The Vietnam War story begins with patriotic ancestors who opened the drama decades before their country had even begun to penetrate American consciousness. Three generations of well-educated, politically engaged Vietnamese faced French colonial control as a force that was penetrating and upending their world. They made liberation from that control their prime concern in life.
The French presence loomed ever larger and more ominous between the 1840s and the 1890s. Naval expeditions and diplomats extended a grip over Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos (collectively dubbed Indochina by the French). The rich Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam (known as Cochin China) was the first to fall. It came under direct rule during the 1860s. The rest of Vietnam — Annam and Tonkin — was soon reduced to the status of a protectorate in which a humiliated monarchy remained nominally in charge. But in fact a French governor-general held sway over all of Indochina. The influx of some 40,000 to 50,000 French settlers and of French capital added cultural and economic dimensions to Vietnamese political subordination.
At the outset — across the latter half of the nineteenth century — scholar-officials loyal to the ruling dynasty mounted a desperate but ineffectual resistance to French conquest. Their failure to turn the tide put in question the established order, which was dominated by a monarchy modeled after China’s and by Confucian social values. Vietnamese intellectuals began to explore the sources of their country’s vulnerability and to consider ways to revitalize and liberate their country.
These concerns led the second generation of patriots to nationalist ideas early in the twentieth century. Under the sway of those ideas, they discovered the importance of building popular unity, creating a strong government to lead the people and resist international pressures, and drawing instruction and support from other countries, such as Japan, whose nationalist programs were proving successful. These pioneer nationalists were products of an educational system geared to create officials to staff the state bureaucracy, and so they instinctively assigned themselves a leading role in finding a substitute for the old, failed monarchy and in remaking society along lines they considered modern. In undertaking these tasks, they carried forward a sense of the special obligation of men of talent to play a public, political role. At the same time, their nationalism incorporated a special faith in the capacity of Vietnamese to resist foreign domination. In this they built on widely retailed legends of heroic resistance against Chinese domination and invasion.
The third generation, active in the 1920s and 1930s, faced perplexity and frustration. The old monarchical resistance had sputtered out. French prejudice and self-interest were discrediting moderate nationalists who had embraced the idea of enlightened colonial tutelage. Revolutionary plots repeatedly failed in the face of repressive security forces. Given the formidable obstacles to developing a nationalist consciousness and creating nationalist organizations, the educated class began searching farther and farther afield for models and insights. As they conceived the task of liberation in ever more expansive terms, they took an ever more critical view of the flaws of Vietnamese society — from gender inequality to class exploitation, to servile subordination to the colonial presence, to official corruption, to popular illiteracy.
Ho Chi Minh is the most famous member of this third generation. By the early 1940s, Ho had scored two major achievements that established his reputation and inspired nationalist hopes. The first, effected in the context of Japanese military expansion into Southeast Asia, was to translate broad ideas about revolution and independence into workable policies. In 1941, just as Japanese forces were taking charge in Indochina, Ho returned home at the head of the Viet Minh. This Communist-led organization would win broad popular appeal and spearhead the independence cause. The Viet Minh at first made its target the Japanese occupation army and the French who had acquiesced to Japanese control. With the unexpectedly early end of fighting in the Pacific in mid-1945, Ho and his colleagues seized power and declared Vietnam independent. The “August Revolution” of that year resulted in the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Ho became president of the new state. With his close associates Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Truong Chinh, he would direct the next phase of the independence struggle against a France determined to reassert its colonial prerogatives. The resulting conflict would last nearly eight years (late 1946 to mid-1954). Ho abandoned the cities in favor of a strategy of broad political mobilization led by the Viet Minh. On the battlefield his forces resorted to a mix of guerrilla and conventional warfare to harass and ultimately exhaust the enemy. Diplomatically Vietnam’s Communists had by 1950 emphatically put themselves on the side of the Soviet-led world communist movement, and they looked hopefully to the new Communist China for practical support.
Ho’s second major achievement was establishing the Communist Party’s legitimacy as the leading resistance force with an effective appeal to a wide range of ordinary Vietnamese. The key to this accomplishment was melding rural with nationalist concerns. Vietnamese Communists had embarked in the 1930s on finding ways to mobilize peasants, far and away the largest part of the population. Along the way they discovered the importance to villagers of land and livelihood.
The same wartime context in which Ho consolidated party control and advanced the independence cause also turned the attention of American policy makers to French Indochina. In 1940 and 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt started worrying about Indochina along with the other tottering European colonial domains in Southeast Asia. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the U.S. military deeply into the Pacific struggle and raised the question of the postwar status of colonial territories now in Japanese hands. In response Roosevelt offered qualified support for decolonization, but his successors — Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — shifted to full acquiescence to the restoration of French control and then to full-throated support even as the French effort faltered and then collapsed.
This chapter’s documents on the deep roots of the Vietnam War raise some fundamental questions:
• What fears, hopes, enmities, and ideals gripped Vietnamese confronted with French domination of their country? How did those concerns vary over time and between politically engaged elites and peasants?
• To what extent did Ho Chi Minh’s evolving views emerge from earlier nationalist attitudes, and to what extent were they shaped by communism?
• What concerns led Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to a commitment in Vietnam?
• Why in the final analysis did Vietnamese and American leaders fail to find common ground on the seemingly shared principle of self-determination?
French domination provoked a class of Vietnamese trained in the Confucian classics and oriented toward political service to engage in an ever deeper and more desperate search for a way to end Vietnam’s humiliating condition. Open resistance to the French had failed by the turn of the century and planted grim doubts about the capacity of Vietnamese to liberate themselves or even to survive as a society in a world of rapacious powers. Dealing with this grim realization fell to a new set of nationalist intellectuals and activists who emerged at the start of the twentieth century. Some among them favored revolutionary struggle, while others preferred a nonviolent reformist program as the more realistic course.
