Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [94]
Mountbatten’s position is clearer than when George Rosie wrote his diatribe in 1970, though his private papers – now open to researchers – are not particularly revealing. Mountbatten was clearly taken aback by Gracey’s declaration of martial law on 21 September, above all by its catch-all character. He also rebuked Gracey for making the proclamation apply to the whole of southern Indo-China and not simply Saigon. He resented the fact that Leclerc had apparently gone back on his personal undertaking to him that he would not attack the Viet Minh without authority. Mountbatten was, however, a realist. He had always given his local commanders such as Slim and Leese a good deal of room for manoeuvre. He was aware that the 20th Indian Division was heavily outnumbered by resentful French and Japanese. To intervene and attempt to rein in Gracey might actually result in a sharp deterioration of the situation on the ground and lead to the loss of British and Indian lives, and the tying down of soldiers who were badly needed in Malaya, Borneo and India itself. Ultimately, he resolved, ‘since you have taken this line and you are the man on the spot, it is my intention to support you’.31 Moreover, Mountbatten had his doubts about the Viet Minh. They were probably communists, he thought, stirred up by the Chinese. They had been put in power by the Chinese nationalists and Japanese respectively. They had not fought against the latter as had the Burma Independence Army. There was, at least in southern Vietnam, no Aung San equivalent, only a group of distant and inscrutable politicians whom the French regarded as bandits.
Mountbatten was not happy, though. Always acutely aware of how events might be interpreted, he deprecated Gracey’s uncompromising tone. He must have worried not only about the radical British press but also about the distant fulminations in Tokyo of his alter ego, Douglas MacArthur, against the perfidious English and the brutal French. He chided Gracey: ‘I must say that it would be most indiscreet for a British Commander to put on record [as Gracey had done] that “tanks, ships, aircraft and guns” are massed against virtually unarmed people and that “useless misery” might ensue.’ He was also ‘distressed to see that you have been burning down houses, and in congested areas, too! Cannot you give such unsavoury jobs (if they really are military necessities) to the French in future?’ Gracey replied with characteristic bluntness that he had to maintain ‘a proper standard of British prestige’ and that force was necessary because the Viet Minh had not the slightest intention in practice to make any distinction between British and French troops. British and Indian lives were at stake, so the threat of overwhelming force was appropriate. As for burning down Vietnamese houses, ‘getting the French to help would result in the complete destruction of not 20 but 2,000 houses and probably without warning to the inhabitants’. Mountbatten’s objections became more muted after this exchange. It is clear, though, that he remained frustrated and continued to see himself as the friend of national liberation movements. On 4 October he wrote to Driberg: ‘I can assure you that if I was left as free a hand in French Indo-China as I was left in Burma, I could solve both problems by the same method’, that is bringing the Viet Minh into a national government. The problem, he believed, was that the French, like the Dutch in Indonesia, were intransigent and refused to give any ground whatever to the nationalists.32