In 1945 to all appearances the Western nations
once more dominated the world, including all of
Asia. They had between them at their wartime
conference mapped out the global distribution of
power. They could display awesome military
power on land, on sea and in the air and their
technological superiority had been revealed at its
most ruthless in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
once invincible Japanese had been humbled and
crushed and had become subject to American
rule. So in 1945 why should the Europeans not
regain their old colonies in Asia? Britain chose not
to maintain its imperial role in the Indian subcontinent
while resuming its control of Malaya
and Hong Kong. The Dutch, with British help,
intended to regain the Dutch East Indies, and the
French to regain Indo-China. But the peoples of
Asia were not simply waiting to welcome back
their old masters. Everywhere there were political
movements demanding independence and ready
to fight for it, generally under leadership inspired
by Marxist ideologies. The Europeans would have
to use force to regain colonial mastery.
In 1945, the Cold War had not yet become
the decisive influence on the shaping of Western
policies. The Soviet Union was not then the most
formidable opponent of British, French and
Dutch colonial policies: at most, it gave ideological
support to nationalist movements. It was the
US that opposed European colonialism.
The Second World War shattered the image of
Western superiority in Asia. Within one decade
from 1945 to 1955, nearly all the Western
colonies and territorial empires were transformed.
The Philippines gained independence in 1946,
India in 1947, Ceylon and Burma the following
year; in 1949 the Netherlands relinquished its
300-year rule over the Dutch East Indies; the
French were defeated in Indo-China in 1954; and
the British granted independence to Malaya in
1957. The most far-reaching transformation
occurred on the mainland of eastern Asia, in
China. The era of Chinese disintegration came to
an end with the communist victory of 1949.
During the four decades that followed, China
successfully asserted its independence from
Western controls. This pattern of enormous
change emerged during the first four critical years
following the Second World War. The first short
phase lasted for just a few weeks, from the collapse
of Japanese power until the British and
American military commands were able to send
troops; the Americans to the Philippines and
Korea, the British to Malaya, to ‘French’ Indo-
China and to the Dutch East Indies. During the
brief interval before the troops arrived, the southeast
Asian countries were still subject to the
uncertain Japanese military. A variety of indigenous
nationalist and socialist factions competed for
power. Their goal was independence, but they
had to decide what tactics to adopt towards the
expected Western military reoccupation. The
reoccupation, which opens a new phase, was
nowhere seriously resisted at first. The hope that
independence would be attained by agreement
with the West was not fulfilled except on the
Indian continent and later in Malaya.
The US had never felt at ease as a colonial power,
and Americans had a bad conscience about the
forcible suppression of Filipino nationalism at the
turn of the century. Strategic considerations had
first taken the US navy to the Spanish Philippine
Islands in 1898, which, with a naval base in Manila
Bay, became America’s most advanced outpost in
the Pacific. For more than a century, the US
retained a strong presence in the Philippines.
For the US the economic benefits of colonial
possession were never sufficient, except to specialinterest
groups, to dominate relationships. The
Philippines, moreover, were too distant and the
‘brown’ Filipino population too numerous – 6
million in 1900, 48 million in 1980 – to consider
their absorption in a racially conscious American
society. Self-government, and eventually some
form of independence, was therefore seen early on
as the only solution. As, colonial rulers, the
Americans were unique in virtually handing over
the administration of the country to its indigenous
population. By 1903, Filipinos held half the
US colonial appointments; by the close of the
1920s, virtually the whole of the colonial government
in the Philippines was in the hands of
Filipinos.
Forty years of American control and tutelage
left an indelible mark on the Philippines. A
Filipino political and economic elite had developed,
whose fortunes as landowners, merchants,
investors and industrialists were closely tied to
the US. Trade boomed with the opening of the
US market to Philippine exports and with US
investment in the islands themselves. From the
American point of view during the depression
years, economic preferential guarantees to the
Philippines were proving disadvantageous. There
were demands to restrict Philippine imports to
the US. The Philippines, not altogether willingly,
were being pushed towards independence in
the 1930s. The upper crust of Filipinos, who
gained so much from the American connection,
remained ambiguous about complete independence
and sought a special American–Filipino relationship.
Attempts to reconcile Filipino desire for
independence and the economic interests of the
Philippines and the US eventually led to the
promise in 1934 of independence after a twelveyear
transitional period. But in 1942 the Japanese
invasion brought the possibility of a transfer to a
halt. The barbarous occupation strengthened
American–Filipino bonds despite a Japanese
proclamation of Philippine ‘independence’ and
the existence of some Filipino collaborators.