This well-known southern writer (1822–1888) represents the proto-nationalist resistance directed against the French and a collaboration-minded royal court. In the poem that follows, Chieu champions popular armed struggle. But, however defiant, he and like-minded advocates of resistance failed to create a peasant army strong and durable enough to drive out the French.
The only things you knew were ricefields and water buffaloes. You lived according to the village’s customs.
Digging, plowing, harrowing, replanting were your usual occupations. …
You were not professional soldiers … experienced in military life and training. You were but inhabitants of villages and hamlets turned partisans to serve the cause of righteousness. …
In your hands, a pointed stick; you did not ask for knives or helmets.
The match for your gunpowder was made of straw; but this did not prevent you from successfully burning the missionary house.
For a sword, you used your kitchen knife; yet you were able to behead the enemies’ lieutenant.
Your officers were not compelled to beat the drums in order to urge you forward. You advanced on your own, clambering onto the barricades. You looked upon the enemy as if he did not exist.
You were not frightened by the French who shot large and small bullets at you. You forced your way into their camp, risking your life as if you had no material body.
Some of you stabbed, some struck so eagerly that the French soldiers and their mercenaries lost heart.
You screamed in the forefront, you shouted at the rear regardless of the enemies’ gunboats, their ships, or their rifles. …
You preferred to die fighting the enemy, and return to our ancestors in glory rather than survive in submission to the Occidentals and share your miserable life with barbarians. …
O, the smoke of your battle has already dissipated, but your right conduct shall be recorded for a thousand years.
Chau (1867–1940) was a leading proponent of revolutionary nationalism. He was trained in the Confucian classics and passed the qualifying exam to become an official. Instead he became a voice for anticolonial resistance. He held up Japan (where he lived for a time in exile) as a model for Vietnamese modernization and a potential source of support for Vietnamese independence. The extract included here comes from The New Vietnam, one of Chau’s many works. The French authorities banned the book and in 1925 arrested, tried, and convicted the defiant Chau of subversion. He spent the rest of his life under confinement.
Our soil is fertile, our mountains and rivers beautiful. Compared with other powers in the five continents, our country is inferior only to a few. Why, then, do we suffer French protection? Alas, that is simply because of our deep-rooted slave mentality; it is because of our inveterate habit of depending on others for over two thousand years. We gladly accepted the colonization of the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming [all powerful Chinese dynasties]. As slaves, we served them; we lacked human dignity. Today our enemy the French are very ingenious. They despise us, claiming that we are weak; they lie to us, because they consider us stupid. … They trample over our people; they hold our fathers and brothers in contempt; they treat us like buffaloes and horses; they suck the sweat and blood from our people; and yet they dare broadcast loudly to the rest of the world that France is here to protect the Indochinese country. Oh! Compatriots, the country is ours; the people are ours. What interest does France have here for her to come and protect our country?
Ever since France came to protect us, Frenchmen hold every lever of power; they hold the power of life and death over everyone. The life of thousands of Vietnamese people is not worth that of a French dog; the moral prestige of hundreds of our officials does not prevail over that of a French woman. Look at those men with blue eyes and yellow beard. They are not our fathers, nor are they our brothers. How can they squat here, defecating on our heads? Are the men from Vietnam not ashamed of that situation? …
After modernization we shall determine the domestic as well as foreign affairs of our country. The work of civilization will go on, day after day, and our country’s status in the world will be heightened. We shall have three million infantrymen, as fierce as tigers, looking into the four corners of the universe. Five hundred thousand of our navy men, as terrifying as crocodiles, will swim freely in the boundless ocean. We shall send ambassadors into every country of Europe, America, Japan, the United States, Germany, England. These countries will make ours their first ally. Siam [Thailand], India, and other countries of the South Seas will look up to our land as an enlightened example. Even the big countries of Asia, such as China, will be brother countries to ours. The enemy, France, will be afraid of us; she will listen to us, ask us for protection. Our flag will fly over the city of Paris, and our colors will brighten the entire globe. At that time the only fear we shall have is that we won’t have enough time to protect other countries. All the shame and humiliation we have suffered previously, which resulted from being protected by others, will have become potent medicine to help us build up this feat of modernization. Commemorative monuments will be erected; a thousand torches will illuminate the entire world. The wind of freedom will blow fiercely, refreshing in one single sweep the entire five continents. Such will be the victory of our race. How pleasant that will be!
Trinh (1872–1926) was Phan Boi Chau’s equal in fame among the early-twentieth-century nationalists. He too was trained in the classics, passed the qualifying exam for royal service, but veered off into nationalist dissent. But unlike Chau, Trinh was skeptical about seeking outside support, whether from Japan or anywhere else. And rather than promote resistance, he looked to enlightened French tutelage to bring his troubled country into the modern world. His involvement in a peasant uprising in 1908 led to his arrest and left him politically sidelined until his death.
