The division of Indochina at the 16th parallel

On 8 May 1945, while Europe was celebrating the end of the war, the founding conference of the United Nations was in session in San Francisco. That day the US Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, had a conversation with the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, and Ambassador Henri Bonnet. As the State Department summarised the conversation in a telegram of 2 June 1945 to the ambassador in China, Stettinius made it clear that the record of the American government contained no official statement questioning, “even by implication”, French sovereignty over Indochina – although he added that part of American public opinion condemned French colonial policy. For France this meant that Washington would not oppose its return to the colony, which the Japanese had taken over two months earlier.

Many war chronologies list the division of Indochina at the 16th parallel under 8 May. Such an account runs two separate matters together and needs correcting. The division of Vietnam at the 16th parallel for the purpose of disarming the Japanese – into a Chinese zone in the north and a British zone in the south – was agreed not in May but in July 1945, during the Potsdam Conference, and was finally confirmed by General Order No. 1 on the surrender of Japanese forces, issued on 2 September. Nor was there any conference on Indochina on 8 May at which France “regained” its colonies. There was no formal request and no formal consent: there was an American assurance that the United States did not dispute French sovereignty, and a gradual retreat, under way since March, from the plans that President Roosevelt had been considering.

Roosevelt and trusteeship

French Indochina – the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia and Laos – had been within Japan’s sphere of influence since 1940. The Vichy government and the Governor-General, Admiral Jean Decoux, first agreed to Japanese troops entering the north and then, in July 1941, to the occupation of the south of the country. For President Franklin Delano Roosevelt this was conclusive proof that France could not defend its colonies, and its rule in Indochina was, in his view, among the worst in Asia. In 1943–1944 he said repeatedly that after the war Indochina should not return to France but be placed under an international trusteeship that would prepare it for independence. He discussed this with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and with Stalin in Tehran, and in February 1945 he returned to the matter at the Yalta Conference.

The plan met with resistance, however. The British, fearing a precedent for their own empire, backed the French. The US Navy and Army wanted to keep bases on the Pacific islands they had captured, which weakened the case for trusteeship in other powers’ colonies. The Provisional Government of General Charles de Gaulle regarded the recovery of Indochina as a matter of honour and a condition for restoring France’s position as a great power; as early as January 1944, at the Brazzaville Conference, reforms had been announced, but within the framework of the empire. According to his adviser Charles Taussig, in March 1945 Roosevelt conceded that he could agree to leaving Indochina to France if France took on the role of trustee and undertook to lead it gradually to self-government. At Yalta it was agreed that trusteeship would cover only territories voluntarily placed under it by the colonial powers – which in practice meant that France could refuse.

The declaration of 24 March

The Japanese coup of 9 March 1945 spurred France into action. On 24 March the Provisional Government issued a declaration on the future of Indochina. It announced the creation of an Indochinese Federation of five countries which, together with France and the other parts of the empire, would form a “French Union”. The federation was to have its own government headed by a French governor-general, with ministers drawn from both the local population and the French, an assembly with limited powers and its own citizenship; France would retain foreign affairs and defence. The declaration made no mention of independence, or even of the unity of the three parts of Vietnam – Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina – and was a response both to the Japanese-sponsored “independence” proclaimed by Emperor Bảo Đại and to American doubts. It later served as the basis for the French Union established by the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946.

On 12 April 1945 Roosevelt died. His successor, Harry Truman, had no settled view on Indochina, and in the State Department the advocates of good relations with France, needed as an ally in post-war Europe, gained the upper hand. The idea of a trusteeship over Indochina without France’s consent was dropped. Stettinius’s conversation with Bidault in San Francisco on 8 May reflected this change, and the United Nations Charter adopted the trusteeship system in a form that covered only mandated territories, lands taken from the defeated states, and those which the colonial powers themselves chose to place under it.

The line at the 16th parallel

The question of the line along which the Allies were to take over Indochina from the Japanese arose from the division of commands. Indochina formally belonged to the China theatre, in which Chiang Kai-shek was Supreme Commander and the American General Albert Wedemeyer his chief of staff; the British of Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, however, had long been conducting intelligence operations in the country and supplying French resistance groups. During the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 the US and British Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed that the southern part of Indochina, below the 16th parallel, would pass to Mountbatten’s command, while the northern part would remain in the China theatre. The line ran a little south of Huế and Đà Nẵng. France took no part in the conference and was not consulted; Paris received the division with indignation.

After Japan’s surrender this principle was repeated in General Order No. 1, drafted in Washington and issued by General Douglas MacArthur on 2 September 1945: Japanese forces in French Indochina north of the 16th parallel were to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek, and those south of it to Mountbatten. On the same day Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. A few days earlier, during the August Revolution, the Việt Minh had seized power in Hanoi (19 August), and Emperor Bảo Đại had abdicated.

The Chinese in the north, the British in the south

In September Chinese troops under General Lu Han, governor of Yunnan province, entered the north – between 150,000 and 200,000 men according to various estimates. On 28 September in Hanoi they accepted the surrender of the Japanese 38th Army. The Chinese occupation was a heavy burden for the population: the soldiers requisitioned food in a country that had only just lived through a famine, and their commanders profited from currency exchange and trade. The Chinese did, however, tolerate Hồ Chí Minh’s government and did not allow the French administration to return. They withdrew only under the Franco-Chinese agreement of 28 February 1946, in which France gave up its concessions and privileges in China; a week later, on 6 March, Hồ Chí Minh signed an agreement with the French that allowed their troops to return to the north.

In the south things went differently. On 13 September General Douglas Gracey, commander of the British-Indian 20th Infantry Division, flew into Saigon. His task was to disarm the Japanese and free the prisoners of war, but – going further than his orders provided for – he declared martial law and released and rearmed interned French soldiers, who during the night of 22–23 September took control of the city’s public offices. Fighting broke out with the Việt Minh; over the following weeks British and Indian units, and even the Japanese who were being disarmed, fought alongside the French. In October General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque arrived in Saigon with a French expeditionary corps, and Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu became High Commissioner for Indochina. The British had withdrawn from the country by the spring of 1946, handing the south over to the French.

Significance

The events of the spring and summer of 1945 decided that France would return to Indochina – not as a result of any single conference, but because of the change in American policy after Roosevelt’s death, Britain’s support and the British presence in Saigon. The line at the 16th parallel was a military boundary, drawn for the convenience of the Allied commands, and it lasted only a few months. Yet the splitting of the country into two zones in which the Allies acted in entirely different ways meant that in the north Hồ Chí Minh’s government had time to consolidate, while in the south the French returned to power at once. Negotiations between them broke down in 1946, and in December of that year the First Indochina War broke out. After it ended Vietnam was divided again – this time under the Geneva Accords of 1954, along the 17th parallel – which opened the way to another war in Vietnam, the American one.