In Good Faith: A History of the Vietnam War Volume 1: 1945–65

DEDICATION

To a good school friend

Frank de Planta

Contents

List of Maps

1 The Serpent in Eden, 1945–60

2 Kennedy’s Finger in the Dyke, 1960–62

3 Annus Horribilis, January–November 1963

4 Mopping the Floor, November 1963–July 1964

5 Shooting at Flying Fish, ­August–December 1964

6 Jupiter’s Thunderbolt, ­January–December 1965

Notes

Bibliography

Plates

LIST OF MAPS

Chapter 1

THE SERPENT IN EDEN, 1945–60

Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff, bowed very low, as well he might. Three weeks previously his country had twice been visited by a divine, destructive wind beyond the imagination of man. It blew in from the east and was released from the bellies of two silver aircraft flying high above the clouds, barely visible except to an attentive observer. Imperial Japan had vowed that the flower of her youth would stop the relentless advance of the American foe. Even on the verge of defeat and faced with the imminent invasion of the home islands, the Imperial Japanese Headquarters plotted insane, fantastic attacks involving 6,500 kamikaze pilots and 5,000 suicide boats to halt the invaders. If it came to it, the generals concluded, 100 million Japanese should sacrifice their lives and charge the enemy with swords and bayonets.

America gave her answer with the thunderclap of two atomic bombs. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer celebrated this novel way of annihilating entire populations by publishing a full page advertisement of a bikini-clad model called Blanca Welter – Miss Anatomic Bomb – enjoying solar energy in an unexplosive moment, possibly the most vulgar documented response to the sudden, violent deaths of 150,000 human beings.¹ Faced with annihilation, Emperor Hirohito made his jeweled voice capitulation speech to the nation, in fact a broadcast of a barely intelligible pre-recorded statement spoken in archaic Japanese. The previous day, Japan had been attacked by the biggest air raid of the Pacific War involving over 1,000 aircraft dropping conventional but no less destructive bombs. An earlier mass leaflet drop revealing the Emperor’s secret decision to surrender had raised fears of civil unrest. This last psychological operation, coupled with the unstoppable Soviet advance through Manchuria, sealed the capitulation. Later detractors of the use of atomic weapons would ignore that, even in the very last hours of the war, Japan had to be pummeled into surrendering. The biggest shock of the atomic bomb was just how un-shocked contemporaries were by its use.

An 11-strong Japanese surrender delegation boarded the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. They were led by the bespectacled Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, dressed incongruously in tails, white gloves, and a top hat. His left hand gripped a walking stick, a curiously emaciated symbol of state propping his missing leg. General Umezu, with downturned mouth, wore his customary peaked cap, three rows of medals, and riding boots with spurs. He looked, like the rest of the party, drawn and beaten.

The surrender ceremony lasted less than half an hour, watched in silence by the entire ship’s company and 300 journalists and photographers. MacArthur led the proceedings but Fleet Admiral Nimitz made sure his name was also on the instrument of surrender (with the distinction that he was signing on behalf of the American nation, whereas MacArthur was signing in his capacity as Supreme Commander Allied Forces). Immediately behind the table on which the surrender documents would be signed, in single rank, were representatives of all the other countries with a stake in the brief and now vanquished Japanese empire: the old colonial powers, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, as well as the awakened giants, China and the Soviet Union. Under the terms of the surrender, only four of the eight nations ranged against Japan were legally counted as an Allied Power; the remainder were parties to the surrender. The French representative found himself relegated to the second rank of powers, along with minnows like New Zealand.²

Following the short ceremony there could be no doubt that the emperor god had been brought back down to earth, and a new deity resided on the summit of Mount Fuji. America now found herself the de jure ruler of an Asian country, her western border stretched across five thousand miles of ocean and now lying on the rim of the most populous continent in the world. Five years later and using a football metaphor, Secretary of State Dean Acheson would call this America’s new defense line against a fresh enemy – communism. The line snaked all the way from northern Japan to the southernmost islands of the Philippines, bypassing Korea with unintended consequences, and stopping short of the remaining European colonies of Southeast Asia, including French Indochina. Like great military irruptions of the past it left the conquerors both bewildered and fascinated by their new possessions. This was the first important consequence of the war in the Pacific.