Since Vietnam was placed under their protection, the French have built roads and bridges; they have improved communication through the construction of railroads and steamships; they have established post offices and telegraph lines: all these works are indeed very useful to Vietnam. …
… [Y]et how is it that [the Vietnamese people] all have reached the lowest level of their subsistence, that they are about to witness the destruction of their race? What are the causes of this predicament? …
… The first one, as I see it, resides in the fact that the Protecting Power [France] gave too great a liberty to the Vietnamese mandarins [officials in the bureaucracy]. …
Knowing, for some time, that the Protecting Power favors and never punishes them, the Vietnamese mandarins … who are greedy become more so, counting on their corruption to climb up the hierarchical ladder. Those who are lazy become even lazier, counting only on their apathy to remain in their position. … They paid no attention whatsoever to the people’s complaints. …
The second cause resides in the fact that the Protectorate has always regarded with contempt the people of Vietnam, resulting in a segregation syndrome. … Seeing that our mandarins are corrupt, our people unintelligent, our customs in decay, the French despise our people, who, in their judgment, have no national dignity. Therefore, in their newspapers, books, conversations, or discussions, they usually express the contemptuous opinion that the Vietnamese are barbarians and comparatively not much different from pigs. …
If France is really interested in changing her policy, she should employ only those mandarins who have talent; give them authority and power; treat them with propriety; show them sincerity; deliberate with them over the best means to promote the good and eradicate the evil; open up new ways for the people to earn their living; provide the scholar-students with the freedom of discussion; widen the freedom of the press so as to know the people’s sentiments; put an end to the abuses of the mandarinate by resorting to just punishments and fair rewards. Furthermore, if, little by little, the legal system is improved, the mandarinal examinations abolished, the educational system renovated, libraries built, teachers trained, commercial and industrial knowledge encouraged, the taxes and corvée [required labor] systems ameliorated, then the people will quietly devote their efforts to do their work well. The scholar-students will discharge their duties with joy. At that time people will only fear that France will abandon Vietnam. Who would and could see her as an enemy?
… The only way for us to keep our territory and to allow our race to survive on this globe is to have a capable teacher to educate us and regard us as his pupils; to find a good mother who would treat us like her own children, raise us and take good care of us, with confidence and with affection.
The following items trace the rise of the leading figure in the Vietnamese liberation struggle from obscurity to national prominence. Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890 in a northern province noted for its anti-French resistance into a distinctly patriotic family. He knew personally the leading nationalists. Educated at first in Vietnam, Ho went abroad in 1911 to learn the secrets of Western power. During his development as a political leader between the late 1910s and the 1940s, he time and again invoked in his writings the proud resistance of earlier generations.
Ho settled in Paris in the late 1910s and hit his political stride, recapitulating as he went the views of an older generation. Under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), he joined other Vietnamese exiles in June 1919 in petitioning the victors in World War I for administrative reforms along the lines advocated by Trinh (document 1.3). Ho and his colleagues were ignored even by that champion of self-determination, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. The French Socialist Party, to which Ho turned, also proved indifferent to the aspirations of the colonized.
In mid-1920 Ho’s views took a revolutionary turn in the spirit of Chau (document 1.2). Here, in a recollection prepared in 1960 for the Soviet review Problems of the East on the occasion of Vladimir Lenin’s ninetieth birthday, Ho recalls his stunning encounter with an essay by Lenin that threw the support of the recently established Communist International behind oppressed peoples struggling against colonialism. Ho found attractive the notion that the “working masses” (including peasants) in Vietnam and other colonies were to combine with the proletariat in the developed countries and spearhead world revolution. According to the conventional Marxist formulation of the time, revolution in the colonies would sweep to power bourgeois nationalists, who would in turn yield to a socialist tide in their countries.
After World War One, I made my living in Paris, at one time as an employee at a photographer’s, at another as painter of “Chinese antiques” (turned out by a French shop). I often distributed leaflets denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonialists in Viet Nam.
At that time, I supported the October Revolution [the 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia] only spontaneously. I did not yet grasp all its historic importance. I loved and respected Lenin because he was a great patriot who had liberated his fellow-countrymen; until then, I had read none of his books. …
Heated discussions were then taking place in the cells of the Socialist Party, about whether one should remain in the [Socialist] Second International, found a “Second-and-a-half” International or join Lenin’s Third [Moscow-based Communist] International[.] I attended the meetings regularly, two or three times a week, and attentively listened to the speakers. …
What I wanted most to know — and what was not debated in the meetings — was: which International sided with the peoples of the colonial countries?
I raised this question — the most important for me — at a meeting. Some comrades answered: it was the Third, not the Second International. One gave me to read Lenin’s “Theses on the national and colonial questions”. …
In those Theses, there were political terms that were difficult to understand. But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy. Sitting by myself in my room, I would shout as if I were addressing large crowds: “Dear martyr compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation!” …
… [F]rom then on, I … plunged into the debates and participated with fervour in the discussions. Though my French was still too weak to express all my thoughts, I hit hard at the allegations attacking Lenin and the Third International. My only argument was: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial peoples, what kind of revolution are you then waging?”
During the 1920s and 1930s, Ho worked as a full-time revolutionary supported by the Soviet-backed Communist International. In 1930 he pulled a fragmented Vietnamese communist movement into a single party (known for its first two decades as the Indochinese Communist Party). The following excerpt was written in Canton, a center of Vietnamese political activity, and appeared under one of Ho’s pseudonyms (Din).
Though Ho was never interested in Marxist theory or in theoretical controversies, he did make conventional Marxist ideas an essential part of his worldview. He saw international affairs in terms of conflict between capitalist-dominated countries embarked on an imperialist course abroad and the emerging socialist camp led by the Soviet Union. He accepted the inherent superiority of the socialist system. And he took as a given the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the victim of its mounting crisis of overproduction and social unrest at home, warfare generated by rivalry among competing capitalist states for foreign markets, and revolutionary resistance in the colonial world. What above all else engaged him was Lenin’s notion of a tight, disciplined party organization as a way of speeding the inevitable advance of progress, not to mention marshaling limited resources against a more powerful foe. Ho devoted his energy and ingenuity to building the party as an essential, effective instrument of liberation and winning broad support for it, including among the peasants Chieu had written in praise of (document 1.1). Ho’s devotion to organizing Vietnamese to fight reflected this Marxist’s still deeply nationalist impulses.
Workers, peasants, soldiers, youth and school students!
Oppressed and exploited fellow-countrymen!
Sisters and brothers! Comrades!
