Saigon (40 page)

He’d been driving through the streets of the city center for two or three minutes without thought for where he was going before he began to focus his attention properly on the freed French prisoners. Like Paul, they were dressed in the same worn and badgeless uniforms that had become their prison clothes, and when the noise of a scuffle drew his attention to a particular group, he noticed that they were carrying new British .303 rifles. At first sight the troops appeared to be sparring high-spiritedly among themselves, then with a shock Joseph saw a Vietnamese in their midst and realized they were attacking passersby at random. Suddenly he remembered that for the past month since the Japanese surrender, most of the French prisoners had been under the guard of Viet Minh jailers, and now in the first heady moments of freedom they were lashing out at anyone who resembled their most recent tormentors. In the Rue Catinat he saw half-a-dozen French soldiers tear down the “Paris Commune” signs, then use it to bludgeon a startled Vietnamese youth to the ground; by the time he arrived back at OSS headquarters he had seen a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians being brutalized by the newly freed troops with their rifle butts. As darkness fell on the city, French civilians began coming cautiously into the streets again and they, too, released from weeks of fear, began to join the troops in abusing any Vietnamese unfortunate enough to cross their paths. 

Just before daybreak on Sunday, September 23, 1945, Major Paul Devraux whispered an urgent command to the troops in his detachment to follow him, then set off at a run eastward beneath the camphor laurels bordering the Boulevard Luro. His men were in full battle order, and their faces, like his, were blackened with camouflage paint. In his right hand he clutched a loaded service revolver at the ready and he moved stealthily in a running crouch, taking advantage of the deeper shadows beneath the trees. He was heading towards the Hotel de Ville. the headquarters of the Viet Minh Committee for the South, and simultaneously, all over Saigon, other detachments of a hastily assembled French force of fifteen hundred men were beginning to converge in the predawn darkness on police stations, the post office, the treasury and the former Süreté Générale headquarters. 

The force was under the overall command of Colonel Jean Cédile, General de Gaulle’s “High Commissioner” who had parachuted into the paddy fields outside Saigon at the end of August, and their objective was to seize back control of southern Vietnam from the Viet Minh in a lightning coup d’état. Among the men loping silently behind Paul in rubber-soled combat boots were a hundred battle-toughened paratroopers who had jumped in with Cédile; all of them had been promptly interned by the Japanese on landing, but they had finally been freed twelve hours earlier by the British along with the fourteen hundred men of the Eleventh Regiment Infanterie Coloniale. Because they had been caged like animals for six months, first by the Japanese then by the Vietnamese, all the French soldiers, Paul knew, were keyed up and spoiling for a fight. For that reason at their assembly point under the walls of the city’s old Vauban fortress he had lectured his group severely against any vengeful bloodletting; like Joseph he had been horrified the previous evening by the sight of French soldiers and civilians attacking innocent Vietnamese on the streets, but although he had threatened his unit with courts martial if they disobeyed his orders, he had sensed that they listened unwillingly and still felt keenly the humiliation of their long imprisonment. 

At the junction where the Boulevard Luro joined Rue de Ia Grandiere, Paul halted his force in the shelter of a high wall while he checked to make sure that the route ahead was clear. He glanced briefly towards the Hopital Militaire, and the sight of the complex of verandahed medical buildings made him wonder briefly if his wife was still asleep in her room there. Then he waved his men quickly across the wide street and ran on, aware suddenly just how precariously his own personal emotions were balanced in the conflict that had so unexpectedly ensnared him. 

Now that the moment of confrontation with the Viet Minh was near, the assurance he had felt the day before was hedged around with twinges of doubt; he remembered Joseph’s earnest expression when speaking of the massive popular demonstrations of support for the Viet Minh he’d seen in the north, and he wondered if perhaps he might now be betraying all his earlier instincts. Seeing how his father’s generation had embittered contacts between his country and the Annamese had made him determined above all else not to repeat those mistakes; right up until his father’s violent death at the hands of Annamese assassins, these feelings had made their relationship strained. Perhaps his anxiety to compensate for the insensitivity of his father’s generation towards the Annamese had even played a subconscious part in his decision to marry Lan; he couldn’t be sure. Although he was effusive in his love for her and their son, he was aware that there had always been a hint of reserve on her side, and occasionally he’d wondered in the back of his mind whether he had made an impossible choice. Now, in the aftermath of the war, the people of her country had out of the blue taken control of their own destiny for the first time in a century, and he was about to help break their fragile grip on freedom arid return them once more to a state of colonial bondage. Didn’t that make nonsense of everything he’d believed in the past? 

