Embers of War (13 page)

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this, as some historians have done, that the start of 1945 was some kind of watershed moment in which the United States abandoned her anticolonial impulses and supported a French return to Indochina.
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Roosevelt had not slackened in his belief that the imperialist system was bankrupt and decolonization inevitable, and that the United States needed to be on the right side of history. In October 1944, he told a visiting French admiral that following Japan’s defeat, the situation of the Western powers in the Pacific would be perilous. “The ideas of independence have become more familiar to the populations so far submitted to the authority of European countries,” the president said. “I believe if we do not wish to be thrown out by these people, we must find a general formula to resolve the relations between the White and Yellow races.” The nature of the formula could vary from country to country, but “within a given time span” all the colonies would have to become independent.
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At Yalta, FDR was contradictory, backing off on international trusteeships but telling Stalin he still “had in mind” some such solution for Indochina. On his return trip from the conference, in an off-the-record session with reporters aboard the USS
Quincy
, he condemned the British and French empires, comparing them unfavorably to the successful U.S. record in the Philippines and the commitment Washington had made to give the colony its independence. Roosevelt remained uncomfortable with the idea of French forces operating in Indochina, and he ruled out proposals for a greater French involvement in the anti-Japanese campaign there. He had retreated from the notion of
international
trusteeships, but the colonial powers would still act as trustees, remaining in control only long enough to prepare the colony for independence. Concluded a British official after Yalta: “ ‘Colonial trusteeship’ is still very much alive as part of the U.S. [government’s] policy.”
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The means had changed, but not the goal. On March 8, upon his return from Yalta and from several days of rest in Hyde Park, the president held separate White House meetings with his ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, and the commander of the China theater forces, General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Hurley tried to engage Roosevelt on the emerging civil war in China, but the president’s attention was elsewhere. He listened with apparent attention to what Hurley had to say but then changed the subject to Indochina. Wedemeyer too found it impossible to get the president to stay focused on China. FDR remarked that he and Stalin had agreed that trusteeship, not colonization, was required in Indochina, and he ordered Wedemeyer not to provide any supplies whatsoever to French forces operating in Asia. National independence was the wave of the future, he said, not empires or spheres of influence.
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It was a frail man who uttered these words. Roosevelt was dying. Both Hurley and Wedemeyer were shocked by his appearance that day, and close aides such as Harry Hopkins knew the end was near. He hung on for another month; then, in the early afternoon of April 12, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died.

Charles de Gaulle, notwithstanding the frosty interpersonal relationship, offered a moving tribute: “I am more shocked than I can say. It is a terrible loss not only for our country and me personally but for all humankind.” On his order, France observed a national day of mourning, an honor never before accorded a foreigner.
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Roosevelt left an Indochina policy that was in flux, for global developments in 1944 had complicated his easy anti-French pronouncements of 1942 and 1943. He never succeeded in reconciling his deep opposition to European colonialism with his equally heartfelt commitment to securing postwar cooperation among the great powers. In his final months he moderated his Indochina policy in important ways, but he never retreated from his belief that the continued existence of European colonial empires undermined the peace of the world. In mid-March, he told State Department colonial expert Charles Taussig that France could return to Indochina, but only if Paris accepted the obligations of a trustee, including setting a date for independence. On April 5 in Warm Springs, Georgia, at what turned out to be his last press conference, Roosevelt appeared with Philippine president Sergio Osmeña beside him. Once Japan was defeated, FDR told the assembled reporters, the Philippines would be given more or less immediate independence. Such action would send a clear message to the European powers that the colonial age had passed.
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For four years, European colonial officials had heard this Rooseveltian message and had fretted about it, had schemed to thwart the president’s designs. (Significantly, few of
them
thought FDR altered his policy in a meaningful way in the final months.)
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The question before them now was whether the new man in the White House, Harry Truman, would follow in his predecessor’s footsteps or chart a new course. Indochina would present an early test, these European leaders understood. For there, an event had occurred that would have profound implications for the Anglo-French effort to reclaim French control and for Vietnamese nationalists’ determination to resist them.

