A Long History of OccupationAround 100 BC, Chinese warriors invaded the northern provinces of what is now Vietnam, and China dominated the country for roughly a thousand years. It could be argued that the Vietnamese people’s desire for independence was born during that millennium, and it grew until, in 938 AD, the Vietnamese hero Ngo Quyen drove out the Chinese. For the next several centuries, Vietnam expanded slowly southward, finally encompassing the Mekong Delta region in the eighteenth century. But by that time, civil wars were tearing the country apart, and Vietnam was for the first time divided by north and south. China, taking advantage of the civil strife, reoccupied parts of the north.Enter the French. A Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, arrived in 1620, the same year that a boatload of English pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in America. Through Father De Rhodes, the French established Europe’s first ties with Vietnam, and in the late eighteenth century another French cleric engineered the 1787 Treaty of Versailles, which promised French assistance to Prince Nguyen Anh to conquer Vietnam’s feuding warlords and reunify the nation. The French king, Louis XVI, had troubles of his own, however, as the French Revolution was afoot, and he was only able to offer a small number of French soldiers. But that proved to be enough to tip the balance, and Nguyen Anh managed to capture Saigon, unify Vietnam, and rule as Emperor Gia Long well into the nineteenth century, when another sort of French ruler, Napoleon III, formed his own designs on Vietnam. In 1858–1859 Napoleon’s forces captured Saigon and Da Nang, and in 1884–1885 French forces drove China out of northern Vietnam. In 1887, French Indochina was formed, including not only Vietnam but Cambodia as well. Laos was added in 1893 after the brief Franco-Siamese War. But long before the maps could be redrawn, Vietnamese resistance to French rule had begun.Three years after the French claimed “Indochina” for their own, in the little village of Hoang Tru, a boy named Nguyen Sinh Cung was born. He would change his name several times. When he was ten, his father, a Confucian scholar and imperial magistrate, renamed his son Nguyen Tat Thanh, “Nguyen the Accomplished,” in recognition of the boy’s scholastic achievements. In Paris, around 1920, Nguyen took yet another name, Nguyen Ai Quoc, “Nguyen the Patriot.” In 1940, serving as an advisor with the Chinese Communist forces that would eventually take over the country, Nguyen took the name that stuck: Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens.”Ho Chi MinhThe life of Ho Chi Minh is the thread that bound the United States to Vietnam, as allies and enemies, for many decades. He petitioned three American presidents to help him get the French out of Vietnam, worked with American intelligence services during World War II, borrowed liberally from the American Declaration of Independence in his rhetoric, and finally fought the Americans until he died, in 1969, in pursuit of his lifelong goal of a unified, independent Vietnam. He was a Communist from an early age, but in the broad view, his communism seemed “small c” and more pragmatic than rigidly ideological. He lived in the Soviet Union and in Red China, and when he finally came to power in North Vietnam, he ruled with a firm and sometimes brutal hand, but he never seemed interested in the world Communist movement. Vietnam was his world, and if the democratic West would not help him achieve it, the Communist East would. And if, in the eyes of the Cold Warriors of the West, Vietnam became a fallen domino, it was also the final domino: the bloc stops here. After the Americans left, the Soviets, who had sent three thousand soldiers to advise and train (and perhaps fight alongside) the North Vietnamese, became Vietnam’s principal ally and maintained a military presence until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but Vietnam never became the USSR’s minion. Or China’s. In 1978–1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, ousting the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge and ending the Pol Pot nightmare, in the process earning China’s outrage. The Vietnamese were denounced by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping as “the hooligans of the East.” North Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, born Nguyen Sinh Cung, pictured circa 1950.The man who eventually would become the symbol of Vietnamese communism, the mortal enemy of the United States, and later, in death, be revered as the Father of the Nation, was a bright child. He learned, from his father, Chinese and Vietnamese writing as well as the requisite French at a lycée in Hue. His first political act is thought to have been participation in a peasant anti-tax demonstration in Hue when he was seventeen. At twenty-one, with his educational opportunities limited in Vietnam because his father had been fired from his government post for an abuse of power, he shipped out of Saigon on a French steamer, working in the galley, and arrived in Marseilles in late 1911. Rejected for study at the French Colonial Administrative School—think what might have happened, or not happened, had he become an administrator of French colonial rule in Vietnam!