Imperialist contradictions were the cause of the 1914–1918 World War. After this horrible slaughter, the world was divided into two camps: one is the revolutionary camp which includes the oppressed colonial peoples and the exploited working class throughout the world. Its vanguard is the Soviet Union. The other is the counter-revolutionary camp of international capitalism and imperialism. …
That war resulted in untold loss of life and property. … French imperialism was the hardest hit. Therefore, in order to restore the forces of capitalism in France, the French imperialists have resorted to every perfidious scheme to intensify capitalist exploitation in Indochina. They have built new factories to exploit the workers by paying them starvation wages. They have plundered the peasants’ land to establish plantations and drive them to destitution. They have levied new heavy taxes. They have forced our people to buy government bonds. In short, they have driven our people to utter misery. They have increased their military forces, firstly to strangle the Vietnamese revolution; secondly to prepare for a new imperialist war in the Pacific aimed at conquering new colonies; thirdly to suppress the Chinese revolution; and fourthly to attack the Soviet Union because she helps the oppressed nations and the exploited working class to wage revolution. World War Two will break out. When it does the French imperialists will certainly drive our people to an even more horrible slaughter. If we let them prepare for this war, oppose the Chinese revolution and attack the Soviet Union, if we allow them to stifle the Vietnamese revolution, this is tantamount to letting them wipe our race off the surface of the earth and drown our nation in the Pacific.
However, the French imperialists’ barbarous oppression and ruthless exploitation have awakened our compatriots, who have all realized that revolution is the only road to survival and that without it they will die a slow death. This is why the revolutionary movement has grown stronger with each passing day: the workers refuse to work, the peasants demand land, the students go on strike, the traders stop doing business. Everywhere the masses have risen to oppose the French imperialists.
The revolution has made the French imperialists tremble with fear. On the one hand, they use the feudalists and comprador bourgeoisie [a class dependent on foreign capital] to oppress and exploit our people. On the other, they terrorize, arrest, jail, deport and kill a great number of Vietnamese revolutionaries. If the French imperialists think that they can suppress the Vietnamese revolution by means of terror, they are grossly mistaken. For one thing, the Vietnamese revolution is not isolated but enjoys the assistance of the world proletariat in general and that of the French working class in particular. Secondly, it is precisely at the very time when the French imperialists are frenziedly carrying out terrorist acts that the Vietnamese Communists, formerly working separately, have united into a single party, the Indochinese Communist Party, to lead the revolutionary struggle of our entire people.
Building Vietnam’s Communist Party provided Ho a springboard for launching the Viet Minh in 1941. It would serve as a vehicle for attracting all types of his compatriots to the independence cause.
Now, the opportunity has come for our liberation. [German-occupied] France itself is unable to help the French colonialists rule over our country. As for the Japanese, on the one hand, bogged down in China, on the other, hampered by the British and American forces, they certainly cannot use all their strength against us. If our entire people are solidly united we can certainly get the better of the best-trained armies of the French and the Japanese. …
Dear fellow-countrymen! A few hundred years ago … when our country faced the great danger of invasion by Yuan [Mongol-led Chinese] armies the elders ardently called on their sons and daughters throughout the country to stand up as one man to kill the enemy. Finally they saved their people, and their glorious memory will live for ever. Let our elders and patriotic personalities follow the illustrious example set by our forefathers. …
Dear fellow-countrymen!
National salvation is the common cause of our entire people. Every Vietnamese must take part in it. He who has money will contribute his money, he who has strength will contribute his strength, he who has talent will contribute his talent. For my part I pledge to follow in your steps and devote all my modest abilities to the service of the country and am ready for the supreme sacrifice.
The headway the Viet Minh made during World War II allowed Ho to seize power in Hanoi in August 1945. Early the next month, he stood before a cheering crowd in central Hanoi and declared the colonial era at an end. His name was now a household word among patriotic Vietnamese. The striking invocation of the lines from the U.S. independence declaration was part of a calculated attempt to get Washington to deliver on its wartime embrace of the principle of self-determination. Ho also nominally disbanded the Communist Party (which would not be formally revived until 1951, as the Vietnamese Workers’ Party), created a broad coalition government to run the DRV, and appealed directly to the Truman administration for support. With the United States in a globally dominant position, with no prospect of Soviet backing, and with the French bent on restoring control throughout Indochina, this conciliatory approach made good sense.
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” …
Those are undeniable truths.
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
Politically, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three different political regimes in the North, the Centre and the South of Viet Nam in order to wreck our country’s oneness and prevent our people from being united.
They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly massacred our patriots. They have drowned our uprisings in seas of blood.
They have fettered public opinion and practised obscurantism [hindering the spread of knowledge].
They have weakened our race with opium and alcohol.
In the field of economics, they have sucked us dry, driven our people to destitution and devastated our land. …
We, the Provisional Government of the new Viet Nam, representing the entire Vietnamese people, hereby declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; cancel all treaties signed by France on Viet Nam, and abolish all privileges held by France in our country.
The entire Vietnamese people are of one mind in their determination to oppose all wicked schemes by the French colonialists.
We are convinced that the Allies … cannot fail to recognize the right of the Vietnamese people to independence.
A people who have courageously opposed French enslavement for more than eighty years, a people who have resolutely sided with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free, such a people must be independent.
Revolutionary sentiment spread through Vietnamese society in the early twentieth century, not only gripping the imagination of educated city dwellers but also reaching into the countryside. In these excerpts we get insight into the diverse ways ordinary Vietnamese became converts to the cause of liberation.
