* As they grew stronger, Giáp's forces took more territory and captured more towns
* And then on 15 August they heard that the Japanese Emperor had declared his country's unconditional surrender to the allies.
* Unfortunately for Ho and Giap, the U.S. had a new President.
* Truman didn’t care, or maybe even know, about FDR’s plans for Indochina.
* And the French, of course, saw their opportunity to get in good with the new administration.
* And they wanted to make sure they would be able to reclaim colonial control after the war.
* The Truman administration wanted France to help them block Soviet expansion after the war.
* And so they decided to allow France to take back Indochina.
* When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not raise the issue of trusteeship for Indochina.
* On the contrary, U.S. secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured French foreign minister Georges Bidault that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the U.S. government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina."
* A report prepared for Harry Truman on June 2 acknowledged that “independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong” but declared that “the United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina."
* When Truman met Chiang Kai-shek in Washington some weeks later, he dismissed any notion of trusteeship for Indochina.
* So much for The Atlantic Charter.
* Then came the Potsdam conference.
* DeGaulle wasn’t invited, because he annoyed the fuck out of everyone.
* And because he’d sent forces to the old French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, despite the Allies telling him not to.
* And at Potsdam the Vietnamese got well and truly shafted.
* In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divide the country in half at the 16th parallel.
* Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same in the south.
* And they agreed to return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina).
* Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia will once again become French colonies following the removal of the Japanese.
* But in the meantime, the Chinese occupation of the north meant the Vietnamese had time to consolidate their position before the French came back.
* And the fact that China and Britain needed to do the cleaning up of the Japanese reinforced the idea in the minds of the Vietnamese that France was now a second rate power.
* Then, when Japan surrendered in August, it created a power vacuum which the Viet Minh were able to exploit.
* As Ho had always said, they had to wait for the right moment to strike.
* And this was it.
* DeGaulle, in the meantime, made a typically clueless speech.
* On August 15, he sent a message from “the Mother Country to the Indochinese Union,” expressing France’s “joy, solicitude, and gratitude” for Indochina’s “loyalty to France” and her resistance to the Japanese.
* Even as he uttered those words, however, in the jungles of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh readied to make a triumphant entry into Hanoi.
* Their message to the crowds awaiting them: With Japan defeated and France prostrate, the moment of liberation was at hand.
* Hanoi is a city in the north of Vietnam.
* Near the coast.
* The name means “inside the river"
* Hanoi has been inhabited since at least 3000 BCE
* And was the administrative center of the colony of French Indochina.
* The French had built a new part of the city which was in Baron Haussmann, the man who designed modern Paris
* It had wide boulevards, shady trees, an opera house and formal gardens, French shops, sidewalk cafes.
* It was the Paris of Asia
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