The end of the Second World War led to the breakup of the centuries-old British, French and Dutch empires in the Far East. The British, economically devastated by the War, left India in 1947 and, by the mid-1950s, after successfully defeating a long communist insurgency, had laid the groundwork for the independence of Malaysia. In 1949 Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch. France with its protectorates in Vietnam and Laos took longer to adjust to the end of empire.
Decolonisation was a painful experience for the European powers, and for many people in the colonies. But apart from the complaints of some die-hard imperialists (such as Winston Churchill), it had been recognised for some time that the writing was on the walls of empire.
Colonial power had been fatally weakened in the Far East by the fact of Japanese occupation. Japanese successes in the early years of the War completely undermined the idea of white, European supremacy, and acted as a spur to nationalist movements in the countries of Asia.
Both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman were openly contemptuous and distrustful of European imperialism. Even before the end of the War the United States had established contact with many of the new nationalist movements in the colonies of the Far East. In 1942 the OSS decided to extend its activties into as many Japanese-occupied areas as possible, and forged operational alliances with nationalists and communists fighting the Japanese. In 1943 the OSS considered working with Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese communist leader, who had successfully appealed to Vietnamese nationalism and organised a guerrilla army that was fighting the Japanese. As the war progressed, contact with Ho was made.
Once the colonial peoples rejected European overlords, the historian Hugh Brogan observed, "they could make it agonizingly expensive, in lives, credit and treasure, for any power which tried to keep them in subjection."1 The British, after their experience of guerrilla warfare in Ireland in 1916-21, and with Ghandi's passive resistance national movement in India in the 1930s and 1940s, absorbed this truth and retired from the business of empire with some dignity. So did the Dutch. The French took a different path.
Unlike the British and the Dutch, the French viewed their colonies as an extension of the mother country -France - rather than as subject countries. So, for many Frenchmen, giving up their colonies was like giving up a part of France. After 1945, instead of handing over power to the people in their colonies, they sought to re-establish their pre-War supremacy. In Vietnam, the principal French colony in the Far East, this enabled Ho Chi Minh to present himself as the national leader who had fought the Japanese and was now fighting against French rule and for Vietnam's independence.
The contact with the OSS played an important part in Ho's tactics. By early 1945 the OSS "Deer Team" and Ho's forces were secretly working together in rescuing Allied pilots who had been shot down, and in sabotaging Japanese supplies and communications. The French were very suspicious of this collaboration, warning and complaining about it to the U.S. government, and the news of the collaboration between the OSS and Ho remained secret until 1971 when the Vietnam War was at its height. In 1945 the French attempted to reassert their authority in Vietnam through the puppet regime of the ex-Emperor Bao Dai in Saigon. In 1946, Ho announced the creation of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam with Hanoi as his capital, and he began a guerrilla war with his Vietminh forces to unify the country under him. Ho had tried to obtain American recognition of North Vietnam, and had strong support in many quarters in Washington, not least among OSS men who had worked with him and others who felt that the United States should not support the old empires, but instead should support national movements and independent states. What swung American support away from Ho was the fact that he was a communist - indeed, he was a Moscow-trained revolutionary agitator who had worked in France and China as an agent - and in 1946 the civil war in China was reaching its climax with the prospect of a communist takeover there. In 1948 the Truman administration gave military support to the French in Vietnam as part of the U.S. effort to contain communist expansion.
For some of the OSS men who had fought alongside Ho during the War, the failure to build upon the good relations then developed with the Vietminh was disastrous. Archimedes Patti, the leader of the OSS-Indochina mission to Ho in 1945, believed that if President Truman had backed Ho instead of the French, Ho would not have turned to Mao Tse-tung and Moscow for support.2 Though a communist, Ho might easily have become an "Asian Tito" and a de facto ally of the West. The course of Vietnamese foreign policy after 1975, when the communist government of unified Vietnam began to seek economic and political agreements with the West rather than the Soviet Union, and fought a border war with Red China, lends support to Patti's view.
U.S. support for the French, Mao Tse-tung's victory in China in 1949, and the worldwide cold war, ended any prospect of a change in American policy in favour of Ho. The prime objective of American policy during the Truman administration became the prevention of any further communist expansion anywhere in the world. In February 1950 the U.S. National Security Council stated that if Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to the communists, then Thailand, Burma and Malaysia might follow. The "domino theory" was born.
There was a general assumption after China fell to Mao Tse-tung in 1949 that there was an inevitability to peasant communism in the Third World. South Korea was defended because it was a defensible place. So, too, Japan. But the crash of decolonisation suddenly put the whole of South East Asia into the melting pot at the same time. After China, it looked as if Indonesia might go, then Malaya and the other countries of Indochina. And then quite possibly India. The Dutch, French, and especially the British were very strong in their urging the U.S. to bankroll them in Indochina.
Behind the domino theory was the conviction that Moscow was the centre of a worldwide controlling network of every communist movement. Mao Tse-tung in China was seen as a puppet of Stalin, and Stalin was seen as being hellbent on world domination. This view was challenged by the China desk of the State Department which pointed to serious differences between Soviet and Chinese communism. But after 1949 and Mao's victory, this desk was a particular target for the McCarthy witchhunts and led to the departure from the State Department of most of the senior China hands. With them went any serious doubts within the U.S. policymaking establishment about Mao being Stalin's puppet. Not until a decade later was the view that Mao was a Soviet stooge challenged in Washington - this time by the analysts in the CIA. The departure of State's China hands prevented the vital internal debate so necessary for developing and fine-tuning policies in government, and had the effect of locking U.S. policy in the Far East into a hard cold war stance throughout the 1950s.
Eisenhower continued Truman's support of the French in Vietnam which, by 1954, amounted to $1 billion a year: over three-quarters of the entire French military budget there. But it made little difference to the outcome of their war with the Vietminh. In May 1954 the French suffered a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu in north Vietnam: a strongly-fortified French mountain valley base was surrounded by Vietminh forces under the command of General Vo Nguyen Giap who overran the French defenders after a fifty-five day seige. This defeat finally convinced the French that their attempt to hold on to Vietnam was hopeless, and they agreed to peace talks with Ho. In July 1954 the Geneva Accords were signed by France and North Vietnam (the United States was not a party to the deal, and Foster Dulles made clear that the Eisenhower a