Born in 1920, Dinh grew up in a poor family in Ben Tre province, a fertile part of the Mekong Delta known for its revolutionary tradition going back to uprisings in the 1860s. The Communist Party maintained a presence there from the 1930s despite repeated rounds of French repression. Dinh followed her activist brother into party work while still in her teens and married another activist, who died in prison. Dinh herself was subsequently jailed by the French during the early 1940s. She participated in the Viet Minh seizure of power in her province in 1945 and assumed in the 1960s a prominent role in the southern resistance as the deputy commander of the National Liberation Front (NLF) armed forces (formally known as the People’s Liberation Armed Forces). In late 1965, just after the start of the Vietnam-U.S. war, Tan Huong Nam recorded Dinh’s story, which was published in Hanoi in 1968. This account of a political coming-of-age is especially revealing of the opportunities the revolutionary cause opened to women.
The family reading noted in the first paragraph is the classic novel Luc Van Tien by Nguyen Dinh Chieu, the prominent nineteenth-century southern scholar and foe of the French whose poem in praise of peasant resistance (document 1.1) was probably written in Ben Tre. This novel in verse, which tells of the triumph of a young couple over wicked people, affirms both Confucian ideas of virtue and the Buddhist faith in the ultimate victory of good over evil.
Whenever we had nothing to do at night, we would gather around the oil lamp … and listened to my brother read [Chieu’s novel]. … Sometimes … I wept and the neighbors also wept. Once in a while, my father nodded his head in approval and commented:
— This story teaches people all the virtues they must have in life: humanity, kindness, filial piety, courage, determination and loyalty. …
… I hated those in the old days who abused their power, position and wealth to harm honest people. … On one occasion, the landlord in the village came to my house and demanded paddy [unmilled rice] in a threatening manner. My parents had to hastily prepare food and wine to regale him. We were out of chickens then, so they had to catch the hen about to lay eggs which I had been raising, and slaughter it for him to eat. When he finally left, his face crimson with all the drinking, I broke down and cried in anger, and demanded that my mother compensate me for the hen. In that period (1930) I noticed that my brother Ba Chan came and went at odd hours. Sometimes men came to the house, sat and whispered for a while and then disappeared. One day, I heard whispers in the room, I looked in and saw my brother hand to my father a piece of red cloth embroidered with something yellow inside [a hammer and sickle flag of the Communists]. …
… [M]y older brother Ba Chan was suddenly arrested by the puppet village officials who took him and jailed him. … It was Muon, the same Canton Chief — the tyrannical landlord who had come to my house to collect rent, drink and swallow my hen which was about to lay eggs — who now angrily hit the prisoners with a walking stick while drinking and shouting. …
… My brother was not the only one who was tortured, many other old and young people were also tortured. Many men were beaten until they passed out, blood trickling from their mouths, heads and feet, and dyeing the cement floor a greyish and purplish color. … I just stood there, frozen, and wept in anger. …
… My brother was not released until half a year later. We wept with joy. He loved me even more than before because I was the only one in the family who had taken care of him during his imprisonment. I asked him:
— You didn’t do anything to them, then why did they beat you up so brutally?
He smiled and said:
— Of course I did something, why not?
— You mean you were a subversive?
— Don’t be silly! I make revolution to overthrow the landlords who are oppressing and exploiting us, like Canton Chief Muon, and also to overthrow the French who have stolen our country from us.
He explained to me at great length, but I did not understand anything more than that the Communists loved the poor and opposed the officials in the village. My love for my brother and the men who had been jailed blossomed and deepened with such new and significant events. …
… [In 1936] the movement was on the rise. People from many areas frequently came to hold meetings in my house. My brother Ba Chan persuaded me to help and cook for them. I agreed at once. They all treated me with affection like my brother Ba. They were all good people and my parents were very fond of them. …
… [B]esides cooking when they came to hold meetings I was given the job of delivering letters, propagandizing people in the hamlets and village to join mutual aid associations and rice transplanting and hoeing teams, encouraging people to buy the “Dan Chung” (People) newspaper, and mobilizing women. … Whatever task I was given I performed with a lot of zeal. …
… After succeeding in a few tasks, I became very eager to operate and wanted to leave because if I stayed home a lot of chores, such as cooking, working in the ricefields and tending the vegetable garden, would get in the way of my work. I began to move around more [on party business]. Some nights I stayed out and came home very late. My parents were afraid I would become “bad” and said, “State affairs are not for girls to take care of. And even if women can do it, they must be very capable. What can our daughter Dinh do? If she’s caught, she’ll confess everything and harm others.” At that time, I had reached the puberty period and caught the attention of many youths in the village. Several sent matchmakers to my house to ask for my hand. My parents wanted to accept and give me away in marriage to put an end to their worries, but I absolutely refused to go along. I often confided to my brother Ba:
— I only want to work for the revolution, I don’t want to get married yet.
This offspring of a well-to-do Saigon family was an unlikely nationalist recruit. His grandfather, a Confucian scholar, had worked for the French administration. His father was determined to see his son well educated, gainfully employed, and thus able to add to the family’s already substantial wealth. To that end Tang attended the best French schools open to Vietnamese and then moved to France for pharmacy studies. His nationalist awakening there offers more testimony to the power of the ideas Ho promoted and the striking personal appeal that Ho himself exercised. Many other youths embraced the revolution as Tang did, without ever joining the Communist Party or fully accepting its principles and policies. Disowned by his family, Tang eventually returned to Vietnam to teach school while actively supporting the Viet Minh in the anti-French struggle. He later served as an NLF organizer in Saigon and as a top-ranking member of the NLF leadership. He and other southern activists became increasingly restive under Hanoi’s control of the NLF in the latter stages of the anti-American war. Tang fled abroad in 1975, dismayed by the realization that the North was going to dominate the South. His ultimate disillusionment with the revolution makes all the more poignant and convincing his recollections here of how he became a convert to the liberation cause.