For the next four decades, facing down the Soviet Union became the monolithic, unifying theme of American foreign policy, and its abiding metaphor was the race: in the development of new weapons, in space, in industrial output, and on sports tracks. Its constant fear was nuclear Armageddon. The better world that millions had fought for – if not a postwar Eden then at least a place rid of the manifest evils of nationalist and totalitarian governments – had proved a child’s fancy. A serpent had entered Eden and its name was communism.

The speed with which this happened forced a complete reversal of policy: if Moscow was going to play the discordant note to Washington’s fiddle, then it was time to summon the marching bands. This hyperinflation of communism had profound consequences on American culture and self-image. Americans fought the Japanese to avenge a heinous wrong, trading war crime for war crime, but no American would have defined the essential character of Americaness as anti-Japanese. Despite the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime, the average GI held no strong feelings against the average German soldier. The lousy Kraut was a figure from the movies, and Patton’s crude characterization of Germans was not shared by his Third Army, which just wanted to get the job done and come home. But communism, invariably spelled with a foreboding capital C, was absolutely different. The dreary ruminations of Karl Marx, read nowhere outside university campuses, became the words of the devil. Communism grew the horns of religious evil, not just political wrong or economic stupidity, threatening the very beacon on the hill the Puritans had first lit.

The immediate postwar tension was and would remain in Europe. This was where vast armies still faced each other across Churchill’s iron curtain. But a second front also opened in Asia, where the end of hostilities brought to the surface the many intractable problems exposed by the receding tide of Japanese imperialism. And it was here that America faced in MacArthur’s colorful phrase, a hard, monolithic block of China and Russia with no crevices in it.³

All the principal actors viewed the postwar settlement through the lens of their own ambitions and ideologies and the outcome was always going to be more wars. For the French and Dutch, a return to the status quo ante was the logical resolution and they were at first surprised and then resistant when they discovered that the newly liberated peoples of their former colonies no longer welcomed them. Better to the hell than to be colonized again, ran the slogan on the sides of buses in Java, where British tanks and Thunderbolt aircraft were used to suppress rebellion against the war-exhausted Dutch. The British themselves were divided, but the more reasonable voices foresaw the end of empire and sought to manage Britain’s disengagement from her Far Eastern colonies with equity and dignity. Australia and New Zealand had no imperial designs (although both administered a handful of colonial possessions), but eyed developments to the north with wariness. The long indefensible coastline of Australia had been exposed by the Japanese. Could it happen again with the threat of now communist-inspired liberation movements? From Moscow’s onion-domed towers, Stalin saw the opportunity to gobble former disputed territories, tidy borders, and spread Soviet influence across the Far East. Nationalist China, exhausted by civil war, parleyed with the Red Army, but the relation was strained and would eventually break down. For America, the undisputed victor, the war had been fought to replace totalitarianism with democracy and especially to champion self-determination, an ideal incompatible with the ambitions of the former colonial powers. Exhausted by this epic war, Washington first settled for Japan and then looked beyond to China, surrendering the complicated ethnic tangle of Southeast Asia to the Europeans. For the myriad native peoples who had witnessed the humiliation of European masters at the hands of an Asian army, the moment was ripe for revolt.

With historical hindsight, the war against Japan proved to be only one of several wars that would ravage East Asia over the subsequent decades. The vacuum of retreating colonialism, swiftly sucking in superpower competition, was one agent. But nationalism and sectarianism, internal power struggles and land-grabbing – much of which masqueraded as liberation movements – also played important roles. This sparking of general, region-wide conflagration was the second great consequence of the war.

For postwar generations of Western Europeans brought up to celebrate the Normandy landings, the sheer scale of America’s Pacific struggle was as difficult to comprehend as it was remote. The armed forces of the United States conducted 78 amphibious landing operations over the course of the Pacific War, with the last launched at Sarangani Bay on July 12, 1945. By that summer, US forces had occupied the Ryukyu and Ret To island archipelagos just south of Japan and were within 200 miles of the mainland. It had been a supreme effort. For the average GI or marine who lived through the experience, vengeance was all that counted – and the ticket home. It took almost four years to defeat Japan because of the geographical scale of the war and the necessity to fight on a second European front. But mostly the war was prolonged because Japan opposed Western military competence with ideological fanaticism. This feature of the war would be repeated in every subsequent conflict in Southeast Asia where Western and Asian soldiers clashed.

