The Greenest Island of my Imagination.
Vietnam is a country most dear to me. I’ve spent a fifth of my adult life there and in a roundabout way hold that I grew up there. It was in Vietnam, at the age of 27, that I for the first time saw the dangers of being free and there that I began to write comedy novels. It’s there alone that I own anything other than books and clothes—a motorbike; there that most of my wildest and funniest memories reside. In fact I have a whole Freudian fascination with the place, for it’s also where Western Civilisation’s adolescent, the United States of America, grew up.
The Creedence-and-Hendrix soundtrack brought violently to Vietnam I find endlessly interesting, and have taught the history of American involvement there. But more fascinating is the history of Vietnam before the Americans. Ancient, proud, diverse, exotic—this is a history of the Vietnam that America knew almost nothing about as it began to send—secretly then openly—two and a half million soldiers there. Even before America began to prop up a puppet government in the country’s south, Vietnam had spent a thousand years fighting the Chinese and a century the French.
There are countries, in history, IN which things happen, and countries TO which things happen. This is the story of a to-country—breathtakingly beautiful, only recently rescued from the mud, and the greenest island of my imagination.
The Ascending Dragon.
So Vietnam is sometimes called for so Vietnam appears—on a map thin and long with a wide head nosing China and a long tail spreading out into the Gulf of Thailand. Transposed, its length would run from Marseilles to Copenhagen, from Manhattan to Tallahassee. Its narrowest centre is only 50km wide.
That dragon has been talking diplomatically with China since 264BC, the year the Romans began their conquest of Greek Sicily. 150 years into their diplomatic relationship China occupied Vietnam, and stayed for a millennium. 70 years into the occupation the Vietnamese began to fight back and two sisters from the family Trung expelled the Chinese for three years after fighting a continuous offensive to topple foreign rule.
Adopting Chinese bureaucracy and absorbing much from Chinese culture, by the 10th century Vietnam was divided into 12 feuding kingdoms each ruled by a general. In 968 one general overthrew the rest and established the first united and imperial kingdom of Vietnam, Dai Viet. (Viet means ‘south’ and Ukraine means ‘borderland’; some countries should really consider changing their name from a relative to an objective one.) Dai Viet’s new capital was Hoa Lu, present-day Ninh Binh, a secluded region of steep karsts and winding rivers—natural barriers against Chinese invaders. The Mongols invaded Dai Viet three times, occupying with half a million soldiers much of the country for nine years. After their third invasion a Vietnamese general retreated into the mountains and wrote a book on guerrilla warfare that still hasn’t been translated into English. In 1278 the Vietnamese booby-trapped an entire river and became thereby one of the few nations to defeat the Mongols in battle.
In 1418 the rebel leader Le Loi developed the strategy of Protracted War, using time to wear down an enemy. He then bottled up the occupying Ming Chinese in Hanoi and in the mountains ambushed the army that was sent to relieve them. So before the 20th century all of Vietnam’s national heroes were figures of national resistance who either defeated or expelled a foreign invader.
Dai Viet slowly pushed southwards from the Red River Delta until eventually it prevailed in a centuries-long struggle with the Chams. By 1471 they had conquered the city-state of Vijaya, in present-day Binh Dinh province, and cut off the declining Cambodians from the sea. Formerly part of Hindu Southeast Asia and in the mandala of the kings who built Angkor Wat, Vietnam now looked as if it would be left, between the mountains and the sea, to become its Sinicised self.
To Create a Eunuch.
But Christianity arrived in the early 16th century, when the Portuguese landed at Nam Dinh in the north. In 1558, tired of the politics at the king’s court in present-day Hanoi, Duke Nguyen Hoang moved to modern central Vietnam and there declared his own ‘empire.’ In 1600 he outright refused to pay taxes to Hanoi and from 1613 to 1800 Vietnam was divided into a northern and a southern state, with an 18-foot-high wall separating the two at the 20th parallel. The north was controlled by the Trinh kings, the south was under the leadership of the Nguyen emperors.
In 1615 Jesuit missionaries landed at what is now Danang and Spanish Dominicans had slightly more success in converting the north than did the Portuguese in the south. The first frenchman to visit Vietnam, Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, spent 22 years studying its language and proselytising its people. He was expelled from Hanoi on suspicion of being a Nguyen spy then from Vietnam for being a Christian. Shortly after he left, in 1651 the first Vietnamese dictionary and grammar was published in Rome. He and the Portuguese Jesuits who had preceded him had transliterated from Chinese characters the Vietnamese language into the Latin alphabet.