Each Sunday we would gather at my grandfather’s house to visit and also to listen as he taught us the precepts of Confucian ethics. He would remind us of our duty to live virtuous lives, lives of personal rectitude and filial piety. And he would talk about the five cardinal ethical principles: nhon, nghia, le, tri, tin (“benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience, and faithfulness”). There was nothing abstract or dry about his exposition. Instead he would weave his story around the adventures and exploits of ancient Chinese heroes and sages, whose lives illustrated one or another of these virtues. For boys especially, he would tell us, there are two unshakable necessities: protection of the family’s honor and loyalty to the nation. …
At the Chasseloup Laubat [an exclusive Saigon school for children of the French colonial administrators and select Vietnamese] we spoke and wrote exclusively French, and we learned, along with mathematics, science, and literature, all about the history and culture of nos ancêtres les Gaulois. … About our own country we remained profoundly ignorant, except for what we read in the final chapters of our history books, the ones on France’s colonial empire, France outre-mer. … It wasn’t until after I had begun secondary school that I began to realize that I was — in some ways at least — different.
The scene of my initiation into the mysteries of colonialism was the lycée schoolyard during recess. As the games we played became rougher and more competitive, my Vietnamese friends and I learned that we, in contrast to our French schoolmates, were part of a racial entity sometimes called nhaques (peasants), sometimes mites (a derogatory abbreviation of Annamite, the French term for Vietnamese). … Soon shock gave way to anger, and recesses were occasionally punctuated with brawls, which mirrored the hatreds felt by many of our elders. …
[In 1946 Tang moved to Paris to pursue pharmaceutical studies. There he and other students met with Ho, who was then in France seeking recognition of the DRV’s independence.] I was immediately struck by Ho Chi Minh’s appearance. Unlike the others, who were dressed in Western-style clothes, Ho wore a frayed, high-collared Chinese jacket. On his feet he had rubber sandals. … [H]e gave off an air of fragility, almost sickliness. But these impressions only contributed to the imperturbable dignity that enveloped him as though it were something tangible. … Ho exuded a combination of inner strength and personal generosity that struck me with something like a physical blow. He looked directly at me, and at the others, with a magnetic expression of intensity and warmth.
Almost reflexively I found myself thinking of my grandfather. There was that same effortless communication of wisdom and caring with which my grandfather had personified for us the values of Confucian life. I was momentarily startled when Ho reached his arm out in a sweeping gesture, as if he were gathering us in. “Come, my children,” he said and sat down on the steps. We settled around him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. … He told us to call him Bac Ho — Uncle Ho — instead of Mr. President. Then he began asking each of us in turn about our families, our names, our studies, where we were from, how old we were. He wanted to know too about our feelings toward Vietnam’s independence, a subject on which most of us had only the vaguest thoughts. …
When Ho realized that among our group there were students from the North, South, and Center of the country, he said gently, but with great intensity, “Voila! the youth of our great family of Vietnam. Our Vietnam is one, our nation is one. You must remember, though the rivers may run dry and the mountains erode, the nation will always be one.” … Ho went on to say that, when he was born, Vietnam was a nation of slaves. … Eighty years of slavery had diminished the nation; now it was time to reestablish the heritage given to us by our ancestors and recover from our backwardness. If our people were to gain an honorable place among the peoples of the world, it would depend largely on us, on our efforts to study and learn and to contribute to the national family.
It was a message that combined ardent and idealistic nationalism with a moving personal simplicity. Ho had created for us an atmosphere of family and country and had pointed to our own role in the great patriotic endeavor. Before an hour had passed, he had gained the heart of each one of us sitting around him on those steps. …
… Against what I knew to be my father’s deepest wishes — not to mention his explicit orders — I was now on my way to becoming a rebel. … In my mind’s eye, I began to envision a radical westernization of Vietnam along the lines of Japan’s miraculous industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There seemed to me no reason that Vietnam, newborn to independence but full of hard-working, intelligent citizens, could not adopt the best from the world’s political and economic cultures: the American approach to economics, the German scientific spirit, the French fervor for democracy.
The testimonies collected by French scholar Gérard Chaliand in October–November 1967 offer insight on the revolutionary appeal in the northern countryside. We hear from peasants in Hung Yen province in the Red River Delta, a region longer and more densely settled than Nguyen Thi Dinh’s Mekong region and distinctly poorer. They recall the anti-French sentiment, the poverty, and the injustice that made the countryside a Viet Minh stronghold.
Historically, our province has been a battlefield ever since … the second and third centuries. The marshes and reeds provided an excellent terrain for guerrilla warfare in the lowlands, and the dense vegetation stopped the enemy from advancing. There were also major battles against the Mongols in the thirteenth century. It is fair to say that the peasants of Hung Yen have had to withstand continual attempts at invasion throughout their history, in addition to long periods of drought and flooding. They’ve had the French to contend with, too! …
The first [Communist] Party cell in the province was set up in 1930. … By 1940, repression or no repression, we were able to get on with our propaganda work and agitation. Each militant was required to establish contact with several villages … and do his best to establish nests of sympathizers. This went on from 1940 until 1944. There were very few professional revolutionaries in the area — no more than four or five in the entire province; the rest did ordinary jobs as well as working for the Party. And then, round about 1943 or 44, we started making military preparations. On a very small scale, mind: we had no arms and ammunition as yet. …
On 9 March 1945 came the Japanese coup toppling the colonial administration. … The French were in such disarray that they could do nothing to stop us. Side by side with the armed conflict, the masses were incited to lay hands on the stocks of rice held by the Japanese. … The communal rice-stocks in the possession of the village elders … were shared out, together with the supplies appropriated by the Japanese. In addition, all taxes were withheld. As a result of these steps, starvation was averted in the province. … This seizure of rice for public use finally removed the peasants’ uncertainties about the revolution. …
In August 1945, we took over every district in the land. … Suddenly we found ourselves enjoying independence and freedom. The mood of the country was unbelievable: people were burning with enthusiasm. I shall never forget those times.
