The division of Vietnam was neither complex nor the product of any international conference. The surrender of Japan caught everyone by surprise: the nuke was a secret even to allied and US forces. Arrangements for the surrender of Japanese forces outside Japan and for custody of territories still under Japanese occupation had to be made quickly and with little preparation or study. The French desperately wanted control of Indochina, but had no means; they supported the British as temporary custodians, knowing that the Brits would support their efforts to recolonize. (The British, of course, wanted their own empire back, and didn't want any precedents for independence.) Chiang Kai-Shek, anticommunist but also fervently anticolonial, also wanted to take on the role of custodian. The solution was to divide the area. The north was occupied by Nationalist Chinese troops under General Lu Han, who did nothing to stop Ho Chi Minh from organizing a provisional government. The south was occupied by the British under General Gracey, who immediately and violently repressed the pro-independence forces and brought French forces into the country.
That's how the division started - it was a postwar bureaucratic blunder. If colonial forces had not been reintroduced, there would have been no Vietnam War. Internal conflict, absolutely, just as in all ex-colonies. But nothing like what happened.
One of the more important historical repercussions of WWII in Asia, little discussed, was the effect that the collapse of allied forces in the face of the initial Japanese advance had on the colonized peoples of Asia. Once they had seen Asians killing and defeating whites, once the aura of invulnerability was burst, colonialism was never possible again. It took some people a while to figure this out. |