America suffered 106,207 war dead in the Pacific War. Her main ally, the British, suffered 52,000 fatalities including 12,000 deaths in captivity. A further 86,838 British Indians added to this toll. By contrast, Japan suffered 2,133,915 military deaths (from 1937 to 1945). As a very rough measure, American forces were perhaps inflicting 20 times as many fatalities on their enemy. The American way of war, at the very least, was a lethally effective way.

The Pacific War not only proved an industrially murderous business. It was also an especially dehumanizing experience for the front-line soldier. A popular wartime poster urged US servicemen to Stay on the job until every murdering Jap is wiped out! This invocation was observed with a bloodlust that matched the abhorrent ideology of the Japanese imperial forces. By the end of the war, soldiers returning from the Pacific theater had to make a customs declaration that they were not carrying body parts in their luggage. Never mind wiping out the Japanese: chop them to pieces and pickle them. When the remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated from the Mariana Islands in the mid-1980s, it was discovered that six out of ten were missing their heads. The same phenomenon of headless (as well as toothless or earless) Japanese corpses was repeated across the Pacific islands.⁴ Directives condemning and prohibiting the practice of collecting body parts as souvenirs were widely ignored.

When Life magazine, in May 1944, notoriously published the image of a young woman posing with the skull of a Japanese soldier sent to her by her naval officer boyfriend, there was pious public condemnation. But this censure missed the mood of a nation that viewed trophy skulls as legitimate spoils of war: This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach. Miss Nickerson, unfazed by the macabre gift, named the skull Tojo, after the Japanese general who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. The real Tojo kept his head long enough for it to be hung for war crimes in December 1948 (but not his teeth – a 22-year-old Navy dentist called Jack Mallory rectified this by providing him with a set of dentures, with the words Remember Pearl Harbor inscribed in Morse code, as a prank). The War Department objected to the Life magazine cover, not because it was morally repellent but because it endangered the lives of US servicemen who might themselves be turned into Japanese body-part trophies. The naval officer who sent the skull got away with a reprimand. As far as the Life editor was concerned, there was no wrongdoing. Did not the government’s own propaganda describe the Japanese as rats, vermin, reptiles, apes, monkeys, bats, and insects? A Japanese skull was just one more animal trophy.

This sense of racial superiority over the yellow, Asiatic enemy, engendered in the Pacific and fortified in the Korean War, would multiply with frightful results in the Vietnam War. The tragic paradox of America as idealistic guarantor of liberty, but acting as out-of-control mobster, was the third great consequence of the Pacific War. Americans wanted to remember the war by the heroic, if staged, image of marines hoisting the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi, not by film of American soldiers shooting prone Japanese prisoners and hacking them with bayonets, footage that would only emerge 50 years after the conclusion of the Pacific War.⁵

The country least willing to accept the new political order was France – not so much a nation as an idea that emerged from the Second World War in a mess, bankrupted, but with undimmed imperial ambitions. Restoring la gloire française, French glory, quickened the pulse of every Frenchman, communists as much as Gaullists. Even as other European countries were preparing to unwind their colonial histories, France’s soon-to-be Fourth Republic embarked on a suicidal project to retain her overseas possessions and the first colony to challenge this vision was French Indochina. When traveler Pierre Barrelon visited Indochina in 1893, for the benefit of readers of the popular weekly journal Le Tour Du Monde, he wrote: "Le cap Saint-Jacques est en vue, c’est la terre française … [Cape Saint Jacques is in view, this is French land …]" Half a century later any Frenchman would have agreed with him.

As early as September 1943, under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle, a Committee of National Defense had been tasked with planning the recapture of Indochina.⁶ For administrative purposes, modern Vietnam was then a colony divided along the lines of its three historic regions: northern Tonkin (Bac Bo), with Hanoi as capital; central Annam (Trung Bo), administered by Hue the imperial capital; and Cochin China (Nam Bo), served by cosmopolitan Saigon. The name Viet-Nam was a modern coinage. Vietnam’s late imperial dynasties had governed a kingdom named Nam-Viet, or South Viet. Chinese invaders reversed the name to Viet-Nam. The imperial court in Hue used the title Dai Nam or Great South up to the end of 1945. It was Northern nationalists, led by the communists, who revived the title Viet-Nam, claiming it for their Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French, of course, denied any such identity. When future Central Committee member Hoang Quoc Viet worked his passage on a French ship he proudly declared himself a Vietnamese. But his fellow French sailors shot back there was no such thing as Vietnam.⁷

