* Welcome to #100!
* And we are still talking about 1944!
* When we finished last time, Ho Chi Minh was making his way to the Red River Delta.
* The Japanese have chased the French out of Vietnam and didn’t bother to protect the northern regions.
* So Ho and the ICP are getting ready to make their move.
* Surprisingly, they talk about a “post coup euphoria”.
* Apparently the Vietnamese were so happy to see the end of the French, they were happy to replace them with the Japanese.
* They realised the Japanese were probably going to lose the war, which is a good thing for the Vietnamese.
* In October 1944, Ho wrote a “Letter to All Our Compatriots,” in which he analyzed the current situation and said “the opportunity for our people’s liberation is only in a year or a year and a half. The time approaches. We must act quickly!”
* So the ICP decided to start with introducing the Viet Minh flag and doctrine to the people.
* And preparing themselves for a general uprising once the Japanese had been defeated by the Allies.
* Which even THEY knew was going to happen sooner or later.
* And the Viet Minh would be the force greeting the Allies when they came to Vietnam.
* They had already started to build connections with the Americans.
* On November 11, 1944, a U.S. reconnaissance plane piloted by Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw had engine trouble while flying over the mountains along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.
* Shaw was able to parachute to safety, but was spotted by French authorities stationed in the vicinity, and patrols were sent to locate him.
* But Members of a local Vietminh unit got to him first, and they decided to deliver him to Ho.
* For the next several days, the Vietminh troops led him over mountains and jungle trails toward Pac Bo, the jungle location of Ho’s HQ cave, walking at night and resting during the day in caves to avoid the enemy.
* In the end, it took almost a month to cover a distance of only forty miles.
* None of Shaw’s escorts had been able to communicate with him
* according to his own account, they communicated only when he said “Vietminh! Vietminh!” and the Vietnamese responded, “America! Roosevelt!”
* but when he arrived at Pac Bo, Ho greeted him in English: “How do you do, pilot! Where are you from?”
* Shaw was reportedly so excited that he hugged Ho and later said to him, “When I heard your voice, I felt as if I were hearing the voice of my father in the United States.”
* Despite the fact that Wilson ignored his attempts to get the League of Nations to address Vietnam back in 1919, Ho was still hopeful that they would come to his aid.
* He had probably read about FDR’s position on Indochina.
* For example, he had said “France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”
* Another thing that helped the VM was the famine of 1944-45.
* The northern regions of the country had relied on rice to be shipped from the south.
* But then in 1944, a combination of French and Japanese policies, typhoons, drought, insect plagues, and Allied bombings, meant the south couldn’t produce enough rice for the country.
* The Japanese had also mandated shipments of rice to Japan
* and they ordered farmers in the north to shift their crops from rice to oil seeds, peanuts, cotton, and jute.
* Do you know what jute is?
* I had to look it up.
* plant or fiber that is used to make burlap, hessian or gunny cloth.
* The French and the Japanese, like the British in India, stockpiled rice for themselves while the native population starved.
* In 1944 when US bombing cut off northern supplies of coal to Saigon, the French and Japanese used rice and maize as fuel for power stations.
* The French authorities refused to reduce taxes or to increase the price of obligator
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