When General MacArthur returned, he was hailed
with genuine enthusiasm by the great majority of
Filipinos who hated the Japanese. The destruction
caused by the war was enormous. One million
lives were lost, the economy shattered, most of
industry destroyed as well as agricultural production
reduced to ruin and Manila devastated.
American reoccupation did not, however,
usher in a tranquil period. The Americans upheld
the existing social order of the landowners and
the wealthy. The conservative post-1945 regime
established in the Philippines clashed with the
guerrillas, the Hukbalahap, or Huk for short. The
Huk guerrillas had first fought the Japanese as
well as their rivals. They retained their arms in
1945 and, to begin with, cooperated with
MacArthur. They wished to change Philippine
society radically, basing their power on the landless,
debt-ridden peasants and urban poor. They
were also nationalists who wanted to end the
semi-colonial relationship with the US. Their
support in the country as a whole was not strong
in 1945 and they declared they were ready to participate
in elections and in the constitutional
process. With their aims of social revolution,
however, and their potential to engage in an
armed struggle, they were regarded by the conservatives
who held power in the government as
a deadly danger to stability and order. The Huk’s
armed militia thus continued to pose a threat to
the prosperous Filipino leadership. As early as
1945, members of the Huk militia were executed
by the Filipino government.
The Communist Party of the Philippines took
part in the 1946 elections, but the six elected
deputies were disbarred from the Filipino Congress.
In 1946 drastic action was ordered against
the Huk rising of peasants, with a military sweep
to root out the Huk militia in central Luzon
Island. The Huk responded with an all-out
armed rebellion in 1948, their supporters nearly
200,000 strong. In 1949 they were joined by the
Philippine Communist Party and set up a provisional
revolutionary government. The struggle
went on for years; by 1954 they were worn down
and superior government forces crushed them.
The government had also won some of the peasants
away from supporting the rebels by offers of
land and resettlement in protected villages.
In the US, by then, the Huk were identified
as forming part of the worldwide communist conspiracy
of subversion in Asia, rather than as an
extreme socialist–communist Filipino movement
resorting to terrorist tactics and deriving their
support from the economic condition of landless
peasants. Communist international support was
negligible. The chief victims of Huk recruitment
and terrorism and of government reprisals were
the peasants caught in the nutcracker of Huk
guerrillas, the landlords and the government.
In 1946 the US granted formal independence to
the Philippines, but it came with strings attached.
The US required that 100 locations should be
reserved for US military bases and leased for
ninety-nine years, though in 1959 this was
reduced to twenty-five. The US constructed two
great naval bases, an airbase and a rest camp,
which formed a key to US security planning in
the Pacific until the 1990s. The US–Philippine
defence agreement, their alliances and the presence
of the bases with thousands of US personnel
were regarded by Filipino nationalists as
giving them a semi-colonial status. The US did
not hold itself aloof from internal politics either.
Special economic rights for American businessmen
were also secured, and all these conditions
were linked to large-scale US aid and privileged
access to the US market.
The Philippine government has introduced
limited land reforms since 1954 but has rejected
socialism. The landlord–tenant relationship was
upheld, but the harshness of landlord exploitation
was somewhat limited. With American support
the Filipino ruling groups retained power. They,
in turn, were not anxious to cut the connection
with the Americans. The US has suffered from
being identified with the wealthy and corrupt
ruling circles amid widespread poverty. Despite a
large amount of US financial aid intended to
restore the war-shattered Philippines and to help
the peasants and the urban poor, little reconstruction
was undertaken and the majority of the
poor did not benefit: the wealthy Filipinos lined
their own pockets. The continuation of distress
among the peasantry provided the seedbed that
nourished the Huk movement.
The diversity of American objectives in what
had virtually been a colony could not be reconciled
satisfactorily: to grant independence, to prevent
a communist–socialist alliance from attaining
power by the ballot box or arms, to ensure genuine
basic economic reforms, to provide for the
global security interests of the US in Asia, and to
find friendly and reliable partners among the
Filipino political leadership. The US, as a result,
strengthened the few who exploited the weak and
was blamed for their corruption. But US policy
was overshadowed, especially after 1950, by one
aim: to stem the advance of communism in Asia.
This was seen primarily not as an internal Asian
problem. The overriding objective was to create a
defensive Asian block against the external enemy,
the Soviet Union, and its ally, communist China.
In pursuit of this aim, the US felt its options were
limited to supporting political leaders it would not
otherwise have backed. It also led the US, despite
its earlier disapproval, into a policy of backing the
French, who sought to restore their colonial
empire in Indo-China.
Of all the attempts by European nations to
reclaim their former empires in south-east Asia, it
looked as if Britain’s return to the Malayan peninsula
and Singapore would be the least troublesome.