And then, in December, the French invaded us again. …
After 1949 the people living in the delta became [the target of French forces]. … [O]ur army and cadres could not be dislodged; the peasants continued to hide them. A complete network of underground shelters and communication trenches was established, stretching for tens of miles, with exits in or on the outskirts of villages. As the war dragged on, it became possible to conceal and accommodate whole regiments and, eventually, whole divisions.
My own family were landless peasants: all they had was a house and a small yard. They were hired labourers, working for landowners. …
I was eleven when my father died, after an illness, at the age of fifty-four. My mother died of starvation during the great famine of 1945. I was fourteen at the time. We were a family of six. … My little sister and I took jobs, looking after landowners’ children. … At that time, I ate one meal a day: rice with fig-leaves, and usually a soup made from rice and bran. There were no vegetables: all we had was rice and salt. One of my sisters died of starvation in 1945; another was killed during a bombardment in 1948. And one of my brothers was killed in the army in 1953. That leaves the three of us. …
… The landowners used to hold huge feasts and make the villagers contribute. Some of them had three wives. They ate meat or chicken every day. When you were working for them, you got a few sweet potatoes in the morning and some rice at midday. That was for heavy labour. … If they wanted to grab a peasant’s land, they would plant some liquor in his home (the colonial administration had exclusive rights to liquor) and tip off the authorities. The peasant was duly prosecuted and had to sell his plot. That is how my uncle was dispossessed. And another thing: peasants would run into debt whenever the taxes fell due. The interest rate was 50 per cent for a period of six months. They would just manage to pay off the interest. The debt itself was never disposed of. … The poorer a family was, the greater the attempts to make it sell its land, fall into debt and move to another part of the country. … In 1943 the village notables [individuals with influence based on their wealth or education] decided to put pressure on my family. At their bidding a man came to my uncle’s house, feigned insanity and set fire to the place. … [M]y two uncles were arrested for laying hands on the notables. There was pandemonium at the district court. In the end, my uncles had to sell all they owned to pay for the trial and were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. We had already lost three saos [about a third of an acre] as a result of the liquor incident, and now the last four saos had to be sold. We had nothing left. In 1945, the young uncle to whom all this had happened was the first person in Quoc Tri to join the self-defence forces; afterwards, the whole family served in the Resistance.
Within one decade, under three presidents — Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower — U.S. policy toward French Indochina moved from qualified verbal support for independence to heavy material support for an embattled colonial army. Accordingly Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese Communists came to view the United States not as a likely patron but as an increasingly formidable obstacle to their revolution.
Roosevelt, like his successors in the White House, viewed Indochina through the prism of global concerns. The World War II crusade against expansionist powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — had dominated Roosevelt’s attention, with priority given to putting together a coalition to secure victory. To rally support, Roosevelt made self-determination one of the main war aims. While decolonization was high on his agenda, the president still thought of independence for young, emerging nations such as Vietnam as something for the distant future. The onset of the Cold War early in the Truman presidency changed the global context and made self-determination less important than good postwar relations with France and containment of Soviet influence. Some of the most vulnerable points in the Cold War struggle were colonies moving toward independence and seemingly at risk of disorder or a Communist takeover. The return of French forces to Indochina in late 1945 and the onset of fighting between them and a Communist-led Vietnamese resistance put the Truman administration on a path toward intervention even as it called attention to the legitimate claims of Vietnamese nationalists. In early 1950 the Truman administration made a highly consequential commitment to back the French. Truman gave his formal approval. The outbreak of the Korean War in June made urgent the new program of support for the French. The U.S. treasury was soon covering the bulk of France’s war costs, and the U.S. military dispatched its first advisers to the war zone.
THE PRESIDENT said that … he felt that many years of honest labor would be necessary before France would be re-established. He said the first necessity for the French, not only for the Government but the people as well, was to become honest citizens.
[Stalin] agreed and went on to say that he did not propose to have the Allies shed blood to restore Indochina, for example, to the old French colonial rule. …
THE PRESIDENT said he was 100% in agreement with Marshal Stalin and remarked that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before. … He added that he had discussed with [Chinese leader and U.S. ally] Chiang Kai-shek the possibility of a system of trusteeship for Indochina which would have the task of preparing the people for independence within a definite period of time, perhaps 20 to 30 years.
At the end of the war, political conditions in Indochina, and especially in the north, will probably be particularly unstable. The Indochinese independence groups, which may have been working against the Japanese, will quite possibly oppose the restoration of French control. Independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong. …
French policy toward Indochina will be dominated by the desire to reestablish control in order to reassert her prestige in the world as a great power. This purpose will be augmented by the potent influence of the Banque de l’Indochine and other economic interests. Many French appear to recognize that it may be necessary for them to make further concessions to Indochinese self-government and autonomy primarily to assure native support but also to avoid unfriendly United States opinion. …
The United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina. It is, however, the general policy of the United States to favor a policy which would allow colonial peoples an opportunity to prepare themselves for increased participation in their own government with eventual self-government as the goal.
[T]he threat of communist aggression against Indochina is only one phase of anticipated communist plans to seize all of Southeast Asia. …
A large segment of the Indochinese nationalist movement was seized in 1945 by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese who under various aliases has served as a communist agent for thirty years. … In 1946, he attempted, but failed to secure French agreement to his recognition as the head of a government of Vietnam. Since then he has directed a guerrilla army in raids against French installations and lines of communication. French forces which have been attempting to restore law and order found themselves pitted against a determined adversary who manufactures effective arms locally, who received supplies of arms from outside sources, who maintained no capital or permanent headquarters and who was, and is able, to disrupt and harass almost any area within Vietnam (Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina) at will.