In 1698 the Nguyen empire conquered from the now-Buddhist Khmer the mouth of the Mekong River and added to Viet Nam its long and wet tail. Then in 1802 the south conquered the north and unified the country. The new emperor, Gia Long, established his capital at Hué at the north-south midpoint of Vietnam. His Imperial Palace was built as a smaller copy of Beijing’s Summer Palace inside a copy of a French fort. At its very centre was the Purple Forbidden City, modelled on Beijing’s forbidden one, and accessible only to the imperial family and their eunuch servants.
To create a eunuch in Vietnam a boy was given an anaesthetic made of Chinese medicine before absolutely everything was cut off. The excision took three months to heal and for the rest of his life he was to urinate through a catheter. His cock and balls were preserved so as to be presented as his employment credentials, and would be buried with him when he died. Their most important function (the eunuchs, not their genitals) was the arrangement of the emperor’s lovemaking.
Eunuchs were frequently bribed by women so that they might be chosen repeatedly. To not get along with the palace eunuchs meant perhaps spending one’s whole life in the Forbidden Palace without ever seeing the emperor’s face.
Not far from the palace was Vietnam’s colosseum, built to stage ceremonial duels between elephants and tigers.
l’Indochine.
In 1820 a tolerant emperor died and was followed by a rather intolerant one—who began sentencing missionaries to death-by-a-thousand-cuts. These persecutions soon became massacres of Vietnamese Christians and between 1827 and 1856—in only 29 years—Vietnamese heaven will receive more martyrs than Ancient Rome’s—130,000 killed for the faith.
By 1858 Napoleon III (Bonaparte’s nephew) had had enough of these royally sanctioned attacks on God’s good missionaries and ordered the French navy to occupy Da Nang, also in the centre of the country. The following year the French sailed south to attack Gia Dinh—now called Sai Gon—and by 1862 they were in control of the city and the provinces surrounding it. The king of Cambodia then asked France to prevent his country from being torn in two by the Siamese and the Vietnamese. After two years of war with China, France conquered the north of Vietnam, and finally in 1893 the French muscled Thailand into recognising their control over Laos.
They then formed a centralised government for l’Indochine—their name for the territories recently brought under their control: Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. Within that administration Vietnam was divided into three—Tonkin in the north, Annam in the long centre, Cochinchina in the south. And to these the French brought the printing press, the baguette, coffee, the consumption of beef, and a ban on eating dog.
With total French control over all of Vietnam established by 1900, the next decade would be no pique-nique for coloniser or for colonised. Among demonstrations, secret societies, insurrections—one group poisoned the food of the French garrison in Hanoi in preparation for the city being taken by a rebel army. One of the poisoners confessed his crime to his priest, who told the government—which executed by guillotine 13 of the plotters. In 1907 the emperor was arrested on his way to join a resistance movement in China. The French declared him insane and exiled him to the far south of the country. His grand chamberlain and eunuch-keeper, Ngo Dinh Kha, resigned at the prospect of serving a puppet emperor and spent the rest of his life farming rice and grumbling in shame to his six sons and three daughters.
La Mission Civilisatrice.
The French colonial administration focused on producing and extracting profitable exports—rice, coal, rubber, silk, spices, minerals—while simultaneously turning the native economy into a market for French products. Its bureaucracy eventually swelled to 45,000 people; only three of whom will speak Vietnamese by 1910. The Department of Customs and Monopolies was the colonial administration’s largest entity and its costliest branch—responsible for enforcing monopolies on what its governor-general called its ‘three beasts of burden’: alcohol, opium, salt. The bulk of its energies went into booze.
Traditional rice liquor was 20% alcohol and a social and ceremonial fixture. In 1902 France declared alcohol production a state monopoly and manufactured their official product to 40% ethanol after diluting it with water. It was tasteless and dangerous, and each province was assigned a quota it had to buy from the state. A villager caught illegally selling or making alcohol would be arrested and his or her home sold. This monopoly’s enforcement was the most frequent point of contact between the French administration and the Vietnamese people.