During the war the most active resistance
to the Japanese had been mounted by the
Chinese in Malaya, the majority of whom identified
themselves with the communist leadership of
the Malay Communist Party; the party was, in
fact, almost totally composed of Chinese immigrants
to Malaya. The Allies had supported them
during the war and, afterwards, had recognised
their contribution. They alone among the three
races in Malaya had actively fought against the
Japanese, and for a good reason: the Japanese,
during the early years of occupation from 1942
to 1943, oppressed the Chinese more savagely
than the other two nationalities living in Malaya,
the Indian immigrants and the indigenous
Malays. Indeed, many Malays and Indians had
collaborated with the Japanese and hoped to
gain independence with Japanese consent. The
Japanese later became more accommodating
towards the anti-communist Chinese of the business
community, whose help they needed. They
might even have granted independence, at least
nominally, had it not been for the sudden end of
the war in August 1945.
The British returned to Malaya unopposed.
The Chinese communists had decided to collaborate
with them and to follow the constitutional
path to independence. Chinese guerrilla groups
came out of the forest where they had carried on
the armed struggle and disbanded, hiding their
weapons in the jungle as a precaution. The colonial
administration hoped to re-establish peace
and good order and to prepare for the electoral
participation of all three races in Malaya on a basis
of equality. These early plans envisaged that the
peninsula of Malaya would be unified, the traditional
Malay rulers deprived of most of their
powers and a more democratic political regime
introduced. Singapore, largely Chinese and a
British colony, would be developed separately.
But the British solution satisfied no one. The
leaders of the 3.5 million Malays, most of whom
were peasants belonging to the poorest section of
society, feared that by conceding equal rights to
more than 2 million Chinese and 700,000 Indian
immigrants they would lose control of their own
country. They therefore opposed the reduction of
the powers of the Malay rulers, who at least
ensured that Malaya was ruled by Malays. The
Chinese also objected. They were against the
separation of Singapore from the rest of Malaya,
as this would reduce their influence outside
Singapore. In the end the British government had
to withdraw these proposals. In the meantime,
both the Chinese communists and the Malays
soon realised that, while the British intended
to rule benignly, their timetable for Malayan
independence was long term indeed. They had
resumed imperial rule in Malaya, not for reasons
of false national pride, but because Malayan
rubber and Malayan tin were vital export earners
for the shaky post-war British economy. When
the standard of living of the British people was at
stake, the Labour government that came to power
in 1945 was as imperialist as the Conservatives.
In 1946, among the majority of the Malays, a
non-militant party was formed, the United Malay
National Organisation, to safeguard the rights
of the Malayans and of the Malay rulers. The
Chinese communists also became active in
politics. They demanded that the British should
leave Malaya and tried to make it unprofitable for
them to stay, by infiltrating trade unions and
calling strikes. When this had no effect they escalated
their pressure by mounting terrorist attacks
on the British rubber plantations and by murdering
planters. Unable to make headway by constitutional
means, the Chinese communists in 1948
resorted to an all-out armed struggle from jungle
bases. But in Malaya they constituted less than
half the population, and in the war – or
Emergency, as the British called it – that followed
they never enjoyed any support or sympathy from
the Malays. With the help of some 100,000 Malay
police, 10,000 British and Commonwealth
troops, including Gurkhas, the British pursued
the Chinese into the jungle. Although the
Chinese guerrillas never amounted to more than
6,000, to defeat them was an exceedingly difficult
military operation. It involved the resettlement of
some half a million Chinese peasants who had
been eking out a living in the jungle and upon
whom the Chinese guerrillas relied for food supplies.
The Chinese kept up resistance for more
than a decade, but by 1952 the real threat they
posed had been removed.
In one significant respect, the communist insurrection
simplified matters: those Chinese who did
not support the communists now found common
ground with the Malays. The future of Singapore
remained a thorny problem, but the future of
Malaya would now be settled in negotiation with
the British; the Malays and anti-communist
Chinese wanted neither an economic nor a social
revolution, nor indeed an armed struggle for
independence. The Malayans, skilfully led by the
aristocratic Tunku Abdul Rahman, and the moderate
Chinese under Tan Cheng Lock formed an
Alliance Party calling for independence. It won
overwhelming support in Malaya. The negotiations
for independence were long and drawn out,
but they reached a successful conclusion in 1957.
The Federation of Malaya, independent but a
member of the Commonwealth, was created.
Singapore was to receive independence separately
when it withdrew from the federation in 1965.
