At Washington’s behest 150,000 Chinese troops, Chiang Kai-shek’s men, descended upon northern Vietnam to assume a share of the allied occupation role. The Vietnamese dubbed them tau phu – the ‘swollen Chinese’ – because they all seemed to have bulging feet, perhaps from beriberi. The newcomers behaved more like locusts than warriors, stripping the countryside of everything edible or portable. They interfered little with Ho’s energetic extension of his political authority, and obligingly sold weapons to the Vietminh. Early in October 1945 the first French troops appeared in Saigon, but more than a year elapsed thereafter – a delay priceless for the communists and fatal to the imperialists – before they reasserted control in the north.
At the age of sixteen, student Pham Phu Bang was an enthusiastic revolutionary who saw the Vietminh exclusively as an independence movement: ‘I knew nothing about communism.’ When the Japanese swept over the country, at first he found it thrilling to see fellow-Asians humiliate the French colonial power – ‘like two great water buffaloes locking horns’. After Japan’s collapse Bang started his own revolutionary career, stealing weapons from careless Chinese soldiers, writing posters and banners proclaiming ‘Up with Ho Chi Minh’, ‘Long Live Free Vietnam’. One day he joined a train taking rice north to famine-stricken areas, which became trapped at a bridge wrecked by allied bombing. Its Vietminh escort enlisted local villagers to hump sacks across the river, but soon found the train besieged by a throng of starving people. Young Bang was accosted by a skeletal figure who had been given a can of rice for himself, but pleaded desperately for one more for his child. ‘We argued a lot among ourselves about who was to blame for these terrible things – the Japanese who ruled; the French who took as much food as they wanted to feed themselves; or the Americans who had bombed the railways. We decided it was all three. We asked each other: why did our small, fragile country have so many enemies?’
In the course of 1945–46 the Vietminh took over the non-communist Vanguard Youth movement and suppressed other opposition groups in the north. Many of the rival leaders were jailed, and in the countryside some thousands of alleged ‘enemies of the people’ were liquidated. The Vietminh hustled to announce its own triumph in a 4 January 1946 national election, as assuredly rigged as was every other ballot in Indochina through the decades that followed. For a brief season while the Chinese army and allied representatives were conspicuous in the north, a semblance of free speech was tolerated. By mid-June, however, most of Chiang’s men were gone, and purges resumed.
Ho’s people moved swiftly and effectively to secure control of rural areas, especially in the remotenesses towards the Chinese border. In the Mekong delta, by contrast, early in 1946 the French reasserted themselves, so that insurgent structures had to evolve secretly, alongside the colonial administration. Among Vietminh returnees from imprisonment was Le Duan, who two decades later would become ruler of his country. As the French expelled the Vietminh from urban areas, he was among those who established himself in the delta countryside, where guerrillas began to fight. And the colonial power fought back.
France’s adoption of this doomed course derived in significant measure from its humiliation in the Second World War. A similar disaster was averted in India, probably only because British voters at their 1945 election displayed the wisdom to endorse a socialist government, which made the historic decision to quit the subcontinent and Burma. By contrast, in Paris in the summer of 1945 a black delegate from Guyana, Gaston Monnerville, asserted: ‘without the Empire, France today would be no more than a liberated country … Thanks to her Empire, France is a victorious country.’ Successive revolving-door governments of the Fourth Republic proved feeble in everything save a willingness to deploy force in France’s overseas possessions, with a ruthlessness seldom matched by the Soviets. Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people. Only in the enervating climate of a world that had exhausted its stock of moral outrage could the creation of such mountains of corpses by a European power have passed with so little remark. Algeria and Madagascar provide important context for the matching bloodshed that descended upon Indochina.
More puzzling than France’s rashness and inhumanity was US willingness to support them. Without military aid, Paris’s colonial policy would have collapsed overnight. Fredrik Logevall observes that there would have been no contradiction about an American decision to assist France’s domestic revival, while withholding backing for its imperial follies. Washington’s contrary call was made partly because, even before the Cold War became icy, policy-makers recoiled from acquiescence in communist acquisition of new territorial booty. While American liberal intellectuals detested colonialism, in an era when much of their own country was still racially segregated, the spectacle of white men lording it over ‘lesser races’ did not seem as odious as it would soon become. In the late 1940s, French policy was less closely linked to US anti-communism than it later became, but the interests of the Vietnamese people – or for that matter of their Malagasy, Algerian and suchlike brethren – ranked low in the priorities of President Harry Truman.
Some Vietnamese at first regarded the return of the French as an acceptable temporary expedient, to rid themselves of the Chinese plundering the north. Ho Chi Minh received token recognition as master of Tonkin, while Bao Dai’s nominal rule over the country was acknowledged. In July 1946, when Ho visited Paris for talks about the constitutional future, he was greeted with the honours of a head of state. This, however, was mere window-dressing. In the talks at Fontainebleau that followed, the Paris government made it plain that he had been summoned only to receive the instructions of his masters, not to negotiate a reassignment of power. De Gaulle said: ‘United with the overseas territories which France opened to civilisation, she is a great nation. Without these territories she would be in danger of no longer being one.’
The head of the French delegation told a Vietminh representative contemptuously: ‘We only need an ordinary police operation for eight days to get all of you out.’ For some weeks, Ho lingered in frustration. Truong Nhu Tang, almost three decades later a Southern revolutionary minister, was among a group of Vietnamese students who met their hero in Paris. They were entranced when the aspiring national leader instructed them to call him ‘Uncle Ho’ rather than ‘Mr President’. He asked their opinions about Vietnam’s future, devoted an afternoon to conversation with them: ‘It is hard to think of another world leader who under similar circumstances might have done the same.’ When Ho found that the north, centre and south of the country were all represented in the student group, he said, ‘Voilà! The youth of our great family … You must remember, though the rivers run dry and the mountains crumble, the nation will always be one.’ His remarks profoundly impressed his young compatriots, because they evoked ‘the language of slogan and poetry that Vietnamese leaders had always used to rally the people … From that afternoon I was Ho Chi Minh’s fervent partisan. I had been won by his simplicity, charm, familiarity. His … burning patriotism offered me a role-model for my own life.’
Ho returned to Tonkin knowing that no peaceful settlement was attainable. The French behaved with unswerving duplicity: as fast as more troops, planes and warships became available, they tightened their grip in the south, then reached out for the north. That summer of 1946 their foremost soldier, Philippe Leclerc, directed military operations: he branded Ho an enemy of France, and unwisely declared the conflict as good as won. The general treated with contempt Giap, Ho’s former intelligence chief who was then presumptive Vietminh ‘minister of defence’. Giap’s broad, infectious grin deluded some Westerners into believing that he was a more genial and pliable figure than his leader. In truth, Giap’s vanity matched his ruthlessness: the Frenchman’s