As bicycle and automobiles came into mass world production, in 1907 Indochinese rubber production began. Worker death rates on Vietnamese plantations were as high as 47% and at one of Michelin’s plantations 90% of workers had malaria. Those who didn’t carefully look out for themselves became, in the words of one employee, ‘fertiliser for the capitalists’ rubber trees.’
By 1920 44% of l’Indochine’s governmental budget came from the beast of burden monopolies. Illegal in France, in Asia the French purchased raw opium in India and Yunnan then brought it to Saigon for processing before selling it at official outlets for a 500% profit. By 1939 official opium catered to 100,000 addicts in 2500 opium dens. The Vietnamese joked that at least the French granted them the freedom to poison themselves.
In 1923 a 22-year-old André Malraux read a book that gave him the bright idea of making his fortune by sailing to Cambodia to steal artefacts from Khmer temples which he could then sell on to art dealers. After hacking out statues from Banteay Srei he was caught red-handed with his loot wrapped and for shipment down the Mekong. While in prison in Saigon the colonial lawyer Paul Monin told Malraux’s wife Clara that the young adventurer
had incurred the hostility of a corrupt administration, which rigged elections, muzzled the press, crushed the native peasantry with ruthless taxes and enriched itself through bribes and speculation. All while pretending hypocritically to defend justice, progress and ‘western civilization’.
It was la mission civilisatrice, France’s version of Britain’s White Man’s Burden. In 1906 every large village was ordered to set up a public school that could teach the inevitable evolution of society from savagery to semi-enlightenment to civilisation. Seen by colonialists and revolutionaries alike as a barrier between Vietnam and modernity, the final round of Confucian examinations took place in 1917. The following year the latinised alphabet, previously confined to Catholic usage, took by imperial decree the place of Chinese writing. The children of wealthy Vietnamese and employees of the colonial administration were sent to lycées. While at home they were taught the five Confucian virtues: benevolence, duty, propriety, conscience, faithfulness—at school they were taught in French the history and culture of ‘their ancestors the Gauls.’ By 1939 less than 15% of all school-age children in Vietnam had received any kind of schooling and 80% of the population was illiterate. In a country of 20 million people there was one university, with 700 students.
Thus, l’Indochine. Now for its most determined opponents.
‘Europe is not all of humanity.’
Nguyen Tat Thanh was born in central Vietnam in 1890 and in Hué received a French education. Before his 20th birthday he went to Saigon and applied for job as a cook on a French steamer and upon arriving in Marseille in 1911 wrote:
Why don’t the French civilise their own people instead of trying to civilise us?
Thanh travelled the world working on ships from 1911 to 1917, perfecting his French and learning English. In 1919 a communist agitator appeared in Paris and the secret police had no idea who he was or how he’d gotten into the country. It was Nguyen Tat Thanh, living under a fake identity given to him by Karl Marx’s grandson. While reading Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, Thanh had converted to Marxism and henceforth followed Lenin in advocating that Communist parties make common cause with nationalist movements in Asia and Africa to destroy imperialist capitalism.
In June 1919 Thanh handed out copies of his own ‘Demands of the Vietnamese People’ to attendees at the Paris Peace Conference, where the Treaty of Versailles was shortly signed. The French secret service surveilled him for the next four years until, in June 1923, the communist parties of Europe snuck Thanh out of Paris and trained him on to Berlin, whence he sailed to Petrograd. He spent six months in newly Communist Russia, never getting to meet his goateed hero but attending his Trotskyless funeral in -30°C weather. In Petrograd he wrote a book in French explaining how France espoused humanist values as it exploited Indochina through an inhuman colonial economy. He argued that Marxism was the engine of history only within European societies—‘Europe is not all of humanity’—and advocated revising Marxism by adding to it ‘Oriental ethnology’. While back in Asia the Governor-General of l’Indochine was himself asking:
For thousands of years Asia has possessed its personal ethics, its art, its metaphysics, its dreams. Will it ever assimilate our Greco-Roman thought? Is this possible? Is it desirable? … In Asia we find souls and minds moulded by the oldest civilisation of the globe.
In 1930, in Hong Kong, a 22-year-old named Le Duan and a 19-year-old named Le Duc Tho founded—with Nguyen Tat Thanh—the Indochina Communist Party. The following year all three were arrested by French secret agents and Le Duan and Le Duc Tho became prisoners of the colonial regime. British lawyer Frank Loseby defended Nguyen Tat Thanh and managed to arrange for him to be deported to a non-French city. In 1933 Thanh was quietly released by the British authorities and, disguised in robes tailored by Loseby’s wife, boarded a ship to Shanghai. He lived again in Russia from July 1934 until the end of 1938, acting as liaison between the Bolsheviks and the Indochina Communist Party.