The end of British rule and the peaceful transfer
of power to the elected representatives of
Malaya came in 1957. The Chinese communist
guerrillas could not now credibly claim that theirs
was a struggle for independence from colonial
servitude. Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tan Cheng
Lock could no longer convincingly be pictured by
the communists as mere stooges and puppets of
the British. Their tough stand in negotiations and
their subsequent success had earned them, in the
eyes of the majority of Malayans, a reputation as
genuine patriots who had created an independent
nation. The British departed voluntarily, with the
respect and friendship of the founders of the
nation, leaving a Malaya, moreover, from which
the menace of communist violence had been virtually
eradicated. Britain’s greatest imperial
achievement, perhaps, was not the acquisition of
its worldwide empire, but the manner in which it
gave it up. Its more realistic and far-sighted attitude
stood in dark contrast to those of France and
the Netherlands.
The British, in the end, accommodated themselves
to national aspirations in south-east Asia,
despite their military superiority. The Dutch, by
contrast, were militarily weak, but refused to give
way to Indonesian nationalism until forced to
yield. Yet it was the Dutch colonisers in the nineteenth
century who had made a critical contribution
to the emergence of an Indonesian sense of
nationalism by bringing together for administrative
convenience the cultures and ethnic groups
of the many islands of their Dutch East Indies
empire. The dominant group, 40 per cent of the
whole, are the Javanese people, Muslims whose
ruling class could look back on an ancient and
splendid culture. Their social structure was subordinated
rather than destroyed by the new
Dutch masters.
The majority of Indonesia’s large population,
which had reached 60 million in 1930, lived on
the overcrowded island of Java. Living standards
were low, despite belated efforts by the Dutch to
improve the lot of the ‘natives’, and population
increases – as elsewhere in the underdeveloped
world – outstripped improvements and depressed
living standards even further. Rice production in
Java could no longer feed the people adequately,
and the price of sugar, the principal export,
collapsed in the blizzard of the world economic
crisis of the 1930s. The outer islands, much less
crowded, provided the important exports of oil
and rubber. It was these commodities, essential
to any war effort, that decided Japan to launch its
‘southern drive’ of conquest and so brought it
into collision with the West.
In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese
invaders were generally welcomed as liberators in
the spring of 1942, and the Dutch bureaucracy
quickly collapsed. The mass of the people now
turned against the traditional social structures,
with the Javanese aristocracy at their apex,
through which the Dutch had ruled the islands
and imposed their policies. After years of Dutch
repression, the nationalist movement – after a
chequered history – surfaced more strongly than
ever. Communism had failed to gain a hold,
almost entirely due to the fierce repression of the
Dutch colonial government of the 1920s, which
resorted to internment and to the mass arrest of
its leaders. The continuing resentment against the
Dutch, however, enabled the two most outstanding
nationalist leaders, the economist Mohammed
Hatta and the engineer Achmed Sukarno, to rally
the various nationalist movements and to win
adherents among the educated elites. Their hour
seemed to have struck when the Dutch were
humiliated and defeated by the invading Japanese
army. But for the Indonesians one system of
repression was now replaced by another.
Although four centuries of European rule had
at one stroke been destroyed, the new Asian ‘liberators’
gave no encouragement to social revolution
or national experiments, let alone to
thoughts of true independence. They left the traditional
social structure and simply sought to
work through it as the Dutch had done. All the
same, there were now new opportunities for the
Indonesian national leadership who, the Japanese
judged, could serve a useful role in mobilising
Indonesians for the Japanese war effort. All that
really mattered to the Japanese was to exploit the
human and material resources of the islands. They
forced the various national factions to patch up
their differences and sent the Indonesian national
leaders out to penetrate the far-flung regions of
the archipelago. Since they did not regard the
Dutch as their rightful masters and friends, these
leaders had no qualms about collaborating with
the Japanese. They also established links with the
anti-Japanese underground movement. Their
dream was Indonesian independence, and to
achieve it the question of whether to work with
or against outside powers, be they Dutch or
Japanese, was a matter of tactics, not of loyalty to
foreign rulers. Thus Sukarno had no hesitation in
enjoying good relations with the Japanese military
commander of Java, given their mutual interests
and the reality of Japan’s supreme power. Later,
with the deterioration of their military prospects,
the Japanese found it expedient to make concessions
to Indonesian national feelings and to
promise independence. Except briefly in Java in
May 1945, and then only in outward appearance,
it was nowhere achieved under Japanese rule,
which collapsed too quickly for the changes of
policy to take effect.
The Dutch and Japanese having been defeated
in turn, at last it seemed that Indonesian independence
would be achieved peacefully. Sukarno
and Hatta nevertheless knew that they faced serious
internal and external obstacles. Within the
country, although the communists had not been
able effectively to reorganise themselves after their
suppression by the Dutch, a new, youthful generation
of radical leaders working for social revolution
had emerged during the Second World War. More
seriously still, British and Indian troops under
Mountbatten’s supreme command landed in
Indonesia in September 1945, not merely to disarm
the Japanese but, as it soon turned out, to
restore Indonesia to Dutch rule. The Indonesians
had, however, made good use of the hiatus
between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of
Allied troops. In August, that is a month before
the British landed, a constitution was agreed and
an independent Indonesian republic proclaimed.