In the distance the pillared façade of the Hotel de Vile came into view at the end of the Boulevard Charner, and when he caught sight of the ragged Viet Minh guerrillas on sentry duty outside its lighted windows, he braced himself inwardly. Surely this wasn’t the way it should happen! For the sake of the many Annamese who were loyal to France, wasn’t it the duty of all honorable Frenchmen to give their backward country a better start than this, to guide them more slowly towards a truly democratic freedom? With the Viet Minh in control, wouldn’t French tutelage be replaced by something much worse 

domination by Moscow through the Comintern? Suddenly the confidence in the rightness of his choice returned with a rush and, waving his men into a narrow side-turning that lead to the rear of the Viet Minh headquarters, he concentrated his mind again on the task of leading them unseen towards their target. 

Unknown to the French attacking force, almost all the members of the Viet Minh Committee for the South had already fled from the Hotel de Ville. They had been virtually living in the former city hall since General Gracey ordered them out of the palace of the governor of Cochin-China where they had set up their original administration; but the previous evening their alert intelligence network had learned of the intended French attack, and all but one of the committee’s members had slipped away quietly into the night with their families, Only Ngo Van Loc, who had no close relatives in Saigon, volunteered to remain, to forestall any French claim that their administration had deserted and abdicated its rule, and as dawn approached, he lay dozing on a camp bed in an empty attic beneath the clock-tower belfry that crowned the ornate, turn-of-the-century building. On the floor beside the bed lay a stolen Japanese machine pistol, and a young Viet Minh guard cradled a similar weapon in his arms as he dozed in a chair by the door. 

Both of them woke with a start when the Street outside was filled suddenly with the roar of gunfire; the Viet Minh sentries before the doors were scythed down without warning by a sustained burst from the paratroopers’ automatic weapons, and moments later they heard the sound of shots and running feet coming from the lower floors. Ngo Van Loc listened for a moment then ordered the young guard to conceal himself in a cupboard at the back of the room. When he’d closed the door, Loc stationed himself with his back against it, holding his own machine pistol in front of him. Slowly the noise made by the French troops grew louder as they mounted the stairs to the upper floors, and he could clearly bear their shouts of anger as they discovered that the building was virtually empty. The crash of filing cabinets being overturned and ransacked reached his ears, then he heard the rush of feet in the corridor leading to the attic. 

He had locked the flimsy door, but the paratroopers kicked it down and even before they caught sight of him, two of them opened fire simultaneously. Loc threw himself to the floor to avoid the hap-hazard fusillade, dropping his own weapon in the process, and the paratroopers forced the door back on its hinges before stepping into the room with the muzzles of their guns trained on him. Like the major who followed them in, their faces looked grotesque in the half-light, smeared with black face paint, and he tried in vain to move aside as the first paratrooper aimed a vicious kick at his face. The toe of the French soldier’s boot caught his temple, stunning him, and only hazily did he hear Paul Devraux’s angry shout as he ordered his men to stand back. 

When he dropped to his knees beside Loc, Paul recognized his father’s old hunting camp “boy” at once. “Loc, it’s me— Paul!” he said quickly. Bending over him, he slipped an arm beneath Loc’s narrow shoulders and lifted him into a sitting position. He called loudly for a medical orderly, and when the medic panted up the stairs, he took his satchel’ from him and pressed a gauze pad soaked in surgical spirit against the bloody gash that the paratrooper’s boot had opened up across Loc’s cheek. When he had staunched the blood, he laid the gauze aside with a muffled sigh. “I’m sorry, Loc, that it’s come to this.” 

Loc glowered at him, saying nothing, his face a mask of loathing. He took a deep breath and seemed to gather himself to speak, but without warning, he changed his mind and spat deliberately in Paul’s face. 