Map 1: French Indochina Before 1945

Vietnamese history and identity had been defined by rivalry between these various ethnic blocs. Over a period of centuries, northern Vietnamese rulers had extended their rule over Annam and later Cochin China. This became the historic mission inherited by Vietnam’s communist leaders. In their way stood the flotsam of a century of French colonialism that had four profound effects on Vietnamese society. In the political sphere, the imperial elite and mandarin classes had been demoralized and eventually dismantled. Economically, traditional land ownership had given way to industrial estates and a rapacious rentier culture. It was said that the workers were fertilizer for the rubber trees because they died in droves and were buried in the plantations. This was an inevitable consequence of Paris designating the Indochinese possessions a colonie d’exploitation (colony of economic exploitation). The corollary to this deracination was social upheaval with an urban working class and a growing and educated middle class, fed on a staple of French culture. Incongruously, Vietnamese were taught that their ancestors were Gauls. Lastly, the division between north and south was reinforced by policies that favored local French caciques (party bosses) over national unity. Roosevelt was absolutely right when he observed France has milked it [Vietnam] for 100 years.⁸ Ho Chi Minh would quip that the French built more prisons than schools. A legacy of belle époque public buildings barely compensated for these pernicious outcomes. This was Graham Greene’s Vietnam of urine and injustices, Tabu and Illusion dirty magazines, and restaurants with grill entrances to ward off grenade attacks. Life correspondent Theodore H. White, with his deep knowledge of Indochina, sketched it best: The splendid French boulevards ran like causeways over a basin of hate.⁹

France’s humiliation in Indochina began in June 1940 when Japan demanded the closure of the Haiphong-Yunnan railway, used to supply nationalist forces in China. General George Catroux, the Governor-General and an officer steeped in the French colonial experience, had no option but to accede to the demand. For many months he had conducted a skillful diplomatic game with Tokyo in an effort to preserve the unity of the French colony, cognizant that his 90,000-strong Indochina Army was a paper force (just 14,500 were reliable Europeans).¹⁰ Trapped by the feebleness of the French position, Catroux concocted the notion of a face-saving defensive alliance with Japan. His interlocutor, the Francophobe General Nishihara, an officer who had served as defense attaché in Paris, readily agreed to this proposal.¹¹ Two months later, on September 22, his Vichy government replacement, Vice Admiral Jean Decoux, endured greater humiliation. Faced with the ultimatum of an invasion, France agreed to the stationing of 6,000 Japanese troops on Vietnamese soil. A fiction of Japanese-French amity was preserved but the reality was that the Japanese 5th Division had effectively ousted Decoux as the supreme authority in the country. To sustain this false narrative, a neutered French garrison was allowed to remain in territories now forcibly co-opted into Japan’s Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere.

Decoux proved an energetic governor-general, as keen at hunting down the Bolshevist common enemy, as building roads. But in making common cause with the Japanese he had manifested a supreme hypocrisy that infected every subsequent French colonial government. A façade of greater Vietnamese participation in government masked an iron determination to resist the twin threats of a total Japanese takeover, and Vietnamese nationalism. His government’s policy, he explained at a secret meeting of résidents supérieurs, the French ruling class, in Dalat, in July 1942, was to play all sides against each other: maintaining as friendly relations with Japan as possible, while keeping lines of communication open with nationalist China and the Allies.¹² The Japanese similarly played a double-game, in public supporting the French authorities, but in private supporting subversive groups like the Hoa Hao Buddhists and the Cao Dai sect.

From the Japanese perspective, Vietnam’s sects were little more than peculiar minority movements but they served the purpose of destabilizing French authority. The latter’s full title was Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do, or The Great Religion of the Third Amnesty. Founded by the probably mad Ngo Van Chieu, the Cao Dai was an occult, syncretic movement borrowing from Christianity, Buddhism, and Taoism. Its saints included such diverse figures as Joan of Arc, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, and French author Victor Hugo. There were as many as two million Cao Daists, mainly in Tay Ninh Province northwest of Saigon, and they owed allegiance to a self-proclaimed pope, Pham Cong Tac, not the government. The Hoa Haos were formed by another religious fanatic, a Buddhist faith healer called Huynh Phu So who would be executed by the Viet Minh, turning the two movements into implacable enemies. There were perhaps one and a half million Hoa Haos, mostly settled in the Mekong Delta.

