The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
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was during the Second World War that Viet Minh cadre, who were “armed, carefully trained and indoctrinated,” made contact with local village leaders and, as David Marr writes, “began convincing them of the inevitable collapse of the Japanese, of Allied support for the independence of colonial peoples, and of the necessity for village participation in taking over the government and defending it against all enemies.” Serious economic problems played a major role in these dramatic and historic changes, especially during the winter of 1944–45 when the increasing demand for rice by the Japanese and the French, breaches in the Red River dike system, and disruption of communications between northern and southern Vietnam because of Allied bombing produced a terrible famine in northern Vietnam, killing an estimated one to two million people.10
Near the end of the Second World War, in March 1945, the Japanese disarmed French troops and interned French civilians there; combined with the economic crises and famine, this created a political vacuum that helped to produce the revolutionary movement that would lead to the end of French colonialism. This occurred in part because “enough Vietnamese knew that a proud history and a proud culture were worth fighting for,” but also because a revolution had arisen during the French absence that gave “millions of poorer peasants a vision of massive social and economic readjustment once the ‘barbarians’ were ejected.”11
In the late 1940s, the French began to fear a Communist victory in China, and they shifted to anti-Communism as the key to their gaining U.S. support on Vietnam. They played this card because they knew that this shift to an anti-Communist rather than a colonial war helped make their case for U.S. assistance. The Eisenhower administration supported them, as it saw the Viet Minh as simply a tool of Soviet and Chinese expansion, even though the Soviet Union had ignored the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its critical early years, and the Viet Minh had gained power four years before the Chinese revolution could possibly provide any material assistance.12
Despite all the propaganda about Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh as tools of the Soviet Union, historian Fredrick Logevall points out that Ho could not obtain “meaningful assistance” from Soviet dictator Stalin, who was more concerned about Europe and thought that Ho was “too independent-minded to be trusted.” The French Communist Party, “anxious to appear patriotic and moderate before the metropolitan electorate, repeatedly refused [Ho’s] pleas for support, and indeed connived in the venture of reconquest.”13
Logevall discusses the visit that John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts congressman, made to Vietnam in 1951. About his trip, Kennedy noted: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.” The United States should take a different path from the collapsing British and French empires and show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality.” After returning home, he stated, “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire.… There is no broad general support [for] the native Vietnamese government among the people of that area.” It is “a puppet government” and every neutral observer believes that Ho and the Communists would win a “free election.”14 A decade later Kennedy administration officials and the corporate media harshly criticized those citizens who made similar criticisms of Kennedy’s support of the U.S.-backed Diem regime.
Some two decades after Kennedy’s first assessment of French colonialism, Ho, and U.S. options in Vietnam, Abbot Low Moffat, who had been there at the end of the Second World War, and later headed the State Department’s Division of Southeast Asian Affairs, offered the following assessment of Ho Chi Minh:
I have never met an American … who had ever met Ho Chi Minh who did not reach the same belief: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist. He was also a Communist and believed that Communism offered the best hope for the Vietnamese people. But his loyalty was to his people. When I was in Indo-China it was striking how the top echelon of competent French officials held almost exclusively the same view.15
Despite Moffat’s glowing comment about Ho Chi Minh, there were different views among OSS personnel in Vietnam regarding him and the Viet Minh, ranging from admiration and sympathy to outright condemnation and hostility based on his Communist philosophy and activism.
Truoung Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front who spent thirty years in the resistance movement against the French, Diem, and the United States, was a double agent. After the war ended in 1975, he became “profoundly disillusioned by the massive political repression and economic chaos the new government brought with it,” fleeing Vietnam and living in exile in Paris. A longtime admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Truoung felt that Ho’s motivations were similar to his own, and that the former’s Communism ultimately served the cause of Vietnamese nationalism. Ho had the welfare of the people at heart, and Truoung gave “[the] Northern government the benefit of the doubt on this score, knowing that the restoration of nationhood would be a long and difficult process..” Although Ho was deeply involved with the international Communist movement, he had forged the struggle of independence from nationalism and communism, shaped by a “unique political vision [that] always retained a sensitivity to options and potential allies.”16
Although the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese and some members of the American OSS respected Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, the Communist-led resistance struggle should not be romanticized. Bitter and repressive French colonial policies shaped internal struggles, including the elimination of rivals, secret and hierarchical decision making, and violent excesses in the land reform program. Ho recognized the land reform excesses, however, and moved to stop the violence and remove the responsible officials. The nature of French colonialism and later direct U.S. intervention forced the Communist leadership to engage in secretive and authoritarian practices. These internal contradictions must be balanced, however, by decades of courage and heroic leadership in the struggle for independence and self-determination, something that could never be imagined or possible under the French or Americans. The Communists offered far greater hope to the Vietnamese than the foreign intervention and repression that nearly destroyed the country.17
The Second World War
The Viet Minh led the resistance against the Japanese and the French. During the war, they worked with officers of the OSS who had been sent to Vietnam to help organize guerrilla efforts against the Japanese. The Viet Minh helped rescue American pilots who were shot down over Indochina, and in return received weapons and training. Essentially “a nationalist-front organization” led by the Indochinese Communist Party the Viet Minh attracted Vietnamese patriots “in a common struggle against the Japanese and the French [by] emphasizing … patriotic themes that would appeal to radicals and moderates alike.”18
In March 1945, the Japanese overthrew French administrative authorities in Vietnam and imprisoned them and French citizens, and formed a regime headed by the emperor Bai Dai, who had faithfully served the colonial regime. During the period between this takeover and the end of the Second World War in early September 1945, Viet Minh territory “expanded to include six provinces in northern Vietnam. In this ‘liberated zone,’ entirely new local governments were established, self-defense forces recruited, taxes abolished, rents reduced, and, in some places, land that had belonged to French landlords was seized and redistributed.”19
By early September 1945, Viet Minh forces had defeated the combined Japanese-French colonialists, and on September 2, before hundreds of thousands of people in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). It became the first former European colony to establish a popular democratic government after the war. At this independence celebration, the opening lines of Ho’s speech were taken from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Americans were the only honored foreign guests, and Major Archimedes Patti of the OSS stood next to General Giap, the commander of the Viet Minh forces. Some Americans who were in Hanoi and Saigon during the war supported the Viet Minh struggle; they “warned of imminent cold war and recommended U.S. withdrawal from the area, [and] also argued against providing assistance to France for the purpose of returning to Vietnam.” The Truman administration ignored their recommendations.20
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