The French officer sat back on his heels and wiped his cheek slowly with his sleeve. “You shouldn’t blame all Frenchmen for the actions of a few, Loc,” he said wearily. “You’ll be granted independence one day— hut it’ll take time.” 

Loc glared ferociously round at the two paratroopers who still held their automatic weapons pointing at his head; then he swung back to face Paul. “Our hatred for France knows no bounds. We’ll fight for our freedom with our last drop of blood.” 

Appalled by the depth of hatred in the eyes of the Vietnamese, Paul hauled himself slowly to his feet; inside he felt a growing sense of despair, and he had begun to turn away when he heard Loc scream a frantic order from the floor in his own language. 

“Giet! Giet! — Kill the officer!” 

Glancing over his shoulder, Paul saw the door of the cupboard at the back of the room fly open, and an instant later the young guard’s machine pistol spat flame. He felt the bullets strike him high in the back and their impact spun him around and flung him across the room. Halfway through the burst the guns of the paratroopers opened up and riddled the scrawny body of the young Vietnamese with more than a dozen bullets. Then they turned their weapons on Loc, and shot him again and again in the chest and head until his limbs finally stopped twitching and he lay still in a spreading pool of his own blood. 

Lieutenant David Hawke spun the wheel of the OSS jeep right, then left, and slammed the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards to send the little vehicle careering through a broken roadblock on the Avenue Gallieni. The crash of mortars and the sudden stutter of heavy machine-gun fire only fifty yards from where they had emerged onto the boulevard told Hawke and Joseph they had almost fallen into another running fight between a platoon of the First Gurkha Rifles and a large force of Viet Minh guerrillas. The swarthy little Nepalese soldiers were trying to clear and hold the Avenue Gallieni that ran south beyond the railway station towards Cholon, but as fast as they drove the guerrillas out of one section, they were reappearing at another point and throwing up new barricades. In the distance Joseph could hear the deep boom of twenty-five-pounders, and from time to time single- engined Spitfires and Mosquitoes bearing the red, white and blue roundels of the British Royal Air Force roared low overhead to strafe a Viet Minh strongpoint. 

It was September 27, and for the fourth day running the Vietnamese were making frenzied attacks on the center of Saigon from all directions, infiltrating sabotage squads towards the city’s vital installations and trying to mount lightning raids on the British and French headquarters. The three thousand British troops were hard pressed to contain the attacks, and although Japanese units had been thrown into the battle, the guerrillas were already proving themselves a resourceful and elusive enemy. 

When a new volley of shots rang out from an unseen group of guerrillas, pitting the wall of a building ten yards ahead of them, Joseph tugged his helmet low over his eyes and ducked, cursing, below the level of the dashboard. 

“May the devil take Gracey’s balls for shish-kebabs,” muttered Hawke angrily as he swung the bucking vehicle out of the line of fire and beaded across the square in front of the railway station. “Who does he think he is? ‘Only the British commanding officer’s limousine will fly a flag of any kind’! If we could fly the Stars and Stripes from this damned jeep, the trigger-happy natives might stop shooting at us. Shall I get us a flag?” 

“Better not, David,” replied Joseph, keeping a wary eye on the road ahead. “The British are crazy enough right now to court- martial all of us for insubordination if we don’t stick to orders.” 

Hawke nodded in reluctant agreement. During the four days that had passed since the French coup, they had watched with a growing sense of anger and frustration as fighting engulfed the city. After being woken by the sound of continuous gunfire early on Sunday morning, they had driven into the center of the city to find the French tricolor already fluttering from flagstaffs on the Hotel de Ville, the governor general’s palace and all other public buildings. As the day wore on they had witnessed the same kind of ugly scenes they’d first seen on a small scale the night before; finding the Hotel de Ville deserted, the French troops had begun to make house-to-house searches, and countless Vietnamese were beaten in the streets or marched off to prison with their hands tied as the long pent-up emotions of the soldiers and the French civilians exploded in an hysterical lust for revenge. 