A sizeable armed militia of Indonesians, largely
trained by the Japanese, whose arms they commandeered,
controlled Java and were ready to
defend the republic. Nevertheless, after the British
landings Sukarno decided not to resist by force and
allowed the British to occupy Jakarta, the capital.
But Sukarno’s and Hatto’s authority was not sufficient
to prevent the development of Indonesian
resistance and in October 1945, despite their
efforts, the armed struggle became fiercer. In
November the British general in command of the
occupying force was killed by an Indonesian sniper
and full-scale fighting broke out, culminating in a
battle at Surabaya. No match for the British troops,
some 15,000 Indonesians died in that tragic
encounter. Bloodshed sanctified Indonesian
nationalism, and the battle of Surabaya is celebrated
as Heroes Day in Indonesia.
Struggling to recover from the effects of the
Second World War in Europe, successive Dutch
governments tenaciously attempted to resume
their colonial rule in south-east Asia. With British
help, Dutch troops despatched from Europe were
able to establish dominance over the principal
cities, but the vast countryside was another
matter. The suppression of Indonesian nationalism
required far larger resources than the
Netherlands could hope to command. Nor was
international opinion in the United Nations or in
Washington sympathetic to the Dutch. The pragmatic
British saw the Dutch struggle as wasteful
and ineffective and, after the failure of initial
attempts at pacification, concluded that the
Dutch should take the same road as the British
were travelling in India and Burma. More and
more isolated, the Dutch hung on. Indonesia was
of immense value with its oil and rubber, but the
Dutch found themselves in a no-win position
against the fifth most populated nation in the
world, the majority of whose citizens wished
to get rid of the white colonial rulers. The
Indonesians were not strong enough to force the
Dutch army out, so Indonesian nationalists were
forced into a series of compromises and trials of
strength. The British government was glad to take
advantage of a truce in November 1946 to withdraw
completely and leave the islands to the
Indonesians and the Dutch.
The Indonesian nationalists, despite making
agreements with the Dutch authorities, did all
they could to frustrate them. In 1947 the Dutch
tried, as before the war, to crush nationalist opposition
by a so-called police action. In 1948 they
stepped up their military effort and attempted to
impose a federal solution which denied Indonesia
sovereignty, but the Indonesian political leaders
simply would not cooperate with the Dutch. The
Netherlands was therefore faced with an unending
military commitment in Indonesia which it
could not afford. Asian nationalism overcame military
and economic superiority by sheer attrition
in Indonesia, as later it did elsewhere in southeast
Asia. Crucial too were US threats to cut off
reconstruction aid if diverted to the war in
Indonesia. The Dutch bowed to the inevitable.
In December 1949 the Dutch conceded independence
to Indonesia and in August the following
year 85,000 Dutch troops and the colonial
administration withdrew. With them went several
thousand Indonesians who preferred to make the
Netherlands their home and as a result turned the
homogeneous Dutch into a multiracial society.
But 1950 did not mark the end of conflict
between Indonesia and the Netherlands. The
Netherlands held on to Western New Guinea,
which the Indonesians claimed, and it still hoped
for some constitutional arrangement linking
Indonesia and the Netherlands for another
decade. A unitary Indonesian republic was not
established until 1960, and not until two years
later did the Dutch agree to hand over Western
New Guinea (or West Irian, as the Indonesians
called it). Decolonisation thus proved a painful
and long-drawn-out process, damaging both to
the Indonesians and to the Dutch. How recently
European physical control of colonial empires was
abandoned needs to be borne in mind, for the
speed with which the bitterness abated between
the former colonial subjects and the European
nations is one of the most remarkable and surprising
aspects of twentieth-century history.
The French, as empire builders in south-east Asia,
were – like the Americans – late arrivals, conquering
Indo-China in the mid-nineteenth century.
They superimposed French rule on an ancient
Vietnamese culture with a sense of national unity
that did not diminish during the century of
French occupation. The Vietnamese were brought
by the French under one imperial umbrella with
the Laotians and Cambodians to form the entity
of French Indo-China. As elsewhere in the colonial
world the amalgamation of Western ideas and
the indigenous culture brought about rapid
changes and created divided loyalties. The betteroff,
the landlords, the independent farmers and
the traders, resisted far-reaching social change
and, to this extent, identified themselves with the
French administration. French education also
nourished an intelligentsia, many of whom were
inspired by Marxist ideals and committed themselves
to an anti-colonial struggle.
