the south more than Admiral Thomas C. Hart, Commander in Chief of the small United States Asiatic Fleet. In late November Hart sent his Catalina (PBY) patrol aircraft to scout the area between Manila and the Indochinese coast. During the first week of December, pilots reported a number of transports and other ships at anchor in Cam Ranh Bay.

On 5 December the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a report on Indochina to the President which revealed that 105,000 Japanese troops were now in Indochina in addition to naval task forces at Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay. Moreover, additional ships were reported in the Hainan and Formosa areas. Following this hard intelligence came a report from Admiral Hart in Manila, confirmed by cables from British sources on 6 December, that a large Japanese naval task force had sailed from Cam Ranh Bay and was steaming past Point Cambodia (Cape Camau), with the Gulf of Siam a possible destination.38

Despite continuous pressure from Britain throughout 1941 to gain specific United States assurance of armed support in the event of war with Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refrained from such a commitment. As the situation became more ominous, he told the British ambassador on 1 December that "we should obviously all be together" in case Japan attacked the Dutch or the British. He later indicated that the United States would support the British if war resulted from a Japanese attack on Thailand. Roosevelt sent a message to Japan's Emperor Hirohito on the 6th calling for the evacuation of Japanese forces from Indochina. He considered addressing Congress if this last effort failed, but it was already too late.39

The Japanese Offensive

Japanese carrier aircraft struck the American ships in Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 December 1941. That same day Japanese aircraft from airfields in Indochina struck at Singapore, the key British naval base in the Far East. Also staging from Indochina, Japanese troops invaded Thailand; Bangkok was occupied soon afterward. An amphibious assault on Malaya

38

» Ibid., pt. 14, pp. 1246-47; pt. 15, pp. 1680-81; Morison, Rising Sun in the Pacific, pp. 156-57.

39

Quoted in Raymond A. Esthus, "President Roosevelt's Commitment to Britain to Intervene in a Pacific War," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, L, No. 1, (June 1963), pp. 28-38. For related events, see Leopold, Growth of American Foreign Policy, pp. 589–91.

followed. Also on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese aircraft from carrier Ryujo and from airfields on Formosa commenced a series of strikes against United States naval ships and airfields in the Philippines. Hong Kong was bombarded from the sea and subjected to a naval blockade. The city would fall to the Japanese by Christmas. Britain's Prince of Wales and Repulse steamed north from Singapore toward the Gulf of Siam with four destroyers seeking to engage Japanese ships. Lacking air cover, both capital ships were sunk on 10 December by Indochina-based aircraft. Japanese amphibious forces landed troops in Borneo on 17 December. Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. By March all opposition from the United States Asiatic Fleet had been eliminated. The Japanese landed troops on Java and soon controlled the Dutch East Indies. American armed forces in the Philippines surrendered on 6 May. There is little wonder that American decision makers would be concerned, decades later, over a "domino effect" in Southeast Asia, should Indochina be seized by the Communists.

40

The Resistance Movement in Indochina

Ho traveled to China in August 1942 to seek aid for his guerrilla forces. On 28 August, the Kuomintang government, which was aware of Ho's communist`activities, took the Viet Minh leader into custody. The Chinese released Ho Chi Minh from detention in September 1943, on the condition that he and the Viet Minh join the expanded "United Front" to make the resistance effort against Japan more productive. The Chinese specifically barred the Indochinese Communist Party from the resistance movement. However, they apparently overlooked the fact that the Viet Minh were controlled by the Communists in Indochina, who had remained operational under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh's two colleagues, Giap in the North and Pham Van Dong in the South."

Eager to initiate this guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, the Kuomintang supplied Ho Chi Minh with funds that he promptly put to use. Soon, he established in Vietnam a network of Communist-dominated Viet

40

41

Morison, Rising Sun in the Pacific, pp. 98–146, 164-83, 187-206, 280–380.

Trager, Why Viet-Nam?, p. 57; Chen, Vietnam and China, pp. 42, 55, 61, 64–66; Fall, Two Viet-Nams, p. 99, provides evidence that American intervention with Chiang Kai-shek on Ho's behalf resulted in his release.

Minh cells that remained apart from the other nationalist groups. The Chinese also supported a Vietnamese "reunification conference" held at Liuchow, China, from 25 to 28 March 1944. With the acquiescence of the Chinese, the Viet Minh attempted to set up a "Provisional Republican Government of Viet-Nam." If the so-called provisional government group did not accomplish much at this time, the favorable impression held by the Chinese of Ho as being cooperative and intelligent was solidified.*2

In addition to Chinese support, the Viet Minh on several occasions during World War II sought to enlist American diplomatic assistance for their cause. Although their attempts were generally unsuccessful and American officials tended to minimize the importance of the Viet Minh, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) did provide some American weapons and supplies. The degree of effectiveness of the Viet Minh campaign against the Japanese is not known. However, one observer has noted that, if the intelligence reports supplied by the Viet Minh were not very exact, "they had the merit of being numerous, and this always makes an impression.'

