Vietnam in The Time of The Second World War

Vietnam In The Time Of The Second World War

During World War II, France was swiftly defeated by Nazi Germany, and colonial administration of French Indochina passed to the Vichy French government. The Vichy government ceded control of Hanoi and Saigon in 1940 to Japan, and in 1941, Japan extended its control over the whole of French Indochina. The United States, concerned by this expansion, put embargos on exports of steel and oil to Japan. The desire to escape from these embargos and become resource self-sufficient ultimately led to Japan's decision to attack Western countries in December 1941.

Indochinese Communists had set up hidden headquarters in 1941, but most of the Vietnamese resistance to Japan, France or both, including both communist and non-communist groups, remained based over the border, in China. As part of the Allied fighting against the Japanese, the Chinese formed a nationalist resistance movement, the Dong Minh Hoi (DMH); this included Communists, but which not was not controlled by them. When this did not provide the desired intelligence data, they released Ho Chi Minh from jail, and he returned to lead an underground centered around the Communist Viet Minh. This mission was assisted by Western intelligence agencies, including the American Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Free French intelligence also tried to affect developments in the Vichy-Japanese collaboration.

In March 1945, the Japanese imprisoned the Vichy French and took direct control of Vietnam until they were defeated by the Allies in August. At that point, there was an attempt to form a Provisional Government, but the French took back control of the country in 1946.

While hindsight and hypotheticals are always tempting diversions, in looking at the broad picture of Southeast Asia at the end of World War II, it cannot be ignored that there were several conflicting movements:

• generic Western anticommunism that saw the French as protector of the area from Communist expansion
• nationalist and anti-colonialist movements that wanted independence from the French
• Communists who indeed would like to expand.

The lines were not always clear, and some alliances were of convenience. Prior to his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt made numerous comments about not wanting the French to regain control of Indochina.

In 1999, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and architect of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam Robert McNamara wrote that both sides had missed opportunities. The U.S. had both ignored its own Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence reports on Ho's nationalism, and failed, when the Truman Administration became suspicious he was merely a Soviet pawn, to probe the situation. He found U.S. claims unconvincing that China was a threat, given a millennium of Sino-Vietnamese enmity, as well as Dean Acheson's claim that the French "blackmailed" the U.S. into supporting them. On Ho's part, McNamara believes they misinterpreted the lack of U.S. response to be equivalent to enmity, and, allowed themselves to be blackmailed by the Soviets and Chinese.