As the Pacific War expanded, tensions within Indochina multiplied. Gaullists and Vichy supporters schemed against each other, fomented by British intelligence. In the background, an austere wartime economy began to spiral out of control: the cost of a chicken jumped from just over half a piaster in 1939, to 18 piasters by 1945. The cost of a kilo of rice multiplied twentyfold.¹³ In May 1941, across the Chinese border in Guangxi Province, Vietnamese exiles anticipating the end of French rule formed the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoy (the League for the Independence of Viet Nam). This movement embraced a coalition of the veteran Indochinese Communist Party (Viet Nam Cong San Dang (ICP)); the rival Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD)); and two smaller parties, the New Vietnam Party, and the Revolutionary Youth League. Nationalist Chinese attempts to manipulate the last three parties led to their loss of credibility and elevated the communists as the only genuine and independent Vietnamese nationalist cause. Internecine struggles then led to the dissolution of the ICP, leaving political leadership in the hands of a handful of armed men. Among the founding members of this resistance was the bone-thin, itinerant political activist later known to the world as Ho Chi Minh. His deputy was a former teacher and newspaper man with an interest in military history called Vo Nguyen Giap. The two had first met as students at the prestigious Lycée Quoc Hoc in Hue, the incubator of many of Vietnam’s future leaders. Since those days both had suffered hardship, imprisonment, and in the case of Giap the loss of his wife, tortured in Hao Lo prison where American pilots would later be incarcerated. Giap was entrusted with establishing the first fighting cadres of a rudimentary guerrilla force, the Viet Minh (meaning Light of the Land). Vo meant force and Giap shield, apt names for the future commander of Vietnam’s communist forces.¹⁴ With an insurgent war churning around him, he was not short of inspiration.

For the first four years, the Viet Minh achieved little militarily, partly because of the success of repressive measures introduced by Decoux. The Bureau de Statistique Militaires, the army’s intelligence service, proved especially effective in this regard. The first formal Viet Minh units were not raised until December 1944 and no significant actions were taken before March 1945. All the while, however, a covert, rural-based infrastructure was being painstakingly built which would provide the foundation for future success.¹⁵ This seeming inactivity was also driven by Ho’s painful experience of the failed November 22, 1940 uprising against the French: a half-cooked revolution, he concluded, was worse than no revolution at all.

The Viet Minh were not isolated during this period of gestation. Nationalist China provided some material support and sanctuary. American support – which marked the beginning of direct American involvement in Vietnam, and hence has a founding quality about it – started with the Roosevelt government through the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The first mention of Ho Chi Minh was made in OSS files dating to 1940.¹⁶ Secret arms shipments to the Viet Minh were made in 1942 and 1943, although there is some suggestion that the American suppliers were unclear who was actually receiving the weapons.¹⁷

The OSS was followed by bombers. In a foretaste of future raids, a sortie was conducted by 14th Air Force against Hanoi on April 12, 1943 that resulted in nearly 500 Vietnamese deaths, but only a handful of Japanese casualties. A raid on the docks of Saigon, on May 5, 1944, produced similar results.¹⁸ It was not until 1945 that B-29 and Third Carrier Fleet raids began to inflict worthwhile damage on the Japanese war effort in Indochina, but these attacks also witnessed high numbers of civilian casualties, including Europeans. Pitching French Indochina into the hands of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS – rather than subsuming it within MacArthur’s military command – had other important consequences. Donovan was strongly opposed to the French regime in Indochina, viewing Vichy colonialism as little better than Japanese imperialism. Anti-French sentiment imbued the Indochinese mission from the beginning, and would continue to complicate Franco-American relations for the next decade.

A Viet Minh irruption in northern Vietnam was finally precipitated by the unannounced Japanese attack on a weakened French garrison, code-named Operation Meigo Sakusen, on March 9, 1945. The coup was launched at precisely the same moment that Roosevelt was privately advising the French government there would be no Allied military action in French Indochina. De Gaulle had warned Roosevelt that the collapse of the Vichy government would encourage the Japanese government to at least subjugate the French administration in the Union [of Indochina], and so it came to pass.¹⁹ By now, 5th Division had been replaced by 38th Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Yuitsu Tsuchihashi. The French were not entirely caught by surprise. Secret Japanese plans to seize control of French Indochina had been known to the French authorities for quite some time, thanks to American code-breaking.²⁰ Ever suspicious of Washington’s motives, some had discounted this valuable intelligence.

