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Fighting went on until early in the new year of 1946, by which time most Viet Minh resistance in the south had been driven underground. There were several attempts at negotiation and several truces, all of which broke down. One of the first was made by the irrepressible Tom Driberg, who decided to spend a weekend in Saigon before flying back to Britain for the new parliamentary session. He quickly sized up the situation. The French, he wrote in Reynolds News, had behaved with ‘maximum ineptitude and considerable cruelty’.26 Not only had their municipal police fired on the local population amid ‘disgraceful scenes of vengeance against helpless Annamites’, but ‘equally trigger-happy French degenerates haunt the opium dens’. Driberg later boasted that he had nearly prevented the Vietnam War. What he had actually done was to use his old London communist connections to try to arrange a meeting between the British authorities and the Viet Minh. Driberg had written to Mountbatten about this but the letter had reached South East Asia Command in Singapore only after Mountbatten had left for London. Driberg was convinced that Gracey had deliberately held it back.27 Over the next two years Driberg continued to argue the case of the Vietnamese nationalists in Parliament, in the press and even in Paris.28 Through Vietnamese connections in Paris he contacted Ho Chi Minh. But he could do little to influence events.

Later attempts by the British to end the fighting were equally unsuccessful. On 10 October, for instance, Gracey and his commanders attempted to explain themselves to Dr Pham Ngoc Thach and ‘Mr Kien Cong Cung’, who called themselves the ‘heads of the civilian resistance’. ‘The British have no interest in the politics of the country as between you and the French,’ Gracey stated. But he went on to threaten the rebels with ‘armed cars, guns, mortars and aircraft’, adding that the British troops ‘are today the finest trained troops in the world… You are fools if you think your troops can oppose them successfully.’29 In response ‘the Annamites said (with some justification) that, although we say we have no political interest in this country and are impartial, we are in fact being used to cover the concentration of large French forces’. The next day a Viet Minh spokesman said that the nationalists had no wish to impede the British in their laudable aim of disarming and repatriating the Japanese. ‘Our only purpose,’ he added, ‘is to forbid French people or soldiers to get out of the region of Saigon or Cholon. So we beg you not to mix in your army any French soldiers, who after returning back to your bases, would occupy by force our towns and villages, as they did some days back in Saigon.’

On this occasion, Gracey claimed that the Viet Minh broke the truce. They staged marches and ‘PT [Physical Training] parades’ in the city. He admitted that the demonstrations were peaceful and that when they encountered massed British forces the demonstrators did little more than salute and turn about. What really concerned him was the possibility that armed insurgents were moving back into the city under the cover of the civilians who were slowly returning from their villages following the panic induced by the French coup. Gracey’s letters give the impression that, while these events were unfolding, he was concerned above all with the lives of his own soldiers and then with the security of the European population of the city. These practical concerns apparently drove his actions from the declaration of martial law through to the final withdrawal of the 20th Indian Division in early 1946. But his hard line against the Viet Minh also had a doctrinaire aspect to it and this became clearer as he pondered the operation after it had finished. He saw himself very much as a representative of ‘the Allies’, not just a British commander, and ‘the Allies include the French’, as he told the Viet Minh. A new France ‘had fought gloriously to free their own country’ and this was unknown to the ‘Annamites’.