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Allies, but pointedly not the French, with the empty streets where ‘a few sullen, stormy-eyed Chinese and Annamites [Vietnamese]’ watched them furtively. The French population mobbed them, seeking news of France. They had been out of touch for four years and reported that since March relations with the local population had become even worse. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with this Annamite trash?’ someone asked.13 The Japanese still maintained the fragile truce. The 14th Army was well aware that the Japanese in French Indo-China did not regard themselves as a defeated army, even though they had received a direct order from the emperor to surrender unconditionally. As in Burma immediately after the dropping of the bomb, some local resistance was expected from ‘dissident units or individuals’.

One of Gracey’s first orders was to stop Japanese soldiers from wandering around in search of entertainment in the port city of Cholon as they had been wont to do. On the other hand, these were ‘surrendered personnel’ and not prisoners of war. As such they were to keep their own officers. The British took this point seriously. It was made quite clear that Japanese commanders from Count Terauchi downwards should maintain strict discipline. They were expected to provide men for ‘labour tasks such as reconstruction, rehabilitation and general maintenance, as required by commanders’.14 They became in effect a huge coolie labour force. This was the reality of total defeat. Later, they were again required to risk their lives as frontline troops when the British war with the Viet Minh broke out. British commanders were advised to tell their forces to hold the Japanese at arm’s length. There was to be no camaraderie, drinking sessions or musing over the events of the Burma campaign. The Japanese were a defeated enemy and were to be constantly reminded of this until they were sent back to Japan at the expense of the Japanese taxpayer. All the same, a degree of tacit co-operation took place between British, Indians and Japanese, occasionally directed against the French. The Japanese did not regard the French as victors in war and ‘viewed them with veiled contempt’. In one incident Major Hagimura, a Japanese officer in control of medical stores, gleefully apprised his British opposite number that a French officer had come in search of stores: ‘French officer look stores. No authority. Me throw officer out.’15 Despite the British order against fraternization, there were cases where officers swapped memories of the great battles at Imphal and Kohima in the previous year.

The trouble the British expected from the Japanese or the French never came. Instead, it was the Vietnamese who caused them grief. The situation deteriorated even before Gracey had got much of his force on the ground. On 2 September the Viet Minh hopefully celebrated Independence Day. People listened to Ho’s speeches from the north and marched proudly down Paris Commune Street in Saigon. Suddenly shots rang out. The Vietnamese were convinced that French agents provocateurs had fired into the crowd.16 Whatever the truth, Vietnamese radicals beat up many French people in retaliation. Vietnamese wives or mistresses of Frenchmen were also targeted: ‘the enemy was yesterday’s houseboy and coolie seeking revenge on his former masters’.17 A French professor who had once sympathized with Vietnamese aspirations told Krull that his domestic servant had suddenly hit him over the head with a stick: ‘I would never have believed it possible. I can understand revenge, but not this blind, wild fury,’ he said.18 There was a serious riot in Rue Catinat at the elegant heart of Saigon. The head of the Viet Minh police tried to calm the situation by arresting people he deemed troublemakers, such as Trotskyites or members of the Cao Dai and other armed religious sects. But the French settlers were already dangerously on edge.

When Gracey’s main force arrived the city was draped with nationalist banners proclaiming ‘Welcome British and Americans, but we have no room for the French’.19 On 17