Command of the colonial army in Hanoi fell under Lieutenant General Eugène Mordant. This old-fashioned general with an exuberant walrus moustache took the warnings seriously and prepared a contingency known as Plan A 835/3. This would see French forces withdrawing to the hills of the Red River Delta to await reinforcement – a forlorn hope. Operation Meigo Sakusen unrolled irresistibly and ruthlessly. Despite spirited local French resistance, Plan A became a retreat. One of the more encouraging aspects of this otherwise desperate action was the manner in which the French and Viet Minh briefly found common cause against the Japanese enemy. But by May 2 the last soldiers of the demoralized French Indochina Army had crossed the Chinese border, leaving behind only scattered bands of partisans. There they found an American ill will and a refusal by General Albert Wedemeyer, Chief of Staff of the South East Asia Command, to treat the French soldiers as anything other than refugees.

This contrary position with the French was the handiwork of the now-deceased Roosevelt. To the end of his life and presidency, Roosevelt clung to the policy that America should not allow France, or any other European power, to bank the lives of US servicemen to save Asian empires, a policy he personally conveyed to Wedemeyer in March 1945.²¹ This conflicted with directives issued by the Joint Chiefs to assist the French, as long as the assistance met American war aims and could not be construed as offering political support for the Vichy colonial authorities. In practice, the two aims could not be easily separated. A bombing run served the purpose both of giving the Japanese hell and succour to the French. Even as a chorus of French officers led by de Gaulle complained that 14th Air Force was not doing enough, US State Department officials fretted that they were doing too much. The two principal outcomes that fell out of this unhappy alliance were a reinforced French mistrust of Washington’s intentions, and an opportunity for the anti-Gallic OSS to fill the vacuum left by the departing French, an opportunity Donovan did not pass by.

Even as the Allies squabbled, Japanese hopes of Vietnamese compliance were quickly dashed. Abrogation of the 1884 Patenôtre Treaty and a declaration of independence failed to satisfy Vietnamese nationalism. Among those who felt thwarted was a future president of South Vietnam who would so perplex and frustrate American policymakers, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem. A haltingly efficient government was established under a progressive politician named Tran Trong Kim, but it was evident that French Indochina, without the French, was no more pacified. Within the month, Ho convened a conference of armed groups in northern Vietnam (the six provinces that constituted the self-proclaimed Free Zone of the Viet Bac) and announced the formation of a 5,000-strong Vietnam Liberation Army. Confusingly, the now puppet Emperor Bao Dai simultaneously raised an army with the same title.

It was at this juncture that the newly arrived and exotically named OSS Captain, Archimedes Leonidas Attilio Patti, crossed paths with Ho Chi Minh. Chain-smoking Chesterfields, Patti later recalled:

I first met Ho on the China border between China and Indochina in the last days of April of 1945. He was an interesting individual. Very sensitive, very gentle, rather a frail type. We spoke quite at length about the general situation, not only in Indochina, but the world at large.²²

In Patti’s later, fascinating 600-page account, Why Vietnam?: Prelude to America’s Albatross, he explained that he actually knew very little about the man. He first noticed the name in a cable to the US ambassador in China dated December 31, 1942, describing the arrest by Chinese authorities of one Ho Chih-chi (?) in Kunming.²³ A year later there was a request for his release. On August 28, 1944, there was a visa request to travel to the United States for a Ho Ting-ching, an intriguing suggestion that Ho intended to make his advocacy directly to Roosevelt (he didn’t, in the end, travel because the Chinese would not issue him with a passport). When Patti asked about this individual, fellow Americans described him as a friendly Annamite.

Ho impressed on Patti the dire situation of the Vietnamese in Tonkin, at the time facing famine, because the French were selling rice stocks to the Japanese, as well as using them to supply the lucrative rice wine business. In turn, the Japanese had exacerbated the plight of farmers by forcing them to grow hemp to support the war effort.²⁴ Patti later recalled that Ho showed him a collection of photographs of famine victims: we look at the Cambodian pictures today and compare them with those, well, there’s no comparison. Really, those were sad.²⁵ Hanoi medical student Tran Duy Hung remembered:

Hanoi was full of agonizing sights at the time. People dug into the garbage dumps in order to find any edible thing at all: banana peels, tangerine peels, discarded greens and vegetable, and so on. They also ate rats … Every morning when we opened our door, we saw five to seven corpses of people who had died the night before.²⁶

Villager Duong Van Thang, like hundreds of his fellow peasants, joined the Viet Minh to escape the ravages provoked by the French and Japanese: We simply died in droves because of starvation … Simply dried up and died.²⁷

To Patti’s surprise, Ho asked for nothing, except an open line to the OSS. Not only was Patti surprised, but when he reported back to the OSS stations in Kunming and Chongqing, they wouldn’t believe me. The Viet Minh duly supplied the intelligence which was judged fantastic and so accurate intelligence staffs in Chongqing and Kunming changed their orders of battle and targeting.

