The Viet Minh

Ho returned to Tonkin in February 1941 and exercised his leadership from clandestine locations in the north. He convened a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam on 10 May. The conference lasted until the 19th, by which time the committee decided on a new strategy highlighting the slogan "national liberation." Further, this body established the Viet Minh, changing the names of various mass organizations to "Associations for National Salvation," and decided to step up preparations for an insurrection to be undertaken at the most propitious moment. Decisions were later made to build guerrilla bases and to strengthen leadership of the military and para-military forces. In "a letter from abroad," written soon after the meeting, Ho Chi Minh called for united action to overthrow the Japanese and the French as a means toward achieving victory for "Vietnam's Revolution" and "the World's Revolution." 30 Responding to the call, the Vietnamese Communists staged another uprising against the French on 6 June 1941. Again the Communist effort was suppressed.

When Germany invaded Russia later that month, Soviet foreign policy shifted once more. It was established that the immediate task was to defeat the Axis powers through the combined action of the Soviet Union and its allies. To that end, the whole-hearted support of Communist parties was sought and the Comintern was dissolved.31

The 50,000 French and colonial military personnel in Indochina, and the region's 23 million civilian inhabitants, including 40,000 Europeans, faced the bleak future of living under a de facto Japanese occupation. On 6 May 1941, Japan and France signed a treaty revealing the commercial benefits that Japan expected to obtain from Indochina. Under its provisions all rice, corn, rubber, coal, and other commodities, which formerly had been exported, were reserved exclusively for Japan and the Japanese occupation forces.32

In addition to obtaining these concessions, there were other advantages gained by Japan. Not only were the routes from Haiphong to China blocked, but the Japanese had obtained a Southeast Asian port for their fleet, at

* Ibid., pp. 51–52; Pham Van Dong, 25 Years of National Struggle and Construction (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1970).

Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism (New York: Random House, 1960), Vol. II, pp. 129–32.

32

Hammer, Struggle for Indochina, pp. 11-14; Buttinger, Vietnam: A Political History, p. 189.

Cam Ranh Bay. Only 715 miles from Manila, the bay was centrally located for naval attacks against the Philippines, Borneo, the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, and Thailand. Furthermore, Cam Ranh Bay provided a well-located base from which to exercise control of the South China Sea.

In persuading the Vichy government to cooperate with them, the Japanese shrewdly satisfied the French desire to maintain some semblance of authority. By retaining nominal power in Indochina, France preserved civic order, thus allowing the Japanese to reap the advantages of occupation with a minimum of effort. Later in World War II the Japanese Army began to "protect" Vietnamese nationalists from the French police. The occupation forces also imported Japanese teachers, cultural counselors, and propaganda officers to win over the Vietnamese people.33

Indochina and the Road to Pearl Harbor

As events in the Pacific moved swiftly toward general war, the Japanese occupation of strategically important Indochina became one of the major issues dividing the United States and Japan. In July 1941, the Japanese foreign minister announced that Japan and Vichy had reached an agreement on the joint protection of Indochina. Soon afterward the Japanese demanded the right to occupy airfields in southern Indochina and to use the port facilities at Tourane, Saigon, and Cam Ranh Bay for their fleet. Unlike the 1940 actions, these new demands could not be justified as necessary for cutting off the flow of materials to China. Instead, they portended a deeper drive into Southeast Asia. The American reaction in the summer of 1941 was to freeze Japanese assets in the United States and to enact other economic curbs.3

34

In Imperial Conferences on 2 July and 6 September 1941, the Japanese government made important decisions that would affect the course of negotiations with the United States. The leadership decided not to "decline war with Britain and America" if the United States failed to meet Japanese demands relating to the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." To these ends the use of French Indochina was considered indispensable.35

33

Ibid., pp. 183, 191–93; Hammer. Struggle for Indochina, pp. 31–33.

4U.S., State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, Japan: 1931-1941 (Washington: GPO, 1943), Vol. II, pp. 266–67, 318-22; Togo Shigenori, Cause of Japan, p. 51; Lancaster, Emancipation of French Indochina, p. 95.

35

Togo Shigenori, Cause of Japan, pp. 351-55, contains the full text of the decision.

On 20 November Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu and Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Ambassador to the United States, presented Washington with what proved to be Japan's final offer. Japan proposed to withdraw its troops from southern Indochina and to reposition them in the north in return for the practice of a non-discriminatory trade policy by the United States and the cessation of American military aid to China. Moreover, Kurusu and Nomura claimed that, when Japan had achieved peace in China, all troops would be withdrawn from Indochina and no further advances by the Japanese armed forces would be made into Southeast Asia. This arrangement fell far short of satisfying American policy-makers.

A Japanese carrier force was already on its way toward Hawaii when the Japanese received Secretary of State Cordell Hull's reply of 26 November 1941. Hull demanded, among other things, that Japan withdraw ground, naval, air, and police forces from China and Indochina. The note also called for Japan to conclude with the American, British, Chinese, Dutch, and Thai governments a pledge to "respect the territorial integrity of French Indochina. . . ." Further, the communication proposed that Japan, along with the United States, "give up all extraterritorial rights in China" and endeavor to obtain the agreement of the British and other governments to do the same. In return, Washington promised to lift the embargo and to normalize trading relations with Japan.36

In the hours following this diplomatic exchange, the news became even more ominous. Late on 25 November, Washington read intelligence reports indicating that a Japanese expeditionary force with five divisions embarked had steamed south from Shanghai for a possible attack on the Philippines, Indochina, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, or Burma. For the next few days the United States watched the progress of the Japanese task force. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary that "if this expedition was allowed to round the southern point of Indochina, this whole chain of disastrous events would be set on foot of going."

37

In late 1941 no one appreciated the threat posed by Japan's moves to

Ibid., PP. 161-63, 171-72, contains an analysis of the Hull note as seen from the Japanese point of view; Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1948), Vol. II, p. 1083; Foreign Relations of the United States, Japan: 1931-1941, Vol. II, pp. 755-56.

37

U.S., Congress, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (79th Cong., 2nd sess.) (Washington: GPO, 1946), pt. 11, pp. 5433-36 (hereafter cited as Pearl Harbor Hearings).

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

as 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.

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.11

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.