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VIETNAM:PART ONE

General Charles De Gaulle; a man who was driven by the idea of restoring French power in a world that was soon to become dominatec by the Americans.

Frances humiliation: Japans opportunity.


By Nick Shepley

The Fall of France in June 1940 was a huge and unexpected catastrophe for the allies. Britain had assumed that she would ght the war at sea and the French would do the bulk of ghting on the land, Britain had a large navy and France a large army. Once France was defeated a fascist puppet government, the Vichy Regime, was established and it laid claim to all of Frances existing African and Asian colonies. Only later during the war would the Free French, under De Gaulle, come to be seen as the legitimate rulers in the colonies. The defeat of the French mattered not only in Europe but also in Asia. In September 1940 the Japanese occupied Vietnam,

in large part because it was a conduit for arms and supplies to southern China where Japan had been waging war since 1937. Japan was chiey concerned with the conquest of China above all things, if Vietnam had a use to Japan it was in supporting that main goal. The Vichy French realised they were powerless to stop the invasion and so came to an agreement with Japan that it could station troops in the country. They occupied the north for a year, knowing that any move to the south might anger not only the French but alarm the Americans and British who did not want Japan to expand any further in Asia. Japan already had one main threat to the north, the

USSR, and did not need two enemies in the region. When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, it presented the Japanese with the opportunity to strike and they invaded the rest of Vietnam, but in doing so they led US President Franklin Roosevelt to place an oil embargo on Japan, threatening to cripple the country. It was this action that caused Japan to plan the Pearl Harbour attack and to start the Pacic War that would see her defeated and see America become the dominant power in Asia and the Pacic for half a century.

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Japanese Occupation Vietnamese Resistance


By Nick Shepley

Vo Nguyen Giap training Vietnamese freedom ghters in 1944. These men would establish traditions of resistance and sacrice that would continue for three decades.

By the mid 1930s a nationalist, left wing popular front movement had emerged in Vietnam, partly as a response to French colonialism, and also due to the fact that in 1936 a broad coalition of left wing parties came to power in France. The Popular Front government under Lionel Blum was a response to the growing threat of Fascism across the continent. Two years later a new, more authoritarian government came to power in France and it appointed George Catroux, a general who had bloodily put down opposition to French rule in Syria in the 1920s as Governor. The popular front in Vietnam went into hiding; the French were worried about the threat of Japan and knew that many nationalists from Indochina and other European Asian colonies were visiting Japan on a regular basis for guerrilla training and to negotiate deals with the Japanese. Part of the strategy that Japan was to employ throughout Asia was to rely on nationalist uprisings to destabilise European colonies and and to provide themselves with instant allies as they landed their troops. The largest part of the popular front was the communist party, which, like the Chinese communist party, looked to Stalin in Russia for leadership and it received its orders directly from Moscow; Stalin at this point was far more concerned with the possibility of a threat from Germany than with anything happening in South East Asia (but he had one eye on Japan to his east). Following the Japanese invasion, much of what Japanese propaganda had promised the poor Vietnamese farmers failed to materialise. Japan had claimed that it was her role to rid Asia of European colonists and to become the leader of a

French Indochina: * Vietnam * Laos * Cambodia

new Asia, in a bid to inspire pan-Asian nationalism across the region. The Japanese, astonished by their own success, did not treat the Vietnamese as equals and instead saw them as an easy source of free labour. Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in 1941 and established a secret headquarters in Cao Bang Province on the very far northern border with China, a region that was difcult for the Japanese to control. Here he planned a war of resistance against Japan and gathered what little intelligence he could for the Americans who were at war with the Japanese from December onwards. He also planned on how to lead Vietnam to independence at the end of the war through a revolution that he would stage in 1945. He knew that Roosevelt was sympathetic to Vietnams plight and wished to see an end to all European colonies in Asia. Cordell Hull, Roosevelts Secretary of State wrote that he: entertained strong views on independence for French IndoChina. That French dependency stuck in his mind as having been the springboard for the Japanese attack on the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. He could not but remember the devious conduct of the Vichy Government in granting Japan the right to station troops there, without any consultation with us but with an effort to make the world believe we approved.

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In the next part of this series I will explore the long term interests of the USA in South East Asia from the start of the 20th Century onwards. If you found this handout useful you can find more free materials at: www.explaininghistory.com/freestuff/

Red Sun At War Part Three Fighting Back From The Coral Sea to the Kokoda Trail
The speed with which European empires and American inuence in South East Asia were swept aside in 1941 and 1942 was historically unprecedented and in the rst few months of 1942 it seemed as if Japans advance towards Australia was unstoppable. However, the early months of 1942 would prove to be the apex of Japanese successes and the remainder of the year would see her ambitions to become Asias hegemonic power dashed. In a six month period her advance was halted, never to be resumed, in a series of naval battles and land campaigns that left her ghting a long and ultimately futile defence over the next two years. Facing Japan was a US Navy under Admiral Chester Nimitz, eager to avenge Pearl Harbour and the Army, led by General Douglas MacArthur, the vain and ego-driven warlord of Manila, concerned equally to retake the Philippines that he had been ejected from and to present himself in a positive light in the US papers for a possible post war presidential race. Beneath these men and their Australian counterparts were countless soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and civilians who drew a bloody line across the South Pacic, nally stopping the enemy at Milne Bay, Buna and Guadalcanal. This is the third of six Explaining History ebooks that chronicle the entire Pacic War from Pearl Harbour to the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ebooks are short accessible guides to the main themes and events of the 20th Century, written for newcomers to modern history and seasoned enthusiasts who want concise but in depth writing that gets to the underlying causes of war, revolution and the massive changes of the past 100 years. Red Sun At War Part Three will be available on January 1st 2014 for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks and in PDF format, you can access it at:

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