However, OSS agents did provide support for America’s future nemesis. When Ho fell seriously ill with malaria and dysentery it was an American doctor, Paul Hoagland, who saved him. Following the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai in September 1945 it was Patti who gave the unauthorized imprimatur to Ho’s unilateral declaration of independence in Ba Dinh Square (actually a roundabout on the corner of the Jardin Botanique in Hanoi), and it was an American aircraft that provided an unintended fly past. For Patti, it was always clear that Ho’s men were fighting for the cause of independence against the French. Ho reciprocated by professing undying friendship with the new, powerful ally. Patti later confessed, I just couldn’t believe my own ears.²⁸

In fact, by the time Patti assumed responsibility for FIC (French Indochina) operations, a narrative of undercover missions had been underway for some time. An AGAS (Air Ground Aid Station – China) operator, Lieutenant Charles Fenn (later an author), had made separate contact with Ho in March 1945 following the downing of an American pilot. A second AGAS operator – Lieutenant Dan Phelan – sent glowing reports of the Viet Minh in May.²⁹ Later, a Major Allison Thomas joined Patti’s team, brimming with confidence after working in occupied France with the French resistance. Under an existing nebulous mysterious GBT (after the initials of the surnames of the three men who took part, Laurence Gordon, Harry Bernard, and Frank Tan) covert operations were being undertaken in Tonkin in support of the Allied bombing. These missions also involved intermittent liaison with Ho’s Viet Minh who were keen to help the Americans. GBT had all the hallmarks of freewheeling wartime espionage operations: Gordon was a Canadian expatriate who had managed Texaco’s operations in Haiphong before the war; Bernard was a British tobacco dealer; and Tan a Chinese-American businessman.³⁰ The ring had in fact been set up by the British secret service, which caused some friction with the arriviste OSS. The newly arrived Major Thomas, who was only partly aware of GBT, judged that one of the operators – never identified – offered the best intelligence, although OSS controllers treated his reports with a pinch of salt.³¹ It was this mysterious individual who presciently warned Thomas that it would be impossible to work with the French in FIC.

Over May and June 1945, the main effort was the mounting of a Franco-American operation from Taingai, on the Sino-Tonkin border. For a combination of reasons, not least a growing realization that collaboration with the French would not be welcomed, this scheme fell apart. During this period, after some deliberations, it was decided the Viet Minh constituted a potentially useful ally against the Japanese. The deciding factor was the loss of French intelligence contacts within Tonkin. As far as anyone knew, the only organized group capable of filling the gap was precisely the guerrilla movement generally known as the Viet Minh League. Much like Patti, Thomas later confessed that he had barely heard of the Viet Minh, and that the first mention of this group was in conversation with French officers.³² Fenn may have played a key role in offering to make contact with the Viet Minh as he had quizzed Hoe on his communist affiliations – the main concern of the American backers – and concluded that he was basically a nationalist. This line was reinforced by Patti. French contacts insisted that the Vietnamese were stupid, infantile, and communist, but Patti dismissed this jaundiced advice.³³

The OSS subsequently organized a covert operation – the six-man Deer Mission led by Allison Thomas. The team comprised Lieutenant Montfort, a French Army officer; Sergeant Logos, a French Annamite; Sergeant Phac, also an Annamite; a third Sergeant Zeilski; and the French and Vietnamese-speaking Private Prunier.³⁴ The group parachuted into Tonkin on July 16, near a village called Kim Lung, 75 miles northwest of Hanoi, where contact was made with Ho’s guerrillas. Among the welcoming committee was Van, the nom de guerre of Vo Nguyen Giap, incongruously and impeccably dressed in a white suit and fedora. Their task, according to Thomas, was to interdict Japanese lines of communication in the Hanoi-Ningmai area, gather intelligence on the Japanese, including targets of opportunity for the Air Force, and train a group of 100 guerrillas in small arms.³⁵ In return, the guerrillas offered assistance to downed Allied pilots, under the scheme earlier organized by Fenn. Ho acquired the code name Lucius, as well as the more prosaic label OSS Agent 19. Incongruously, Prunier noticed that Ho used stationery from the Parker House Hotel in Boston, a city he had visited as a young man.³⁶ In addition to Ho and Giap, this core group gave rise to at least two general officers, including Major General Quang Trung, who would first vex the French and then the Americans during the Vietnam War. This particular group was a select group from all over Vietnam, said Prunier. They weren’t a ragtag bunch of farmers.

