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The British were eager to assist these survivors, on both humanitarian and political grounds. If Indochina fell into local nationalist hands, this would represent a disastrous precedent for Burma and Malaya. Yet the Americans, with bases and aircraft in neighbouring China, declined to lift a finger. This provoked one of the most bitter Anglo-American rows of the Japan war. Esler Dening, chief political adviser to Mountbatten, once observed acidly: “I often think that we might813 on important occasions remind ourselves that we are not yet the 49th of the United States.” In Paris, the enraged de Gaulle complained to U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery about the refusal of the U.S. air force in China to fly support missions to his people in Vietnam. He said that he found American policy incomprehensible: “What are you driving at? Do you want us to become, for example, one of the federated states under the Russian aegis?” In Washington, a State Department official minuted contemptuously: “I personally think that the French are making a great fuss over the IndoChina resistance for political reasons only in an effort to smoke out our policy.”

Churchill cabled Washington on 19 March: “It will look very bad in history814 if we were to let the French force in Indochina be cut to pieces by the Japanese through shortage of ammunition, if there is anything we can do to save them.” Marshall, however, delegated operational decisions to Wedemeyer in Chongqing, who pleaded logistical difficulties to justify American passivity. Such arguments seemed unconvincing. On 29 March, for instance, two C-47s of Tenth Air Force were dispatched from China to Tonkin to evacuate OSS personnel and six downed American airmen. Frenchmen at the strip where they landed were enraged when the planes arrived empty, without even cigarettes for the destitute colonists. An officer of the British Force 136 signalled: “American name is mud, repeat mud, with French and British alike in this whole episode.”

The anti-colonialist policy of the Roosevelt administration in Washington was executed with utmost fervour by OSS teams operating in support of the Vietminh nationalists. American special forces’ definition of Vietnamese liberation addressed French rather than Japanese occupation. Sebastian Patti of OSS explicitly told the Vietminh that they enjoyed the wholehearted support of the United States. Another OSS man described Ho Chi Minh as “an awfully sweet guy815…If I had to pick out one quality about that little old man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentleness.” Washington refused to allow troops of de Gaulle’s Corps Leger to be deployed in Asia. French agents parachuted into Tonkin Province by British and Australian aircraft were killed by the Vietminh. After dreadful sufferings as they struggled through the jungles and mountains of northern Vietnam, some 5,000 French fugitives eventually reached China. They were greeted without enthusiasm by U.S. ambassador Patrick Hurley. Urging that they should quickly be removed elsewhere, he described them as “undisciplined, unequipped and destitute816 refugees and almost useless.”

Relations worsened steadily between Wedemeyer in Chongqing and Mountbatten’s headquarters at Kandy. On 30 May, the American general asked Washington to suspend lend-lease aid to British clandestine organisations in South-East Asia. He was chagrined to learn that this was impracticable, since in the China-Burma-India theatre U.S. forces were getting “considerable assistance from [the] British817 through reverse lend-lease.” The “turf” dispute about Indochina was settled at Potsdam in July, when the combined chiefs of staff agreed to assign southern Indochina to SEAC, the north to China, at the Japanese surrender. Esler Dening wrote from Mountbatten’s headquarters, however: “The division of French Indochina818 by the parallel of 16 degrees north…is going to cause a lot of trouble…The division is purely arbitrary and divides people of the same race, while raising new and unnecessary