Within twenty-four hours the outraged Vietnamese struck back, declaring a general strike and launching successful attacks on the power station and the water works; the central markets had been set ablate, and roadblocks were erected all around the city so that during the night Saigon became a burning, barricaded enclave without water or electricity. In those nightmarish conditions the Binh Xuyen had carried out a terrible massacre of French civilian officials and their families in a quarter of Saigon that should have been guarded by Japanese troops; nearly two hundred men, women and children had been hacked to death and tortured in their beds during a night of barbaric atrocities, and two hundred more had been carried off as hostages. The next day Joseph and Hawke had watched thousands of French civilians flock to the Continental Palace Hotel, which was turned into a fortified strongpoint, and there the coiol2s and their families huddled on the floors of the corridors and public rooms as the fighting raged all around them in the city outside. 

Horrified by the turn of events, General Gracey had confined the French troops to their barracks again, only twenty-four hours after freeing them, and he had arres1e&the4apa-nese-commander, Field Marshal Count Terauchi; after threatening to charge him with war crimes, the British general had ordered the Japanese officer to send his men immediately into the battle lines against the Vietnamese, and Joseph and Hawke had quickly become accustomed to the sight of fully armed Japanese soldiers rushing into action alongside the British Gurkhas. The Japanese had helped kill more than a hundred Vietnamese in the first few days of fighting, and Joseph had listened in dismay to British officers praising the discipline and the spirit of the Japanese troops who had borne the brunt of the casualties. 

Outside the railway station a company of the Imperial Nipponese Army was mounting up into trucks under the direction of a British officer, and on catching sight of them Joseph let out an exclamation of disgust. “Goddamnit! How can they live with themselves when they’re using enemies to fight our friends? How must those brave little Gurkha tribesmen who fought the Japanese to a standstill in Burma feel rushing around with men who two months ago were killing their closest buddies?” 

“Maybe you’ll have the chance to ask them tonight,” replied Hawke with a grim smile. “We’re invited to dine with the British officers—you, me and the major.’ 

Joseph shook his head in disbelief. 

“Takes more than a little colonial war, don’t you know, to stop the British observing the niceties of mess rules and dining-in nights,” added the Bostonian, aping a British accent. “We’ll have to sit and hold our tongues with both hands instead of eating.” 

Joseph nodded, feeling a new surge of anger rising in him at their helplessness. Watching ineffectually from the sidelines as the city descended into chaos had been a harrowing experience — not least because his own emotions were so inextricably bound up in the turmoil. For several nights he’d slept only in snatches in his uniform, and watching the brutal and shameful behavior of the French had saddened him deeply. At the same time his feelings for Lan had intensified after seeing her again, and the shock of learning that they had an eight-year-old daughter living in an obscure northern village had continued to haunt his mind day and night. He longed desperately to visit Lan again to hear more about little Tuyet, but the prospect of deceiving Paul further filled him with renewed feelings of guilt. As he watched the fighting spread, he felt a deepening sympathy too for the French officer who had committed so much of his life to the Annamese for unselfish reasons. He had been distraught to discover on visiting Colonel Cédile’s headquarters early in the week that Paul had been wounded during the early hours of the coup and had been airlifted for treatment to a military hospital at Dalat. Knowing how deeply grieved Paul must have been by the fighting and the destruction had served to heighten Joseph’s own feelings of distress anti resentment at the way the British had mishandled the crisis, and these thoughts were uppermost in his mind when he sat down to dinner that evening with the senior British officers at a table agleam with regimental silver, polished glass and linen napkins. 

Over a glass of sherry in the mess there had been some jocular discussion of the difficulty of pursuing the guerrillas when they melted into their jungle villages beyond the city borders, and as the soup arrived in plates bearing the crest of the Twentieth Indian Division, a portly major with a booming voice took up the subject again. 

“I’ve told my men that when they find it difficult to distinguish friend from foe, they must always use the maximum force available to make sure all hostiles are wiped out— maximum force!” He rolled the phrase off his tongue with obvious relish, “If one uses too little, one might not live to tell the tale — but if one uses too much, no great harm is done. That’s what I say — am I right?” He chuckled and sipped his glass of claret appreciatively, then looked around for approval. 