43

A curious sidelight to the assistance rendered Ho by the OSS became known more than twenty-five years after the end of World War II. In July 1945, an OSS team found Ho in a small village approximately seventyfive miles northwest of Hanoi where he apparently was dying from several tropical diseases. One observer described the future ruler of North Vietnam as "a pile of bones covered with yellow dry skin," who was "shaking like a leaf and obviously running a high fever." But, two weeks later an OSS medical corpsman arrived to care for Ho, and the quinine and sulfa drugs that he administered reputedly saved his life.**

As later summarized by Giap, the mission of the Viet Minh during World War II continued to be the "preparation of an uprising" to achieve, as its first step, "national liberation." In support of this goal the Viet Minh

42

Chen, Vietnam and China, pp. 68-74; Fall, Two Viet-Nams, p. 100; Buttinger, Smaller Dragon, pp. 441–42.

43

Quoted in Ibid., p. 442; Fall, Two Viet-Nams, p. 100, states that OSS missions in North Vietnam and China employed Vietnamese aides, some of whom later proved to be "good Vietnamese Communists." Additionally, the presence of senior U.S. officers at Viet Minh functions and the flying of the U.S. flag over the American residence helped convince the people that the Viet Minh had "official relations" with the United States. For Viet Minh contacts with American officials during World War II, see Ronald Spector, "What the Local Annamites are Thinking': American Views of Vietnamese in China, 1942–1945," Southeast Asia, III (Spring 1974), pp. 741-51.

44

Quoted in R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 331–32.

guerrillas used terrorism and assassination to eliminate leaders of other non-Communist Vietnamese groups. The guerrillas also undertook major propaganda efforts within Southeast Asia and throughout the world. In 1944, Giap formed a platoon-size propaganda unit in his guerrilla army. This act was the start of a program that during the war sought to portray Ho as a nationalist and to establish his reputation as the strongest of all the revolutionary leaders."

United States Naval Operations in Southeast Asia

From the beginning of World War II one of the better hunting grounds for United States submarines was found off the strategically located shore of Indochina in the South China Sea, the location of important Japanese sea lines of communication with Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma. This was the area through which petroleum and other critical cargos flowed to Japan. Sampans, junks, and steamers also sailed along the coast, carrying rice from the Mekong Delta to Tonkin to feed the people there, and coal south from Tonkin for the power plants of Saigon.

Hardly a week after the Pearl Harbor attack, submarine Swordfish (SS-193) sent a Japanese cargo ship to the bottom of the Gulf of Tonkin. By the fall of 1943, the rate of ship sinkings recorded by U.S. submarines in the South China Sea had begun to increase. The sinkings achieved in three and one-half years of war were impressive. In all, American submarines sank approximately 250,000 tons of Japanese shipping, representing more than fifty-five ships and craft along the Indochinese coast.*

46

In view of the long-deferred American decision to use mines off North Vietnam in the 1960s, the mining operations of the Second World War are of particular interest. Between 15 October and 2 November 1942,

45

Giap, Banner of People's War, pp. xii, 8, 27; Fall, Two Viet-Nams, p. 101.

Samuel E. Morison, New Guinea and the Marianas: March 1944-August 1944, Vol. VIII of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), p. 21; Morison, Rising Sun in the Pacific, pp. 191, 304; Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1949), pp. 34, 269–72; statistics on submarine successes off the Indochina coast (defined as the area bounded by 08-00 to 20-30N, to 102-00 to 110-30E) are based on U.S., Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II By All Causes (Washington: GPO, 1947); Samuel E. Morison, The Liberation of the Philippines, 1944-1945, Vol. XIII of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1959), p. 281.

submarines Thresher (SS-200), Gar (SS-206), Grenadier (SS-210), Tautog (SS-199), and Tambor (SS-198) planted mines in the frequently used route to Tonkin which passed through Hainan Strait and off Haiphong. Other mines were dropped at points along the routes to Saigon and Bangkok -in the shallow waters near Cape Padaran (Dinh) where the shipping lane hugged the coast and in the approaches to Bangkok. These actions resulted in the sinking of six ships and the damaging of six more. Aerial minelaying by Allied aircraft, begun in Southeast Asia in 1943, included the planting of minefields in Cam Ranh Bay and Phan Rang Bay, and off Saigon and Haiphong.

47 Ellis A. Johnson and David A. Katcher, Mines against Japan (Washington: Naval Ordnance Laboratory, GPO, 1973), pp. 90-96.