

CHAPTER 5
THE WARRIOR MONK

H
E WAS BORN IN BREST, IN BRITTANY, ON AUGUST 7, 1889, THE
third of six children of Olivier Thierry d’Argenlieu, an aristocratic naval officer. Following in his father’s career path, the young Georges Thierry entered the École Navale in Brest in 1906 and, upon graduation, followed the typical career of a naval officer. After World War I, however, he resigned his commission at the rank of lieutenant in order to join the Carmelite Order, a Catholic religious body noted for dogmatic severity and strict moral views. D’Argenlieu, known as Father Louis of the Trinity among his brethren, rose rapidly in his calling and by the late 1930s had become the Carmelites’ provincial in France.
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With the outbreak of World War II, he returned to his previous career. Captured by the Germans after the fall of France, he escaped and joined de Gaulle in London in 1940 as a
capitaine de corvette
, later rising to become an admiral and, successively, high commissioner for France in the Pacific, commander in chief of Free French naval forces based in Britain, and assistant chief of the Free French General Staff. D’Argenlieu’s devotion to de Gaulle and Free France puzzled many who saw him as a natural Pétainist, in view of his royalist birth, his Carmelite training, and his adherence to the extreme right political views so favored by French naval men. Whatever its source, his Gaullism was genuine and unshakable, and he took up his new charge with determination, fully sharing the general’s uncompromising ideas about maintaining the empire for the glory of France.
²

Of average height and with a thin, angular face, Thierry d’Argenlieu was fifty-six years old when he arrived in Saigon, on the final day of October 1945, to take up his post as high commissioner for Indochina. He immediately installed himself in the Norodom Palace, symbol of colonial pomp and splendor, and set about meeting his charge from de Gaulle to reestablish French authority. “It is the sacred duty of France to reestablish order, respect for law, freedom to work, and security for all wherever she extends her authority,” he declared at an early point. France, he said, was coming to liberate the Vietnamese. On some occasions in the early weeks, d’Argenlieu sounded notes of conciliation, but over time his pronouncements became harsher, perhaps as a result of pressure placed on him by many
colons
in Saigon—administrators, planters, professionals, military officials—virtually all of whom pushed a hard-line policy. Or perhaps this increased toughness resulted more from the success of Gracey and Leclerc in extending military control over Cochin China in late 1945 and early 1946.
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Whatever the cause, by the early weeks of the new year, the high commissioner had a well-earned reputation for unwavering firmness in his dealings with Vietnamese nationalists. Aloof, haughty, and bitingly sarcastic, he terrified his underlings and was known to reduce bureaucrats to quivering compliance. An autocrat to the core, d’Argenlieu also sought to project an air of mysticism and almost religious veneration. Largely unemotional up to a certain point, he could then launch into passionate oratory and bring himself to tears. His worldview was Manichean, black-and-white with few shades of gray. Good had to prevail over evil. Far-reaching compromise was out of the question. As 1946 progressed, more than a few observers, including some who shared the desire to reclaim French control over Indochina, would comment on this rigidity of mind, this lack of intellectual dexterity. As one wag on his staff quietly put it, d’Argenlieu had “the most brilliant mind of the twelfth century.” The problem was that he was about to be faced with one of the most delicate political and historical problems of the twentieth—decolonization—and he didn’t have the breadth of mind to understand the forces against him.
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This matters enormously in the story of 1946 in Vietnam, because as the year began, Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi had reached a sobering conclusion: He had no option but to seek a negotiated settlement with France. Always conscious, even during the glorious days of August 1945, of the obstacles that lay in the way of real independence for Vietnam, the veteran nationalist knew full well that the first essential task of any revolutionary party is to establish power throughout the country and to create the machinery that will solidify that power and ensure that it is accepted by, if not the whole population, at least the vast majority of it. Equally important, Ho believed, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) had to create her own laws and schedule elections. Hence his government’s early efforts, beginning already in September, to strengthen its position. It moved quickly, for example, to abolish an iniquitous head tax and the land taxes on small landowners, while carefully avoiding a general redistribution of land that might antagonize Vietnamese landlords. Some landholdings of the French, however, along with those of “traitors,” were confiscated and given to landless peasants. Forced labor was outlawed, and the eight-hour workday became law. An ambitious literacy campaign was launched.

ADMIRAL D’ARGENLIEU INSPECTS TROOPS AT SAIGON’S TAN SON NHUT AIRPORT, JUNE 1946.
(photo credit 5.1)

The government also announced that general elections based on universal suffrage would be held, in order to elect a national assembly that would be the supreme political body representing the will of the people. Women candidates would be encouraged to run. To attract moderate elements and to avoid alienating the Chinese occupying army, Ho declared that the new government would include all “patriotic elements” in the society, not merely workers and peasants. Later, in November, he formally dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party (which continued to operate behind the scenes). This action too was designed to reassure the Chinese occupiers, who in their own country were engaged in open warfare against Communists, but Ho said nothing of that motivation, or of the related one of easing U.S. concerns about his ideological convictions. The ICP, he merely said, was no longer needed. His country was his party.
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Not everyone embraced these measures. Ho Chi Minh personally had broad support, not merely in Tonkin and Annam but in the south as well, and the army won widespread devotion for its perceived discipline and for its stated willingness to fight wherever and whenever ordered. But many were warily skeptical regarding the new government in Hanoi as well as the local administrative committees. Among the substantial Catholic minority, roughly 10 percent of the population, some leaders supported the DRV, but many Catholics worried about being harassed for their faith and for their historical links to the French. As evidence, they pointed to the government’s use of military tribunals to punish hundreds of “counterrevolutionaries” by jailing or even executing them (the latter at the hands of specially formed “honor squads for the elimination of traitors”). Though Ho proved quite skillful in alleviating these fears, partly through conciliatory statements directed at the Catholic clergy, suspicions remained, particularly given the penchant of local committees for ignoring central directives and seizing land, harassing property owners, and outlawing numerous traditional customs.
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But severe weaknesses in the economy and in military preparedness, more than anything, pushed Ho toward seeking some kind of deal with the French. Late in the year, another terrible famine in the north was barely averted by a range of short-term measures; thousands nevertheless starved to death. The Hanoi government’s revenues remained meager, partly because, in keeping with Viet Minh promises, various taxes had been abolished. The government had to resort to a public appeal for contributions to the treasury, a scheme that brought a pittance until Ho personally asked for the people’s help. All over Tonkin in late September, during what was called “Gold Week,” individuals appeared at collection points with offerings of gold and silver family heirlooms, necklaces and weddings bands, wristwatches, and precious gems. One eighty-year-old woman secured a place in the national mythology by donating her life savings: a gold ingot wrapped in red silk. According to Vo Nguyen Giap’s recollection, in a few days the government collected twenty million piasters and 370 kilograms of gold.
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A significant sum, but hardly more than a fraction of what the new government needed, particularly given the monumental task of creating a national army. From the moment of the DRV’s founding, her leaders determined that they would have to build a modern regular army capable of defending the entire territory of Vietnam, from the Chinese border in the north to the Ca Mau peninsula in the south. Recruitment for this National Defense Guard (the renamed Vietnamese Liberation Army) in the fall of 1945 went well—by the end of the year, Giap had some fifty thousand soldiers, a tenfold increase from August. In addition, major efforts were made in these months to organize self-defense and guerrilla units throughout the northern and central provinces. In Hanoi, the self-defense militia (
tu ve
) comprised virtually all the young men in the city and numbered in the tens of thousands.
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