I’ve been reading a little (very little) about Indochina and was surprised to find how overtly imperial France’s move to regain Vietnam was. Why did they want Vietnam back after Japanese occupation? And, wasn’t this just a tad imperialistic/aggressive in the post-WW2 world?
They wanted it back because it belonged to them. Indochina was a French colony before and during the war, until the Japanese conquered it.
My point is that I can understand how “grandfathered” colonies would remain under French control, but taking one back from people who want their independence seems like aggressive imperialism.
It was because of the massive rubber plantations, especially those of Michelin.
Hey, look at the Spanish-American/ Phillipine war. The Phillipinos wanted their independence and took advantage of the weakening of Spain during the war to achieve it. But then the US said “Nuh-uh, you’re OUR colony now” - and spent years suppressing guerrilla resistance.
<sigh> I guess if we hadn’t done it, the British, French, Germans or Japanese would have moved in instead; the Phillipinos didn’t have the means to resist imperial invasion. And we told ourselves that we were planning to give them independence- someday- eventually- when they were “ready”. Still, Star Trek’s Prime Directive it weren’t.
But they ALL wanted their independence ;). Of course it was aggressive imperialism, but that notion wasn’t yet dead, only dieing. The Dutch did the same thing in post-WW II Indonesia ( with even less success - just as an example see: Indonesian Heritage). The Portuguese didn’t back out of the colonial empire business until the 1970’s.
- Tamerlane
I have been reading a very good book by Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. The last third of the book is devoted to the American involvement with Vietnam. According to her, French pride was severely damaged by German occupation, plus Indochina was a rich source of raw materials.
What especially delegitamized French reinstallation after WWII was the fact that Vichy France had collaborated with the Japanese, with no Free-French faction taking to the jungles in resistance. Vietnam had always been a “cake” assignment, compared to Algeria, so the Foreign Legion spent the war shacked up drinking and fornicating until the very end, when the Japanese rounded them up and shot them just to be safe. It was the British, not the French, who re-conquered Vietnam, with some Nationalist Chinese activity in the north. Then the British Army deliberatley gave Vietam back to France, perhaps because the “quit India” goal hadn’t penetrated into the skulls of the British Officer corps and they didn’t want to give encouragement to their own colonies. The British even kept some Japanese troops on as police until the French were reorganized. Such good neighbors.
Roosevelt’s policy had never to been to do this. Unlike Great Britain, the US had nothing to gain diplomatically by propping up French colonialism. The US preferred to “make new friends from scratch” as we’d done in the Phillipines (some scratch! Consider the Phillipine-American War of 1898-1903!), or the Nationalist Chinese, or even today in Iraq. The fact was, before the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, nobody worried much about any agrairian nation going Communist. The Soviets grabbed the cities first, then moved out to the farms. Marx and Engles philosophized about rising Western European factory workers. American’s had seen plenty of labor strikes in the cities, but still idealized farmers as rugged individualists. So although we knew there were "pink’ elements among the people who’d replace the French, we though they coud be marginalized. Plus, by the time the issue required action, Roosevelt was dead and had been replaced by a foreigh policy incompetent.