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By Root 4361 0

and Hong Kong would remain theirs. For empire to be re-established, however, it was imperative to set it amid friendly powers, and in Asia in the mid 1940s this meant imperial powers. Certainly, this was what Winston Churchill believed. Quite apart from this, the prime minister felt obligated to the Free French and Dutch regimes that had been his strong allies during the war and which showed no sign of wishing to give up their colonial territories in Indo-China and Indonesia. Churchill had several spats with Franklin D. Roosevelt about this in 1943 and 1944. The US president, brought up on British and Dutch history, heartily detested French imperialism and was keen to install a United Nations protectorate in Indo-China after the war. Then, at a stroke, the political scene was unexpectedly transformed. FDR died and his successor, Harry S. Truman, seemed prepared to give the British their head in southern Indo-China and Indonesia, provided that Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese nationalists, now close allies of the USA, were allowed a controlling influence in the north. Shortly afterwards Labour came to power in Britain, ostensibly committed to policies of colonial independence. On the ground Mountbatten had established good relations with Indian and Burmese nationalists.

It could not be assumed, therefore, that the British would take the line that they did. This was effectively to restore the French and Dutch empires in Indo-China and Indonesia at the very time that they were coming to realize the limitations of their own tenure in India and Burma. In Indo-China in particular the consequences were momentous. In 1970, at the height of the American war in Vietnam, George Rosie, a radical journalist, wrote The British in Vietnam:how the twenty-five year war began. Rosie built up a formidable case against General Douglas Gracey, commander of the 20th Indian Division, which intervened in Indo-China in September 1945 on the orders of South East Asia Command. Gracey, the book argued, had greatly exceeded his orders. While claiming that he would not intervene in the politics of Indo-China, Gracey purposely allowed the French to rearm and stage a coup against the communist-led Viet Minh national front government in Saigon on 23 September 1945. He then used the Indian Army and surrendered Japanese forces to suppress a legitimate nationalist rebellion. Rosie concluded that the British ‘as a nation, bear some measure of responsibility for the tragedy of Vietnam’.7 Now that official and private papers are open, it is possible to consider anew many of Rosie’s assumptions and also to show how the beginning of the brutal war in Indo-China impacted on Britain’s policies in Southeast Asia more broadly.

Indo-China had been conquered piecemeal by the French after 1850. In the deltas of the Mekong to the south and the Red River to the north, their rule was direct and intrusive, even though they maintained the fiction of Vietnamese sovereignty in the form of a client emperor, based at the old royal city of Hue. By the 1930s French land companies owned much of Cochin China (southern Vietnam) and Vietnamese labour was exploited on rubber and coffee estates across the country. In the hills and forests away from the river valleys, in Laos and Cambodia, the French allowed more authority to native rulers. The Depression had a devastating effect on the Indo-Chinese countryside. Hardship fuelled peasant risings. The French had suppressed mainstream Vietnamese nationalism. Inevitably, clandestine communist movements filled the vacuum. French forces carried out savage punitive campaigns during the 1930s. But the shadowy communist leadership, headed by Nguyen Ai Quoc, ‘Nguyen the patriot’, alias Ho Chi Minh, slipped to and fro across the Chinese border and infiltrated the homelands of the Moi, the tribal peoples of the northern hills.

When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in 1941–2, they preserved the rule of their French Vichy ally while clamping down hard on any sign of restiveness among the large French expatriate populations of Hanoi and Saigon,