The Road to Vietnam

America, France, Britain, and the First Vietnam War

Pablo de Orellana

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788317283
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Vietnam War

Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam? What led US policy makers to become convinced that Vietnam posed a threat to American interests? In The Road to Vietnam, Pablo de Orellana traces the origins of the US-Vietnam War back to 1945-1948 and the diplomatic relations fostered in this period between the US, France and Vietnam, during the First Vietnam War that pitted imperial France against the anti-colonial Vietminh rebel alliance.
With specific focus on the representation of the parties involved through the processes of diplomatic production, the book examines how the groundwork was laid for the US-Vietnam War of the 60's and 70's. Examining the France-Vietminh conflict through poststructuralist and postcolonial lenses, de Orellana reveals the processes by which the US and France built up the perception of Vietnam as a communist threat. Drawing on archival diplomatic texts, the representation of political identity between diplomatic actors is examined as a cause leading up to American involvement in the First Vietnam War, and will be sure to interest scholars in the fields of fields of diplomatic studies, international relations, diplomatic history and Cold War history.

Part I

Ouvertures

‘what the East needed was a Third Force.’

Perhaps I should have seen that fanatical gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

1

The Road to Vietnam: historical debates and the question of representation

Historical debates

During a 1951 visit to Vietnam, Congressman John F. Kennedy noted that ‘[i]n Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate efforts of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire’.¹ For Kennedy and many US policymakers, American support had been granted on the conviction that Vietminh, Vietnam’s anticolonial rebel alliance, was part of a global Communist offensive directed from Moscow. In the second half of 1948 Vietminh’s bid to end French colonialism blurred into events that appeared to show a coordinated global Communist offensive. Most salient among these was the Communist insurgency in British Malaya, the emergence of a Communist movement in recently independent India, and the Berlin blockade. The most worrisome development in Asia, however, was the spectacular advance of Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) during the Liaoshen Campaign in late 1948. KMT had received American military and economic support, but this CCP campaign, together with the Pingjin and Huaihai offensives, marked the reversal of the balance of the Chinese Civil War and sealed the Communist takeover of Northern China. It looked as though communism was on the march and Vietminh was a small part of it.

Association with French colonial imperialism in Indochina was clearly not part of the American policy equation. By 1951 it appeared to observers rather like an extremely unfortunate and counterproductive coincidence. How did this occur? The Pentagon Papers, the late 1970s US Department of Defense investigation into the Vietnam War, posit that strategic calculation preferred to support French colonialists than allowing communism, incarnated in Vietminh, to advance in Southeast Asia and conquer Indochina. The Pentagon Papers suggest that the global and strikingly binary strategic thinking that characterized the early Cold War and the recently proclaimed Truman Doctrine relentlessly pushed for communism to be stopped in its tracks before another domino fell.² It is therefore not surprising that young Congressman Kennedy was uncomfortable with American involvement in the French effort to prolong colonialism in Indochina. By the time of his visit in 1951, the US found itself supporting a radical French imperial military administration in Indochina bent on retaining the colony at all cost in the face of Vietnamese nationalism. Tragically, this was an anticolonial nationalist cause that, in principle, many Americans sympathized with.

This contradiction was, however, a new and potentially unnecessary one. During the Second World War Vietminh and OSS, America’s pre-CIA military intelligence agency, collaborated in the struggle against the Japanese occupation of Indochina. The Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội, (League for the Independence of Vietnam, abbreviated Vietminh), was formed in 1941 as an alliance of Vietnamese nationalist, socialist, communist, religious and even monarchist parties to fight French colonialism. In March 1945, after years of wartime Axis cooperation, the Japanese suddenly dismantled the Vichy French administration of Indochina under Admiral Ducoux and assumed direct rule. The momentary respite in the fierce French repression of Vietnamese nationalists that had driven the rebel alliance to the mountains allowed Vietminh to expand and consolidate.³ Vietminh chose to fight Japan as a prelude to preventing the re-establishment of French administration and, crucially, its leaders immediately sought contact with the Allies.

In 1945 Vietminh did not bear the signs of a communist bogeyman. US intelligence and military personnel that came into contact with them during joint anti-Japanese operations sympathized with their goals of decolonization and independence. In late August 1945 a rare constellation of factors came together to favour Vietminh: the French were no longer in power in Indochina, the Sûreté générale (the dreaded colonial political police) and French military were under Japanese internment and on 15 August the Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allies. On 2 September 1945, Vietminh leader Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in Hanoi and announced the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). His speech, witnessed by American OSS officers, opened with a verbatim quotation from the preamble to the US constitution: ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’.⁴

Vietminh actively sought American and UN assistance between 1945 and late 1948 to prevent the French from re-establishing colonial rule. This little-known diplomatic communication, dug out of French, Vietnamese, British and American archives and analysed in detail in this book, reveals another possible future, one desperately sought by Ho Chi Minh for over four years and reiterated over every diplomatic communication channel Vietminh could open. Had this correspondence flourished into a relationship, US foreign policy might have enjoined the postwar role imagined for American power by Vietminh rather than that sought by French and British diplomacy.⁵ The US might have declined to acquiesce to the French return to Indochina in 1945, perhaps even assisted in preventing the war, declined support for the French reconquest of the colony in 1948, and never launched its own military intervention from the late 1950s. In this might-have-been imaginary, Ho Chi Minh would not have sought Soviet and Chinese assistance in 1949, becoming instead an ‘Asian Tito’ as some US policymakers had thought possible.⁶

In the late 1940s this question was not foreclosed. Indeed, in December 1946 Abbott Low Moffat, head of the State Department’s Southeast Asian Division met with Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi and broached the question of whether Vietminh’s goal was communism. Ho replied that ‘he knew that the United States did not like communism, but that that was not his aim. If he could secure their independence that was enough for his lifetime.’⁷ But between late 1945 and 1946 the US remained silently neutral on French plans for reconquest. France dispatched an expeditionary force led by Second World War hero General Leclerc to recover the territory while French diplomat and spy Jean Sainteny negotiated a temporary settlement with Vietminh on 6 March 1946. That agreement, and a subsequent Franco-Vietnamese Modus Vivendi signed on 14 September 1946, was violated in November 1946 by what historian Stein Tønnesson called a ‘colonial triumvirate’ of French colonial and military officials hell-bent on reopening hostilities and re-establishing colonial sovereignty by force.⁸ During this crisis the US administration remained keen to stay out of a conflict it considered an unpleasant bout of European imperialism.

The misgivings of lawmakers like Kennedy observing the effects of US support for France in 1951 belie and indeed hide the origin of the move from a policy of vague acquiescent neutrality to active support of France. The shift in policy between 1947 and 1948 was predicated on two key developments: recognition that Vietminh was part of a global Communist threat and a liberal French plan to guide Vietnam towards independence under a non-communist regime. Though between 1945 and 1947 US diplomacy had encouraged a negotiated settlement between France and the Vietnamese rebel alliance, by March 1948 American diplomats were considering alternatives to negotiation with Vietminh. In a July 194...