Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

Cochin China, as the southern part of Vietnamese territory had been called, would come under Ho’s control. Ho agreed to have 25,000 French troops replace Chinese soldiers north of the sixteenth parallel and stay until 1951. Both sides consented to have a Vietminh delegation travel to Paris later in the year to work out details of the agreement. But when Ho Chi Minh went to Paris in the summer of 1946, he was in for a big surprise. Georges Thierry D’Argenlieu was the culprit.
     
    After graduating from the French Naval Academy, D’Argenlieu had taken vows in the Carmelite Order in 1920 but then returned to active naval duty in 1940. In 1943 he became commander in chief of the Free French Naval Forces. D’Argenlieu was a devout Roman Catholic, a man who lived permanently in the past. D’Argenlieu believed that Adolf Hitler’s victory over the French had been a fluke, a brief pause in the reign of France as the premier nation on earth. Buoyed by the Allied victory in 1945, D’Argenlieu expected France to return to its former splendor. With that vision, he became high commissioner for Indochina in August 1945.
     
    On June 1, 1946, the day after Ho Chi Minh sailed for Paris, D’Argenlieu created the Republic of Cochin China, a new, separate colony in the French Union. Ho Chi Minh felt “raped” Unification was as important to him as independence. In fact, the two were for him inseparable, not only because his nationalism extended to include a larger Vietnam but because northern Vietnam was overpopulated and poor, unable to feed itself, while the nutrient-rich Mekong Delta produced rice surpluses. To keep Ho Chi Minh away from the Vietnamese émigré community, French officials moved him out to Biarritz in southwest France. The conference was held out of the press limelight at the isolated Fontainebleau Palace. For eight weeks Ho tried to get France to recognize Vietnamese independence, but the French preferred total control over French colonies. Desperate for assistance, Ho contacted the United States embassy, promising to open up Vietnam to American investment and lease a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in return for help in keeping the French out. Rebuffed, he remarked to an American reporter, “We . . . stand quite alone; we shall have to depend on ourselves” Before returning to Hanoi in mid-September, Ho Chi Minh signed a document in which France agreed to a unification referendum in Cochin China in 1947, but he had few illusions about France’s real intentions. During his last meeting with Georges Bidault, the French prime minister, on September 14, 1946, Ho warned: “If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours. Yet, in the end, it is you who will tire”
     
    In October Ho was back in Tonkin. The battle for Vietnam began a month later over the collection of customs duties in Haiphong. The French insisted it was their right; the Vietminh insisted it was not. When gunfire erupted between Vietminh and French soldiers, D’Argenlieu decided to “teach the Viets a lesson” On November 23, after giving the Vietminh two hours to evacuate Haiphong, the French attacked guerrilla hideouts in the city. French infantry and armored units swept through Haiphong; French aircraft provided tactical air support; and the French cruiser
Suffren
unloaded a sustained artillery bombardment. When the day was over, much of Haiphong was rubble. Six thousand people, including a few Vietminh, were dead.
     
    Four weeks later, the Vietminh retaliated in Hanoi, destroying the city’s electrical power plant and assassinating several French officials. Ho Chi Minh fled the city and established new Vietminh headquarters in the jungle sixty miles from Hanoi, where he controlled several provinces with 40,000 Vietminh troops. General Etienne Valluy, who replaced Leclerc, announced that if “those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it” General Vo Nguyen Giap was obliging: “I order all soldiers