CHAPTER 3
CROSSROADS

S
HORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON MARCH 9, 1945, A VISITOR ARRIVED AT
the opulent Saigon offices of the French governor-general, Admiral Jean Decoux. It was Shunichi Matsumoto, Japan’s ambassador to Indochina, there ostensibly for the purpose of signing a previously worked-out agreement concerning rice supplies and French financial support for Japanese troops. As the signing ceremony ended, Matsumoto asked Decoux to linger for a private conversation. Matsumoto appeared nervous, the Frenchman later recalled, “something rare in an Asiatic.” It soon became clear why: Tokyo had ordered the ambassador to present an ultimatum, which required unconditional French acceptance no later than nine o’clock that same evening. The entire colonial administration, including army, navy, police, and banks, were to be placed under Japanese command.
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For almost five years, Decoux had dreaded the arrival of this moment. Ever since he took office, in July 1940, his overriding objective had been to preserve French sovereignty over Indochina, at least in a nominal sense, so that after the armistice the colony could still be a jewel in the empire. Now Tokyo had issued a demand that, if agreed to, would abolish French colonial control over Indochina. Decoux played for time, but Matsumoto did not budge—the deadline was firm. The Frenchman consulted with several associates, and at 8:45 sent a letter via messenger urging a continuation of the discussions beyond the nine o’clock deadline. The letter carrier went to the wrong building, and it was not until 9:25 that he could at last present the letter to Matsumoto. By then, reports of fighting in Hanoi and Haiphong had already come in. Matsumoto scanned the document, declared, “This is doubtless a rejection,” and ordered the Japanese military machine into action.
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It was a carefully planned campaign, code-named Operation Bright Moon. Ever since October 1944, when U.S. forces began their reconquest of the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Military Command had feared that the Allies would use the islands to invade Indochina in order to cut off Japan from her forces in Southeast Asia. And indeed, South East Asia Command (SEAC), based in Kandy, Ceylon, under British admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, viewed Indochina as an increasingly important theater of operations. Bombers of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Major General Claire L. Chennault operating from South China regularly attacked Japanese targets in Vietnam, sometimes ranging as far south as Saigon to hit ports and rail centers. To add to Tokyo’s concerns, French resistance inside Indochina appeared to be growing, and the Decoux regime seemed clearly to be switching its allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle’s Free France. The concerns grew in January 1945, when American forces attacked Luzon in the Philippines. In conjunction with this attack, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, launched a brief but devastating naval raid along the Indochina coast between Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, in order to deflect Japanese attention from Admiral Nimitz’s advance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese Thirty-eighth Army responded with a major reinforcement of garrisons in Indochina, especially in Tonkin, Annam, and Laos.

Through MAGIC intercepts Washington officials were able to follow closely Tokyo’s preparations for Bright Moon. A Japanese Navy message intercepted on January 17, for example, stated categorically that “landings in Indo-China by Allied forces are imminent.” A summary of intercepts on February 11 said that “the Japanese have become increasingly concerned over the possibility of Allied landings in Indo-China and have been taking various measures—and thinking about others.” On March 3, Japan’s foreign minister informed Tokyo’s diplomats abroad that “we have decided to resort to force of arms” in French Indochina. By March 5, this decision was known in Washington (it took about forty-eight hours for raw intercepts to be processed and translated), and U.S. analysts now also had a good estimate of the balance of forces on the ground: roughly 65,000 Japanese troops versus about 60,000 French Indochina Army forces (of whom approximately 12,000 were Europeans).
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JAPAN’S OIL SUPPLIES BURNING ALONG THE WATERFRONT IN SAIGON AFTER AN AIR RAID BY THE U.S. NAVY’S THIRD FLEET, JANUARY 12, 1945.
(photo credit 3.1)

Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance. It’s also clear that their task was made easier by the chronic inability of French Resistance forces to keep their activities and plans secret. Many
colons
openly expressed their support for the Resistance, and French soldiers collected arms dropped in the countryside and deposited them in arsenals in full view of the Japanese. Portraits of de Gaulle even hung in the public offices of the French High Command. On top of all that, the Japanese had cracked the French codes and were reading all the French ciphers. Their surveillance of French activities was child’s play, and on the evening of March 9 they had their troops ready in strategic positions to negate the anticipated French moves.
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Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell. Almost without exception, the senior French commanders were captured in their homes or in those of Japanese officers with whom they were dining (the meal invitations being part of the ruse). In Saigon, Japanese forces moved immediately on Decoux’s palace and seized him as well as several other high-ranking French ministers. Throughout Indochina, they took over administrative buildings and public utilities and seized radio stations, banks, and industries. Public beatings and executions of colonial officials occurred in numerous locales, and there were widespread reports of French women being raped by Japanese soldiers—including in Bac Giang province, where the province
résident
’s wife was gang-raped.
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Some senior French officials put personal safety before military duty. General Eugène Mordant, former commander of the French Indochina Army and covert leader of the Gaullist Resistance in Indochina, made his way to the Citadel in Hanoi after the shooting began, where he told officers not to waste their ammunition. He then went by foot to the private home of a friend and in the morning dispatched a note to the Japanese, indicating where they could find him. Accused later of cowardice, Mordant would claim he had hurt his leg in climbing over the wall to the Citadel and would not long have eluded the Japanese by foot, and that he intended to offer the Japanese his life so they might spare the lives of others. There is no evidence he made any such offer.
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A few French units resisted. Ignoring Mordant’s advice, the Citadel in Hanoi held out for several hours, even after the capture of General Georges Aymé, Mordant’s successor as commander of the French Indochina Army, and even after a captured French trumpeter blew “
Cessez le feu!
” The Japanese finally gained control of the Citadel on the afternoon of the tenth, but after fierce fighting: 87 Europeans and about 100 Vietnamese were killed on the one side, 115 Japanese on the other. In Lang Son, the French garrison held out until noon on the tenth, whereupon the Japanese beheaded or bayoneted to death the survivors. One French commander, a Colonel Robert, was offered a pistol to commit “honorable” suicide; he refused and was beheaded.
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