—Nguyen decided to work his way around the world on ships, and for the next several years visited the United States, Britain, and France. He lived in the US in 1912–1913, and again in 1917–1918, and worked at several jobs, including a stint as a baker at Boston’s venerable Parker House Hotel. Between those visits he sailed to Britain, where he odd-jobbed, mainly in restaurants, before crossing the English Channel to France, where his political education really began.By the time Nguyen arrived in Paris, probably in 1919, there was a sizeable Vietnamese community in France. Within that community, a nationalist movement had bubbled up, and Nguyen joined it, quickly becoming one of the movement’s leaders and taking a new name: Nguyen Ai Quoc. At the Versailles peace talks at the close of World War I, Nguyen and the nationalists petitioned US president Woodrow Wilson and other Western leaders to force an end to French colonial rule in Indochina. This was the first time that the man who would become Ho Chi Minh brushed up against the US government, though he did not leave much of an impression. The nationalists’ plea was ignored, which served to fortify Nguyen’s patriotic resolve. His Paris activities may not have moved the West, but they did not go unnoticed in Vietnam, where he became a symbol and a rallying figure for the anticolonial movement.
In the years between the world wars, Nguyen Ai Quoc became a founding member of the French Communist Party and traveled to Moscow, where he spent a year studying and working for the Communist International (Comintern). In 1924, he went to Canton, China, where he gave lectures to young Vietnamese revolutionaries. He remained in China until 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup forced him to leave. For the next decade, he was constantly on the move—he returned to Moscow and then went to Paris, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1928, he moved to Thailand and then went to India, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, where he was arrested, possibly at the request of the French, in 1931. The British authorities in the Crown Colony resisted French demands for Nguyen’s extradition, then falsely reported his death and allowed him to slip away to Italy, where he worked for a time in a Milan restaurant (purportedly, a portrait of him still hangs on a wall there), but he was suffering from tuberculosis, and he spent several years in the Soviet Union recovering. He returned to China, where communism was in its ascendancy, working with Mao Zedong’s army, in 1938—the year Hitler’s Germany seized Austria and set its sights on the rest of Europe. In China, Nguyen Ai Quoc began calling himself Ho Chi Minh.
World War II
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Eight months later, on May 10, 1939, Germany invaded France; France surrendered on June 22, placing its new, pro-Axis Vichy government in charge of France and her territories, including Indochina.
By then, Japan and China had been at war for two years. Japan had long coveted China’s resources, including its seemingly inexhaustible supply of human labor, and had sent its armies in to try to seize them. In 1937, Japan captured Nanking, the Chinese capital, and began a six-week rampage of slaughter and rape that left as many as three hundred thousand Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers dead.
The Nationalist Chinese government was supported by the US and France, who funneled war supplies to China through the Vietnamese port of Haiphong. In 1940, Japan invaded northern Vietnam to shut off the Allied pipeline to China, but left the Vichy government in place. The following year, with the rubber-stamp approval of the Vichy government, the Japanese placed forces in southern Vietnam and created the bases that served as springboards for Japanese assaults on the Philippines, Malaysia, and other Pacific territories. In July 1941, President Roosevelt asked the Japanese to withdraw from Indochina, and began an oil embargo of Japan that threatened to cripple its military machine. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war.
A Japanese officer gives his weapon up to allied forces during the Japanese surrender in Indochina, August 1945. Ho Chi Minh had led guerrilla actions against the Vichy French and Japanese occupiers. When the Japanese surrendered, he proclaimed Vietnam’s independence.
Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh in the fight for independence, which now had two adversaries, the French and the Japanese. He led many guerrilla actions against the Vichy French and the Japanese occupiers, reportedly with clandestine support from the American OSS, given in return for the intelligence on the Ja
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