Program Information

The defeat of Japan was near in 1945, and the United States had to decide whether to permit the French to return to power in Vietnam.

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Transcript

Lead: The defeat of Japan was near in 1945, and the United States had to decide whether to permit the French to return to power in Vietnam.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: With the end of the war looming just months ahead, events in Indochina were at the boiling point. Since 1941 the Vietminh, a collection of nationalists and Communists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and his military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, had been conducting an ever increasingly effective insurgency against the Japanese and their French collaborators. Early in 1945 the Vietminh began receiving training from agents of the American Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA.

On March 9, 1945 the Japanese--dropping all pretense--suppressed the French colonial government and began to rule directly. With the French gone and the nearly defeated Japanese trying to hold onto power, the deteriorating situation was made even worse by a terrible famine that claimed the lives of perhaps as many as two million peasants. The famine was due less to bad harvests than it was to the disruption of food transport by Allied bombing and Japanese hoarding of rice for its troops.

Ho Chi Minh watched this mounting chaos from his jungle headquarters and sought help from the United States to defeat the Japanese and to keep the French from returning. The U.S. State Department was divided. The Asia experts were convinced that French rule in Indochina had been a disaster and were urging that France be told it could not go back. The European specialists cautioned that such a course would offend the Free French under Charles de Gaulle and threaten de Gaulle's regime by bringing the communists to power in France. The Europeanists won. Harry Truman instructed Secretary of State Edward Stettinius to quietly inform the French that the U.S. would back their return to power in Vietnam.

Unaware of the U.S. promise to the French, on September 2, 1945 a sickly Ho Chi Minh climbed onto a wooden platform in Hanoi and, using Thomas Jefferson's words from the Declaration, declared Vietnam's independence.

Next time: The aborted Revolution and the beginning of the first Vietnam War.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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