Little murmurs of agreement rose from all round the table. “Quite so, I’ve even written it into my daily orders,” said a ruddy- faced colonel with obvious pride, touching the corners of his drooping blond mustache with his linen napkin. “I tell my chaps it’s perfectly legitimate to treat all locals found anywhere near the scene of shooting as hostiles — and damned treacherous ones at that. It seems to be getting the required results too, I must say.” 

The officer on Joseph’s right hand, Colonel Sir Harold Boyce- Lewis, his intelligence counterpart, raised an amused eyebrow in Joseph’s direction. “Seems your Viet Minh chums are getting more than they bargained for, captain, doesn’t it?” he said dryly. “In that report you sent us they made a lot of noise about wanting to negotiate, but the way I read it they really wanted to trigger off a good old-fashioned shooting war to make their tin-pot revolution look a bit more realistic. Cédile assures me the vast majority of the Vietnamese support the French and want to see orderly French rule restored.” 

Joseph stared at Boyce-Lewis in disbelief. “You couldn’t be more wrong, colonel. All hut a tiny minority of the Vietnamese loathe the French — and with good cause. They’re deeply outraged that Britain has helped take away the first taste of freedom they’ve had for a hundred years. But the Viet Minh are realists — I know because I’ve talked to Ho Chi Minh in the north. He’s a hardheaded political leader and he knows they still need France. The Viet Minh were desperate for some negotiated return of the French that would recognize their sovereignty.” 

“My dear fellow, recognition of a Vietnamese government would be a political act. We’re only soldiers, remember.” Boyce- Lewis smiled pityingly. “The manual of military law, as you should know, lays down that the commander of an occupying army must try to observe the existing laws of the country. We’re here to maintain order. Their little revolution is disturbing good order. I think we’re following the book pretty closely; France is the sovereign power, the laws are French, nothing could be simpler. Returning power to the French is restoring the status quo. Your Viet Minh haven’t been elected by anybody.” 

“Did the people of this country elect the French to govern them?” asked Joseph, his voice growing loud with indignation. “France hasn’t been the sovereign power here by any stretch of the imagination since 1941. If the British are going to go around the world restoring that status quo, they’ll have their hands frill.” 

Boyce-Lewis bent his head towards his soup spoon and waved his free hand dismissively at Joseph. “Down here at least the Viet Minh’s just a lunatic fringe and the other nationalists have been goaded into action by the Japs who just want to make things sticky for us. That’s why they gave their arms away to the likes of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao.” 

Suddenly the disdainful tone of the British officer brought all the pent-up emotion inside Joseph to the boil and he stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over with a crash. “Listening to what’s been said here tonight makes me wonder what we fought the war for,” he said hotly, glaring down at Boyce-Lewis. “Remember the Atlantic Charter of 1941? Didn’t Churchill and Roosevelt agree we’d respect the rights of all people to choose their own form of government? You were sent here to disarm and repatriate the defeated Japanese — but instead you’re keeping their troops under arms to crush a little nation whose only sin is it wants to be free.” A shocked hush had fallen over the table, and several of the British officers were gazing at Joseph open-mouthed. “Have you seen their hand grenades made out of old food tins — their poisoned arrows and bamboo spears? Crude weapons aren’t they? But it shows how deeply they feel about getting rid of their foreign masters. We’re supposed to have fought this war to defend freedom and democracy — but all you’ve done here is put the slave-driver’s whip back in the hands of the French. That’s not something you should be proud of — in fact it’s a goddamned betrayal of everything Western democracy is supposed to stand for!” 

Joseph turned and strode white-faced to the door without looking back, leaving Lieutenant Hawke and the OSS major embarrassed and uneasy in their seats among the British staff officers. There was silence in the room for a moment or two, then Boyce-Lewis glanced towards the ranking officer present, a thin, sour-faced brigadier. 

“Best way to deal with that angry young captain, I suggest, sir, might be to declare him persona non grata and have him shipped back to Calcutta pronto, don’t you think?” 

The brigadier nodded slowly then picked up his wineglass and twisted it reflectively between his thumb and forefinger. “Indeed I do, colonel. Indeed I do.”