The OSS men and Viet Minh quickly established a good rapport, facilitated by a welcoming supper of beer (recently captured), rice, bamboo sprouts, and barbecued steak. The Deer Mission was impressed that the guerrillas freshly slaughtered a cow in our honor.³⁷ Ho assured his guests that he would welcome 10 million Americans into Tonkin, but no French.³⁸ The Frenchman Montfort, in fact, was lucky to have escaped with his life. As Ho later explained, his guards would have shot him dead on the spot had they known his identity (Montfort was later flown out for his safety; it transpired, to Franco-American mutual embarrassment, that Montfort was in fact an M.5 French secret service agent who had infiltrated the OSS; Logos and Phac were also double-agents in a piece of brazen French chicanery). Thomas’s opinion on the Viet Minh was quickly formed. In his preliminary report to the OSS base in Kunming he wrote: Forget the Communist Bogy. VML [Viet Minh League] is not Communist. Stands for freedom and reform from French harshness.³⁹ He was wrong on the first point, but right on the second. Ho was both communist and nationalist, a juxtaposition that simplistic American labeling could not reconcile.

In the end, the Deer Mission achieved little: military support was neither substantial nor decisive, and various delays meant the guerrilla force was still in training when the Japanese surrender was announced. The only fighting undertaken by Thomas’s trainees was a desultory affair against an isolated Japanese contingent in the town of Thai Nguyen (where the Three-Nation Truce Commission would in fact sit at the end of the First Indochina War). After some negotiations, a truce was called, and the Japs were allowed to circulate in the town without arms where they were surprised to find equally surprised Americans out strolling the streets on a shopping and picture-taking tour.⁴⁰

It was during this heady period that another OSS operator crossed paths with Ho and Giap: a Franco-American called Lucien Conein. The young captain just wanted to get the hell out of there and return home, like so many other servicemen stuck in backwaters. In time, he would return to South Vietnam and play a central role in the final drama of the Kennedy presidency. Thomas’s untrammelled support for Ho, in the meantime, caused discord in the Deer Mission camp. Another Franco-American called Defourneaux alleged that the boys hated Thomas and his pro-Viet Minh ways. Conein in turn fell out with Patti in Hanoi, whom he judged arrogant. These tensions in the American camp aside, it had always been Ho’s policy anyway to avoid confrontation with the Japanese (for fear of being worsted) in the same way that he had avoided conflict with his Chinese hosts. In reality, the Viet Minh undertook just one independent action against the Japanese, in the entire war.⁴¹ Ho’s reputation as nationalist leader was based on the blare of propaganda, good organization at village level, but little martial substance. His real enemies were competing Vietnamese political groups maneuvering to seek power following the anticipated collapse of French colonial rule.

Unlike his fellow communists, Ho was well traveled and had seen at first hand the great engine of America when he worked his passage to New York as a young man. He instinctively understood this was the power that counted, not a fracturing China, the traditional enemy of Vietnam anyway. Ho accepted the military assistance and reciprocated with intelligence, but what he really wanted was political recognition: every educated Vietnamese was acutely aware of Roosevelt’s promise of independence made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. In their first meeting, Patti had been taken aback when Ho quoted Wilson’s Fourteen Points by rote.⁴² These were nationalists steeped in the rhetoric of an American-promised independence.

However, the OSS mission was not in a position to fulfill such promises. Both the OSS and Viet Minh were unaware that Secretary of State Stettinius had secretly promised his French counterpart that Washington would respect the status of French Indochina. Ignorant of this deal, Ho continued to act as if independence was imminent. There followed an exchange of messages with Washington which Ho used to press his case as Vietnam’s legitimate future head of state. The Viet Minh was portrayed as a genuinely popular movement backed by Buddhists, Christians, businessmen, and farmers.⁴³ The possibility of an American naval base at Cam Ranh Bay