The French took their civilising white man’s
mission seriously in the south of Vietnam (Cochin
China), which they administered directly; central
Vietnam was less affected; in the north, around
Hanoi, some basic industrial development took
place. The French built railways and roads, a university
in Hanoi, schools and hospitals; they
increased literacy and stamped out widespread
diseases; mortality rates fell. There was less racial
arrogance than in British colonies, and a greater
promotion of education. Contact with France was
also encouraged, and a small Vietnamese elite
travelled there in the 1930s, including Ho Chiminh.
On the debit side, economic development
in Indo-China was dictated by the interests of
metropolitan France. Industrialisation was slow.
Over-population in the two most fertile regions,
the Mekong River in the south and the Red River
in the north, was a perennial problem. The great
majority of the 16 million Vietnamese were poor
peasants, hardest hit by the collection of rents and
taxes. The depression of the 1930s, which saw
steep declines in the price of rice and sugar, most
affected those who could least afford it and led to
waves of unrest. All peasant and student protest
was met by the French with repression.
A small Vietnamese Communist Party inspired
by the Russian Revolution had been formed in
1929 by Ho Chi-minh. In the social and political
conditions of the 1930s its potential following
was large, and it adopted the tactics of the
popular front, softening its own revolutionary
aims in the interests of unity to win the support
of the revolutionary but non-Marxist Nationalist
Party, which had been suppressed by the French.
Vietnamese intellectuals were both attracted
and alienated by French culture. Proud of their
own civilisation, they discovered the hollowness
of French revolutionary egalitarianism, which
seemed to apply only to the French and not to
colonial natives. Nonetheless, the overwhelming
military strength of the French gave their colonial
rule an appearance of stability and permanence. It
was to prove illusory.
France’s claim to superiority in Indo-China was
shattered by her defeat in Europe in June 1940. To
the north, the Japanese were waging their relentless
war against China and espousing a Japanesedominated
‘Greater East Asia co-prosperity
sphere’. French weakness in September of that year
brought the Japanese into Indo-China, pathway
to the Dutch East Indies. The Vichy French
authorities collaborated with the Japanese and suppressed
nationalist guerrillas with French troops. A
serious uprising in southern Vietnam was bloodily
defeated and, in the process, the southern Vietnamese
communist organisation was decimated. This
was to be of crucial importance for the future, since
the communists now remained strong only in the
north. The anti-Japanese resistance, organised in
the north by the Vietnamese nationalist League for
the Independence of Vietnam, or Vietminh, was
led by the charismatic Ho Chi-minh.
Ho Chi-minh became a cult figure in his own
lifetime. Before his death in 1969 his photographic
image was as widely reproduced as
Castro’s, Che Guevara’s and Mao Zedong’s. He
lies buried in a glass cage within a mausoleum in
Hanoi and hundreds daily pay their respects. Yet
before 1945 no one in the outside world had
heard of him. As a nationalist and communist
conspirator he had used several pseudonyms in his
lifetime and had travelled widely, working on
boats, though between 1913 and 1917 he had
been employed in the kitchen of the London
Carlton Hotel. As a Vietnamese nationalist he
became well known in socialist circles of Paris,
and travelled to China and to Hong Kong, where
he founded the Indo-Chinese Communist Party
with a number of fellow conspirators in 1929. He
visited Moscow in the 1920s and served as a delegate
to various conferences, before disappearing
from view from 1933 to 1941, when he reappeared
in Moscow. He had probably spent the
intervening years in Stalin’s Russia. There can be
no doubt that Ho Chi-minh had become a dedicated
communist, but he was also a dedicated
nationalist.
Tactically Ho Chi-minh was a chameleon,
appearing to espouse many causes and roles. But
the core of his beliefs was nationalism – Vietnam as
one unified, independent nation – and Marxism.
He was a man of intellectual brilliance and a complete
personal incorruptibility, modest in his needs,
able to relate to the common people, yet utterly
ruthless and inflexible in the pursuit of ultimate
aims. No price was ultimately too high to create a
united communist Vietnam, free from all outside
interference.
When Vichy French power began to be
destroyed in metropolitan France following the
Allied invasion in the summer of 1944, Ho Chiminh
knew that the time for the power struggle
in his country was drawing closer. The Japanese
occupiers continued to tolerate the Vichy administration
in Vietnam, which had collaborated with
them under duress. But on 9 March 1945 the
Japanese attempted to strengthen their position
by making a bid for popular Vietnamese support.
The French administrators were unceremoniously
imprisoned and a Vietnamese state independent
from France was brought into existence by
decree.
The Japanese needed a leader to give independence
some credibility in the eyes of the
people. They turned to Bao Dai, who had been
crowned emperor in 1925 at the age of twelve.
