Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [90]
The nationalists in Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: ‘You are defeated, now it is our turn to fight the white imperialists.’10 Terauchi refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon’s twin port city, French and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like organization called the Binh Xuyen. Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the Japanese, who held power. Inside Cholon, the large French population was restive. Colonel Jean Cédile had parachuted into the country and represented Free French authority until the arrival of a French commissioner. He established strained relations with the Viet Minh authority, which was itself split between moderates who were prepared to co-operate and radicals who wanted an immediate attack on the returning colonialists. When the surrendered Japanese representatives visited the British headquarters in Rangoon in late August they said frankly that they could not control the population of southern Vietnam.
Into this minefield moved General Gracey’s 20th Indian Division, a crack unit of the 14th Army, with some trepidation and little knowledge. French Indo-China had never figured strongly in the British mental map of the East, even though it adjoined Burma and Malaya and was home to substantial numbers of Indians and the same southern Chinese communities who traded in Singapore and Rangoon. British minutes of 1945 waffled about the ‘Annamite character’ with its ‘ceremoniousness’ and ‘veneration for age’.11 Nor, apparently, were the British very interested in replacing these comfortable stereotypes with more solid information about the roots and nature of Vietnamese identity. Earlier in the year Paul Mus, the soldier sociologist, had been parachuted into Vietnam in an extension of Force 136 activities. In a rice field he had a sudden vision of a resurgent Vietnam in which Ho Chi Minh, bearded father of his people, appeared to him as a true representative of Vietnam’s ancient culture and long tradition of independence. Mus seemed to have understood before many of his compatriots that the Japanese had destroyed the illusion of French power and that it could never be repaired. He prepared an eloquent sociological minute on the issue for a British general in Calcutta. The latter dismissed it brusquely as ‘nothing important, just ideas!’12 The British therefore entered the country with fixed assumptions and simple tasks in mind. Their first objective was to secure Japanese forces attached to Count Terauchi’s Southern Army HQ in Singapore. They had to release Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. They had to arrest ‘black’ and ‘grey’ Japanese ‘war criminals’ and notorious French Vichy collaborators including local mayors, merchants and purchasing agents. They were to maintain the ‘writ of law’ in the south and this quite soon came to be seen as a French writ, not a Vietnamese one. This whole operation was to be carried out in isolation from events in Hanoi and the north where Chiang’s forces and their American advisers were much more inclined to respect the authority of Ho and the Viet Minh.
The first of General Gracey’s troops to arrive from Rangoon was a detachment of Gurkhas. They were accompanied to Saigon by a Polish photojournalist, Germaine Krull. She contrasted the banners welcoming the