The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
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they were making history, not just witnessing it. Many sensed that their lives were changing irrevocably.…” This historic Vietnamese struggle was to be blocked by U.S. allies Britain and France. In late September 1945, the British rearmed some fourteen hundred French soldiers and civilians who “in the name of restoring law and order,” rampaged through Saigon, “cursing, beating up, detaining, and otherwise offending any native encountered.” Vietnamese then retaliated by killing more than a hundred and fifty French civilians; many were women and children. Later that fall, British, French, and Japanese troops attacked the Viet Minh near Saigon.21 Let this historical fact sink in: Japanese troops, who a few months earlier were killing and wounding British and U.S. troops, now joined British forces trying to destroy Vietnamese resistance against the returning French colonialists.
In early 1950, the Vietnamese resistance against the French was strengthened when the People’s Republic of China became the first nation to formally recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. China sent American weapons and ammunition it had captured in Korea, and this allowed General Giap to arm new divisions in the fight against the French. Chinese aid later included anti-aircraft units that Giap used in the May 1954 victory over the French at the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu. During this period and into the early years of the American war, the Chinese “exerted considerable influence” over Vietnamese Communists until their own Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. 22 Relations worsened considerably after President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, eventually leading to war in 1979 when the Chinese invaded Vietnam. President Jimmy Carter supported this invasion, urged on by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
After the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, David Marr writes, “the most important question” was how much assistance the United States would provide France; this was done “above all by facilitating the arrival of French troops, equipment, and supplies … Most French soldiers were outfitted with U.S. weapons and uniforms, and they roared around in U.S. jeeps, trucks, and armored cars—a startling, depressing sight for Vietnamese who had hoped for American neutrality, if not outright support.” As the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s, the Truman administration increased its economic and military support to the French, becoming more generous after the Chinese Communist Revolution in late 1949, “when Indochina came to be seen as a vital segment of the global anticommunist front line.”23
Historian Michael Gillen contends that the United States missed an opportunity when its officials did not listen to OSS agents on the ground in Vietnam, such as Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, who wrote from Saigon in September 1945: “Cochinchina [southern Vietnam] is burning, the French and the British are finished here, and we [the Americans] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.” Dewey became the first U.S. casualty of the war in Vietnam when he was killed by Viet Minh soldiers at a military checkpoint.24
Historians point out that President Franklin Roosevelt was not happy with French colonialism and wished to see it end after the Second World War. Historian Michael H. Hunt argues that Roosevelt’s verbal opposition to French control of Vietnam—something the United States did not oppose during his presidency—was a form of racism that “was common for his generation and that would prove a consistent strand in later U.S. policies.” FDR did not believe that “the peoples of Indochina and other ‘brown people in the East,’ such as the Koreans,” were able “to exercise freedom with wisdom.” 25
Hunt writes that the August 1945 revolution was “a promising bid for full-fledged independence.” The Viet Minh “commanded the political high ground as the only effective political group … with an untarnished patriotic reputation … and a demonstrated capacity to mobilize rural support. From that position, it had sponsored a government with national pretensions and broad representation.”26
Vietnam’s declared independence did not last long, however, as immediately after the Second World War U.S. material support for French colonialism grew dramatically. France desperately needed American troopships and other military equipment to transport its colonial troops to Vietnam. Harold Issacs, a war reporter for Newsweek, was in Saigon as these troops came off American ships: there were “thousands every week, first in French transports and then in a long succession of American ships, flying the American flag and manned by American crews.… They marched past cheering crowds of relieved French civilians and moved out … to restore French order.”27
Sailors from the USS Stamford Victory were among the few Americans to see the sight of “fully armed Japanese soldiers, several weeks after [Victory over Japan] Day, being employed by the British in Vietnam.” The crews of this and other U.S. ships witnessed the Vietnamese reaction. One sailor reported that they “all spoke to us of their hatred of the French and their wonder at the Americans [for] bringing the French invaders back.” These members of the National Maritime Union (NMU) protested “the policy of the United States Government in chartering ships, flying the American flag,” to transport French troops “in order to subjugate the native population of Vietnam.”28 In a stunning shift in history, U.S. vessels brought French troops to Vietnam so they could join recently released Japanese troops to support France’s attempt to crush the Vietnamese independence movement. The sailors’ action was the first organized antiwar protest against Washington’s policy, twenty years before campus protests began in 1965.
The French-Indochina War and U.S. Involvement
Vietnamese resistance against the returning French expanded, and by early 1946, “under their own government and without assistance from any foreign country, the people of Northern and Central Vietnam were free of famine and colonial taxation, and on the way to universal literacy.” But these accomplishments did not matter as the French began to retake Vietnam, calling its aggression fighting Communists. The United States presented its alliance with France as protecting the “free world” and defending against the spread of totalitarian Communism. This language was necessary to hide the real purposes of U.S. support. Historian Marilyn Young contends that the American public did not look “directly at the [French] army receiving this aid,” which included thousands of French Foreign Legionnaires who had fought for the Nazis.29 How many Americans knew that these former Nazi troops were part of the French colonial forces attempting to reconquer Vietnam? How many today know this fact?
Gabriel Kolko and H. Bruce Franklin stress the powerful impact of these U.S. decisions to help France in Vietnam. Kolko argues that U.S. support for French colonialism after the war was “logical as a means of stopping the triumph of the Left … not only in that nation but throughout the Far East.” When de Gaulle visited President Truman in August 1945, he was told that the United States “favored the return of France to Indo-China. The decision would shape the course of world history for decades.” Franklin points out that the White House and the Pentagon “tried from the very beginning to keep their actions secret. When they decided to send Americans to fight in Vietnam, they conspired at first to wage war covertly, later to conceal how the war was being conducted, and finally to expunge the memory of the entire affair or bury it under mounds of false images.”30
There was a temporary pause in the French-Viet Minh conflict in March 1946, when France signed an agreement with Ho’s government that “recognized the Republic of Vietnam as a Free State … within the … French Union.” This government, therefore, was the only legal one in Vietnam. But France quickly withdrew its recognition and set up a client regime in southern Vietnam. The betrayal led to armed conflict when the French navy shelled Haiphong harbor in November 1946, killing an estimated six thousand civilians; a month later, France occupied Hanoi, and the war soon spread throughout all of Vietnam. From the moment the Vietnamese declared their independence in September 1945, and certainly after a free and general election throughout Vietnam in January 1946 resulted in an overwhelming victory for Ho Chi Minh and his supporters, any U.S. involvement against this independent state, whether by supporting the French or setting up a separate regime in the South, was an act of aggression deserving of resistance.
The propaganda from Washington and the mainstream media portrayed the Vietnamese as tools of the Soviet Union, even though the latter did not recognize or aid the Ho government for five years after it declared independence. This is another inconvenient fact that contradicts the story