A Popular Front government came to power in Paris in 1936 and gave amnesty to 1500 prisoners in Indochina, including Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. Both came out of colonial prisons more committed to revolutionary activity than ever. In 1938 Nguyen Tat Thanh returned to China from Moscow, and started calling himself Ho Chi Minh. In 1940 France outlawed the Indochina Communist Party, so another of its other leaders, Vo Nguyen Giap, said goodbye to his wife and fled to China. His wife was promptly arrested and sentenced to 15 years in a Hanoi prison.
Giap was both a Leninist and a Maoist—believing that not only a small group of revolutionaries (Leninism) but also a wider selection of class-conscious activists (Maoism) should strive for the establishment of communism. He had been expelled from school for revolutionary activity but went on to take a law degree—and like Lenin never practised. Instead he became a geography teacher in Hanoi and as he taught he studied the campaigns of Napoleon and T.E. Lawrence. He became an original military thinker, with his primary models the Trung sisters and Le Loi—inventors of the Continuous Offensive and Protracted War. Once arrived in Chinese exile, Giap for the first time met Ho Chi Minh, who was advising the army of the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of that year, 1940, Japan invaded Tonkin and came to an agreement with Vichy France: France would retain sovereignty over the country while Japan used it to wage war for their own empire. A year later Japan invaded the south as well, using it as their base for a conquest of the Dutch East Indies.
French jackals and Japanese fascists.
With his people now labouring under two imperial powers, Ho Chi Minh slid his communism into the background and brought various nationalist groups into a Popular Front: the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam—the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, the ‘Viet Minh’ for short. A guerrilla group formed in 1941 to drive out ‘French jackals’ and ‘Japanese fascists’, the Viet Minh was dominated by the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, as the Communist Party had just renamed itself, and its leader was Ho Chi Minh—who now returned to Vietnam after 30 years’ absence. He set up his headquarters in a cave near the Chinese border and tasked Giap with establishing an intelligence network and organising political bases in the north. Then on December 8th the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, delivered a speech to Congress:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
As America’s war in the Pacific began Ho Chi Minh allied himself with the Allies—the British, the OSS, the nationalist Chinese of Chiang Kai-Shek. Roosevelt told his Secretary of State in January of 1943:
The case is perfectly clear. France has had Indochina—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. They are entitled to something better than that.
In the summer of that year Giap was told that his wife had been beaten to death by guards in Hanoi’s central prison. Her sister had already been guillotined and Giap’s baby daughter had died of unknown causes there. Then in April 1944 famine came to North Vietnam. Ho directed the Viet Minh to break into Japanese storehouses and distribute all the rice they found. Amid a Japanese-made famine that will kill a million people the Viet Minh were hailed as saviours. Ho then decided that with a single brigade of 34 soldiers and 17 rifles, the Viet Minh needed to win a fight against someone—anyone—for propaganda purposes. On December 25th Giap led two successful attacks against French outposts and in four months the resistance movement grew to 5000 members.
In March 1945 the emperor Bao Dai declared Viet Nam to be an independent part of the Japanese Empire. Shortly Japan changed its mind on Vichy France and seized Hanoi and abolished the French colonial administration. With the collapse of the French, the Viet Minh were now the only pro-Allied movement of any consequence in Vietnam. In April Ho Chi Minh met for the first time with an American officer (named Archimedes). The OSS agreed to supply the Viet Minh with guns, quinine, and Lucky Strikes in exchange for intelligence and their rescuing of any downed Allied pilots. Four months later they sent in a team to train 80 Viet Minh soldiers in guerrilla warfare. They it was who taught Vo Nguyen Giap precisely how to throw a hand grenade.
Self-determination.
While in the south of Vietnam, the disappearance of the French Administration led religious groups to organise their own self-defence militias. Three sects will emerge from World War II with political strength and military importance: the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, the Binh Xuyen—more on which in Part II.