Although he had been groomed by the French
for this role and educated in Paris, Bao Dai was
no cypher and in the 1930s had attempted to win
genuine independence for Vietnam, but without
success. He could serve as a rallying point for
unity and independence, so he was a leader of
some importance in 1945. Realising this, the
Japanese prevailed on him to head an ‘independent’
Vietnam in March 1945. Ho Chi-minh saw
that Bao Dai’s royal standing in the eyes of the
peasantry made him a potential rival, but decided
that it would be best to appear to recruit his
authority to the Marxist cause. Bao Dai, with no
army to protect him, had little choice after the
surrender of the Japanese but to accept what Ho
Chi-minh demanded of him. He abdicated,
passed the Mandate of Heaven to Ho Chi-minh’s
emissaries and was appointed his supreme
adviser.
August 1945 was a critical time. What authority
would replace the Japanese after their surrender
on 14 August and before the French could
return? Ho Chi-minh played his cards well. The
French and Japanese had stockpiled grain; the
Vietminh led raids on the granaries to relieve the
famine. General Vo Nguyen Giap’s small fighting
force, trained by the US to fight the Japanese, was
soon in control of Hanoi and Saigon. On 2
September 1945 in Hanoi, in constitutional language
borrowed from the American Declaration
of Independence in 1776 and France’s revolutionary
Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791,
he proclaimed the Independent Democratic
Republic of Vietnam with himself as president.
He was looking for American support. Roosevelt
before his death had been sympathetic to Ho Chiminh’s
nationalist cause, and General Joseph
Stilwell (commander of US forces in China,
Burma and India) had supported his irregular
troops. At that time Washington was more concerned
with the evils of colonialism in Europe’s
former empires than with the global threat of
communism. All that would change under
Truman’s administration with the onset of the
Cold War. It was not the Americans, but the
British and French, in a determined effort, who
frustrated Ho Chi-minh’s plans for a Marxist
unified and independent Vietnam.
The country south of the 16th parallel, that is
all of southern and much of central Vietnam, fell
by earlier Allied agreement into Lord Louis
Mountbatten’s sphere of command. What followed
is one of the most extraordinary episodes
of the post-war period. If the south had been permitted
to follow the north and the independence
of the whole of Indo-China had been accepted by
the British, the trauma of the longest war in Asia,
which led to at least 3.4 million deaths and untold
misery, might have been avoided. Mountbatten
personally sympathised with the Asian peoples’
desire for independence. But General Douglas
Gracey, the British commander sent to southern
Indo-China, took a different view. He was determined
not to treat with local independence
leaders in Saigon and to do all he could to restore
French rule. There were no French troops at first
in Indo-China and Gracey had only a few
hundred Indian and British soldiers at his disposal.
So he ‘restored order’ with the only available
well-disciplined soldiers – the Japanese. Far
from disarming them, he arranged for the
Japanese divisions, with their own officers but
under British command, to fight the local south
Vietnamese during the summer and autumn of
1945 in a startling reversal of alliances. The
Americans could do nothing. General MacArthur
fumed: ‘If there is anything that makes my blood
boil it is to see our allies in Indo-China and Java
deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little
people we promised to liberate.’ By Christmas
1945, some 50,000 French troops had been
brought to Indo-China to take over from the
British and Indians, who were able to withdraw.
The British motivation is not difficult to
understand. In London there was great suspicion
of American intentions: if the French were to be
deprived of their colonies in the name of liberation,
what claims would the British have to the
restoration of their colonies in southern Asia,
especially Malaya? France, furthermore, was a vital
future ally in Europe, the only potentially strong
power to defend the continent against a resurgent
Germany or a Soviet threat at a time when the
Americans were withdrawing. But the French
were not likely to act in Europe with Britain if
Britain helped to deprive France of Indo-China.
Yet these all proved short-term and wrongheaded
calculations. For France, its return to
Indo-China was to lead to defeat and humiliation;
and the Americans, who eventually replaced the
French, were ironically to suffer here their only
defeat in war and even greater humiliation. The
Vietnamese suffered most of all.
War did not break out immediately between the
French and the Vietminh in the north. By the
spring of 1946, the French had taken control of
the south and had negotiated the withdrawal of
the Chinese from the north. Chiang Kai-shek
complied, because he needed his troops in China;
Ho Chi-minh, who was not ready at this juncture
to start fighting, agreed to allow a small French
force to enter the north in return for French
recognition of the Vietnamese Republic he had
proclaimed. The French further stipulated that
the Vietnamese Republic should remain within
the French Union. This was a compromise that
could never last. The French had excluded the
southernmost part of Vietnam from their recognition
of independence in the north, which in any
case was so circumscribed that it would not have
amounted to true independence. Ho Chi-minh
travelled to Paris, where negotiations for a firm
settlement broke down. He then returned to
Hanoi and claimed independence for a united
Vietnam. In November 1946 the French opened
hostilities, by shelling the northern port of
Haiphong and killing 6,000 Vietnamese civilians.