The United States has, since the Japanese surrender, pointed out to the French Government that the legitimate nationalist aspirations of the people of Indochina must be satisfied, and that a return to the prewar colonial rule is not possible. The Department of State has pointed out to the French Government that it was and is necessary to establish and support governments in Indochina particularly in Vietnam, under leaders who are capable of attracting to their causes the non-communist nationalist followers who had drifted to the Ho Chi Minh communist movement in the absence of any non-communist nationalist movement around which to plan their aspirations. …
[Conclusions:] It is important to United States security interests that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Indochina is a key area of Southeast Asia and is under immediate threat. …
Accordingly, the Departments of State and Defense should prepare as a matter of priority a program of all practicable measures designed to protect United States security interests in Indochina.
Ho took note of rising U.S. support for the French, which he interpreted in terms of his assumptions about intense economic competition among capitalist states. He concluded that Americans were bent on elbowing the French out. For support against this powerful new foe, Ho looked to his Communist neighbor to the north. China’s recently victorious Communists quickly lined up behind the Viet Minh, providing from 1950 onward strategic guidance, troop training, and substantial matériel.
At the very beginning of the war, the Americans supplied France with money and armaments. To take an example, 85 per cent of weapons, war materials and even canned food captured by our troops were labelled “made in U.S.A.”. This aid had been stepped up all the more rapidly since June 1950 when the U.S.A. began interfering in Korea. American aid to the French invaders consisted in airplanes, boats, trucks, military outfits, napalm bombs, etc.
Meanwhile, the Americans compelled the French colonialists to step up the organisation of four divisions of puppet [Vietnamese] troops with each party footing half the bill. …
The French colonialists are now landed in a dilemma: either they receive U.S. aid and be then replaced by their American “allies”, or they receive nothing, and be then defeated by the Vietnamese people. To organise the puppet army by means of pressganging the youth in areas under their control would be tantamount to swallowing a bomb when one is hungry: a day will come when at last the bomb bursts inside. However not to organise the army on this basis would mean instantaneous death for the enemy because even the French strategists have to admit that the French Expeditionary Corps grows thinner and thinner and is on the verge of collapse.
Furthermore, U.S. aid is paid for at a very high price. In the enemy held areas, French capitalism is swept aside by American capitalism. American concerns like the Petroleum Oil Corporation, the Caltex Oil Corporation, the Bethle[he]m Steel Corporation, the Florid[a] Phosphate Corporation and others, monopolise rubber, ores, and other natural resources of our country. U.S. goods swamp the market. The French reactionary press … is compelled to acknowledge sadly that French capitalism is now giving way to U.S. capitalism.
The U.S. interventionists have nurtured the French aggressors and the Vietnamese puppets, but the Vietnamese people do not let anybody delude and enslave them.
People’s China is our close neighbour. Her brilliant example gives us a great impetus. … Can the U.S. interventionists, who were drummed out of China and are now suffering heavy defeats in Korea, conquer Viet Nam? Of course, not!
When Dwight Eisenhower took over from Truman in early 1953, he held to the established Indochina policy even as the French faltered and struggled to break a Viet Minh siege of their garrison at Dien Bien Phu. The new president and his secretary of state described the U.S. commitment in broad terms that were to become staples in U.S. officials’ discussions of Vietnam: Ho was a threat to the genuine independence of Vietnam, Indochina was a domino whose fall would have far-reaching repercussions, and U.S. policy could not afford to repeat the appeasement that had brought on World War II.
The Communists are attempting to prevent the orderly development of independence [of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia]. …
The scheme is to whip up the spirit of nationalism so that it becomes violent. That is done by professional agitators. Then the violence is enlarged by Communist military and technical leadership and the provision of military supplies. In these ways, international Communism gets a strangle-hold on the people and it uses that power to “amalgamate” the peoples into the Soviet orbit. …
“Amalgamation” is now being attempted in Indochina under the ostensible leadership of Ho Chi Minh. He was indoctrinated in Moscow. … [He worked with a Soviet agent] to bring China into the Soviet orbit. Then Ho transferred his activities to Indochina.
Those fighting under the banner of Ho Chi Minh have largely been trained and equipped in Communist China. They are supplied with artillery and ammunition through the Soviet-Chinese Communist bloc. … Military supplies for the Communist armies have been pouring into Viet-Nam at a steadily increasing rate.
Military and technical guidance is supplied by an estimated 2,000 Communist Chinese. They function with the forces of Ho Chi Minh in key positions — in staff sections of the High Command, at the division level and in specialized units such as signal, engineer, artillery and transportation.
In the present stage, the Communists in Indochina use nationalistic anti-French slogans to win local support. But if they achieved military or political success, it is certain that they would subject the People to a cruel Communist dictatorship taking its orders from Peiping and Moscow.
The tragedy would not stop there. If the Communist forces won uncontested control over Indochina or any substantial part thereof, they would surely resume the same pattern of aggression against other free peoples in the area.
I am sure that like me you are following with the deepest interest and anxiety the daily reports of the gallant fight being put up by the French at Dien Bien Phu. …
But regardless of the outcome of this particular battle, I fear that the French cannot alone see the thing through, this despite the very substantial assistance in money and matériel that we are giving them. … [A]nd if they do not see it through, and Indochina passes into the hands of the Communists, the ultimate effect on our and your global strategic position with the consequent shift in the power ratio throughout Asia and the Pacific could be disastrous. … It is difficult to see how Thailand, Burma and Indonesia could be kept out of Communist hands. This we cannot afford. The threat to Malaya, Australia and New Zealand would be direct. The offshore island chain would be broken. The economic pressure on Japan which would be deprived of non-Communist markets and sources of food and raw materials would be such, over a period of time, that it is difficult to see how Japan could be prevented from reaching an accommodation with the Communist world which would combine the manpower and natural resources of Asia with the industrial potential of Japan. …
… [W]e failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?