Over in northern Laos, the French had enticed the Hmong hill tribes to change their cash crop to opium, promising them political support in exchange for the rights to their White lotus, their Yam-Yam, their Shanghai Sally. Opium production in Laos rose by 800% between 1940 and 1944—from 7.5 tons annually to 60.6 tons. In Paris, the leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle, threw a tantrum and cried that if the Americans did not allow the French back into postwar Indochina—on whose soil so much of their blood had been shed—France would go over to the Soviet Union. So in April 1945, with Roosevelt recently deceased, Secretary of State Stettinius told de Gaulle that America did not question French sovereignty over Indochina. Ho Chi Minh sent eight letters to American presidents from 1944 to 1946, asking that they not allow the French back into Vietnam. None were ever given to either president.
In mid-July 1945 Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met in Potsdam and decided that Eastern Europe was going to be Stalinist, Germany divided into four, Vietnam divided in two. North Vietnam was to be occupied by the Chinese, the South by the British—who would hand it back to the French when they could stop talking about cheese for ten minutes. Then on the 6th and 9th of August the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan’s home island. Five days after the second bomb, 3.75 years after they attacked Pearl Harbor—and after killing 100,000 Americans, 25,000 Britishers, 20,000 Australians—Japan surrendered. The Viet Minh were by now in full control of Vietnam’s administration so Ho Chi Minh organised a National Congress, which adopted 10 policies—including a General Uprising, a new national flag, a national anthem, and a government. Emperor Bao Dai abdicated on the 25th of August then appealed to Charles de Gaulle personally:
If you come to re-establish a French administration here, it will no longer be obeyed; each village will be a nest of resistance, each former collaborator an enemy, and your officials and colonists will themselves ask to leave an atmosphere which they will be unable to breathe.
Ho Chi Minh snuck into Hanoi and on September 2nd 1945 proclaimed an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. His declaration began by quoting from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man & Citizen. Then it interrupted itself:
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh was now a globally recognised statesman, head of a new and unified country. He would be so for less than two weeks, for on September 12th the British Army entered Saigon. With Ho’s General Uprising order already given, the British and French battled the Viet Minh for three months as piece by piece Saigon was handed over to French divisions arriving from Europe—who then reoccupied southern Vietnam.
The Big Band Decade Ends.
In March 1946 General Philippe Leclerc, sent out to reclaim Indochina, ordered the French navy and 21,000 soldiers to Tonkin, where they intended to reoccupy the north. So Ho Chi Minh signed an armistice in which France recognised Vietnam as having its own government, control of its own finances, armed forces and foreign relations—as part of France’s reconstituted empire. 25,000 French soldiers were to return to the north to replace the 200,000 Chinese soldiers still stationed there—but they were to leave Vietnam within five years. Ho Chi Minh said, very eloquently:
I would prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.
Ho then spent four months, June to September 1946, in France to negotiate full independence and unity for Vietnam. While he was away Giap consolidated communist control of the Viet Minh and purged it of nationalist parties and ‘reactionary saboteurs.’ It was to be a communist army—prepared by the self-taught Giap to liberate Vietnam from French occupation. In Paris Ho met often and privately with French government officials and told them openly:
You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.
But his efforts failed, for in June France declared southern Vietnam, Cochinchina, to be its own republic. In October the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam was further diminished when the newly formed French Fourth Republic claimed control over all of l’Indochine Française.
Fighting soon broke out for control of Haiphong. For two days the French fleet bombarded the Vietnamese sections of the city and in a single afternoon killed 6,000 Vietnamese civilians. Giap saw proof that the French intended to re-establish their control in Hanoi and mobilised the city’s militia. The French ordered the militia to disarm and disband and cut off electricity to Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh broadcast a nationwide radio transmission urging the Vietnamese to rise up in resistance—and on December 19th 30,000 Viet Minh under Giap’s command initiated their first large-scale attack on French soldiers.
That month, eight of America’s top big-band leaders quit. Not because of the Battle of Hanoi—but because after a decade of filling American dance halls they were finding themselves audienceless. In the space of a month Benny Goodman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Woody Herman all dissolved their bands. And as France gradually retook Hanoi, by February 1947 the communist government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had escaped to the regions of the north which since the 10th century the Vietnamese had used as a refuge from foreign invaders.
In a flash Ho Chi Minh returned from globally recognised statesman to a communist guerrilla leader—and as the Big Band decade ended in America, full-scale decolonial war broke out in Vietnam…
Coming up outside the world of Josh Write Essay…