In December full-scale fighting broke out.
The French sent growing numbers of troops
from Europe to reinforce the southern Vietnamese
levies. Bao Dai had escaped from Ho Chi-minh’s
group and took refuge first in Hong Kong, then
on the Côte d’Azur, where he enjoyed a life of luxury.
In March 1949 the president of France and
Emperor Bao Dai signed a treaty granting Vietnam
independence though reserving all eventual rights
to the French, but Bao Dai’s government was too
obviously subordinated to France to gain respect in
the West. Nonetheless, the French appeared to be
well in control during the first five years of the conflict.
From 1946 to 1950, with Giap building up
his hopelessly outnumbered Vietminh in the Red
River valley of fertile rice fields in the north, there
was relatively little fighting. But the skill, discipline
and fighting spirit of his force, which by 1954 had
grown to 117,000, proved more than a match for
the 100,000 French Foreign Legion soldiers supported
by 300,000 Vietnamese.
The victory of the Chinese Communists in
1949 transformed Giap’s prospects, as large military
supplies including heavy artillery were soon
speeding south to support him. Mao’s victory and
the outbreak of the Korean War also transformed
Washington’s attitude: between 1950 and 1954
the US provided France with about $3 billion to
enable it to carry on the war. But, despite their
early successes, the French discovered they could
not crush the Vietminh. Their own casualties,
90,000 dead and wounded by the close of 1952,
were arousing increasing criticism at home. In
Vietnam the death of France’s one brilliant tactician,
General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, left its
strategy in the hands of generals who were not
the equals of General Giap, with little idea how
to combat peasants being politically indoctrinated
and militarily trained to fight a revolutionary war.
In 1953 Giap lured the French into defending
Dien Bien Phu. When his forces eventually outnumbered
the French garrison of 13,000 men by
almost four to one and his artillery commanded
the heights surrounding the French emplacement,
Giap destroyed the garrison and took Dien
Bien Phu on 7 May 1954. Like the fall of
Singapore to the Japanese, this was a great Asian
victory over a European-led colonial army, and
one that changed history. The communist
Vietnamese had won, not only a battle, but the
war against the French – yet complete political
victory was still denied to them.
The news reached the Geneva Conference,
which had been in session since 26 April. The US
would not fully participate. But Zhou Enlai represented
China, a China determined to demonstrate
reasonableness in the hope of removing America’s
principal European allies, Britain and France, from
the Cold War in Asia. Eden presided and to the
bitter disappointment of the Vietnamese – both
the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam
and the Republic of Vietnam in the south – it
suited China to maintain the partition of Vietnam,
thus keeping it too weak to resume its traditional
hostility to China. With the communists sustained
in the north, moreover, the Americans, who had
supported the French and the Republic of
Vietnam in the south, would be kept at arms
length from China’s southern frontier. Elections
were planned for the summer of 1956 which were
intended to unify the country: Zhou Enlai was
shrewd enough to realise that, given the hostility
of the two Vietnam regimes towards each other,
they would never take place. The French were satisfied
at having found a way out of the quagmire.
The British could bask in the role of peacemakers
on the world stage. But the Americans were hostile,
rightly sceptical about communist promises,
and warned against a resumption of fighting from
the north. But they too had compromised in
accepting a frontier drawn, not on the borders of
China, but dividing Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
Even so it seemed that another Korean situation
had been created, with a clearly defined territorial
limit on the extent of communist power.
That, however, proved an illusion. The two
Vietnams were more realistic: the struggle for unity
was not over. Both sides would have to prepare for
it, Ho Chi-minh in the north, but who in the
south? Bao Dai was too weak now that his French
protectors had departed. The Americans wanted
someone tougher and more single-minded. They
backed Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist and member
of a leading Catholic family, who had already
proved his patriotic credentials when opposing
French interference in the 1930s. He had travelled,
living in France and then ascetically in a Catholic
seminary in the US. In 1954 Bao Dai recalled him
and made him prime minister. In 1955 he ousted
Bao Dai and, in a rigged referendum, established
the Vietnam Republic with himself as president.
An implacable enemy of communism, autocratic
and corrupt, Diem refused to accept the Geneva
settlement as final. South Vietnam had not signed
anything beyond a ceasefire. Ho Chi-minh too was
biding his time before renewing the struggle for
the unity of Vietnam under Marxist rule. Peace did
not have a chance.
World History
