The Japanese coup in Indochina

On the evening of 9 March 1945 the Japanese ambassador in French Indochina, Shun’ichi Matsumoto, presented the Governor-General, Admiral Jean Decoux, with an ultimatum: all the colony’s armed forces and police were to come under Japanese command immediately. Before an unequivocal reply arrived, Japanese troops throughout Indochina moved against French barracks, forts and government offices. In a single night and the days that followed, the colonial administration ceased to exist – an administration that since 1940, in the shadow of Japanese garrisons, had kept the French flag, its army and its offices. The Japanese called the action Operation Bright Moon – Meigō sakusen.

Two days later, on 11 March, Emperor Bảo Đại announced in Huế that Vietnam was annulling the French protectorate and was independent – within the Japanese “Co-Prosperity Sphere”. Over the following weeks the King of Cambodia and – after some resistance – the King of Laos made similar declarations. Thus short-lived states dependent on Japan came into being, among them the Empire of Vietnam, whose first government, under Prime Minister Trần Trọng Kim, was formed only on 17 April 1945. Popular chronologies combine all these facts under the date of 9 March and speak of the overthrow of the “Vichy government”; in reality the Vichy state had ceased to exist in the summer of 1944, and the proclamation of independence and the formation of Kim’s government came only after the coup – on 11 March and 17 April respectively.

The coup was a brief military campaign, but its consequences reached far beyond the end of the Second World War. It destroyed French rule in Indochina, which – as the French diplomat Jean Sainteny later put it – had lasted eighty years, and it opened the way for the communist Việt Minh.

Five years of coexistence

After France’s defeat in June 1940, French Indochina – the colony of Cochinchina, the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia, and Laos – was cut off from the mother country and left without the means to defend itself. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain entrusted it to Admiral Decoux, who decided to give way to Japan on military and economic matters in order to preserve the French administration. In September 1940, after brief fighting at Lạng Sơn, the Japanese entered northern Indochina, and in July 1941 they occupied the south of the colony as well, from where in December they launched their attack on Malaya.

For the following years an extraordinary arrangement prevailed in Indochina. The Japanese army used the colony’s ports, airfields, railways and rice, while the French authorities continued to govern, collect taxes and maintain an army and police. For Tokyo this was convenient: several tens of thousands of French soldiers and officials kept order, and Japan did not have to detach troops for an occupation. For Decoux it was a way for France to come through the war as master of the colony. The price was compliance with Japanese demands, the introduction of Vichy laws and the suppression of national movements, including communist-inspired uprisings.

The arrangement began to totter when the situation in France changed. As early as January 1944, at the Brazzaville Conference, de Gaulle’s followers announced that the empire would return to the authority of Fighting France, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no secret of the fact that he was considering placing Indochina under international trusteeship after the war. In August 1944 Paris was liberated and General Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government took power. Decoux recognised its authority, but to the Gaullists he remained Pétain’s man. Paris formally left him in his post so as not to alarm the Japanese, while secretly entrusting the direction of preparations for resistance to General Eugène Mordant. Free French agents dropped by the British Force 136 began to infiltrate the colony, and in the garrisons there was increasingly open talk of the day when the French would rise against Japan. Japanese intelligence was well aware of this.

Tokyo’s decision

At the turn of 1944 and 1945 Japan was losing on every front. The Americans had landed in the Philippines, and in January 1945 Admiral Halsey’s carriers entered the South China Sea and sank dozens of ships off the coast of Indochina. The commander of the Japanese Thirty-Eighth Army, General Yūitsu Tsuchihashi, regarded the raid as a possible prelude to a landing. In addition, the French authorities in Saigon refused to hand over downed American airmen, whom they had hidden and helped to reach safety. The Japanese feared that in the event of an Allied landing they would have at their backs a French army numbering – according to various estimates – some 60,000–65,000 men, mostly local riflemen under French officers, as well as several tens of thousands of men in the local gendarmerie (the Garde indochinoise). They themselves then had about 30,000 troops in the colony, though better trained and battle-hardened; over the following weeks they brought in reinforcements from China, Thailand and Burma.

In Tokyo the question had been under consideration since the autumn of 1944. Some diplomats feared that overthrowing the French would open yet another front, but the military argument prevailed: better to disarm an unreliable ally before it became an enemy. At the beginning of 1945 the supreme war leadership in Tokyo approved the plan, and the army gave it the codename Meigō. It had two aims: to destroy or intern the French army and take over the administration, and then to win over the population by granting the local monarchs nominal independence. For years Japanese propaganda had proclaimed the slogan “Asia for the Asians”; now it could turn it against the Europeans with whom it had cooperated for five years.

At the beginning of March Japanese units were redeployed around the main French garrisons. Some French commanders noticed these movements and put their units on alert, but there was no general plan of defence, and since 1940 the French forces had received neither reinforcements nor new equipment. Ambassador Matsumoto proposed to Decoux a “joint defence” of Indochina; the admiral temporised, suggesting that he would agree to Japanese command only in the event of an actual invasion. On the evening of 9 March Matsumoto delivered an ultimatum with a deadline for a reply that same evening. According to accounts based on Japanese and French sources, Decoux still wanted to negotiate, but his reply either did not arrive in time or was taken as a refusal, and Tsuchihashi gave the order to attack.

The night of 9–10 March

The blow fell simultaneously in Hanoi, Saigon, Haiphong, Huế, Nha Trang and the forts on the Chinese border. Decoux and his associates were arrested in Saigon; the admiral was later interned at Lộc Ninh. In many places French units were disarmed without a fight, often after their commanders had been arrested when invited to talks or receptions. Elsewhere they fought fiercely. In Hanoi the citadel held out for several hours; according to figures cited in the literature, nearly 300 French and more than 200 Japanese soldiers were killed there. In Huế the local Garde indochinoise, guarding the residence of the French Resident, fought the Japanese, according to accounts, for more than ten hours. In Haiphong the barracks of the 1st Tonkin Brigade were taken position by position until its commander ordered the fighting to stop, though he refused to sign surrender orders for other garrisons. In Laos and Cambodia the Japanese seized the capitals and larger towns almost without resistance, interning French officials and sometimes killing them.

The heaviest fighting took place in the north, in the forts of Lạng Sơn, built long before against Chinese invasion, and at nearby Đồng Đăng. The Japanese 22nd Division invited General Émile Lemonnier’s officers to a banquet; those who came were taken prisoner. Fort Brière de l’Isle and smaller works held out for two days. After they fell, the Japanese demanded that Lemonnier and the French Resident, Camille Auphelle, sign an order to surrender. When both refused, they were beheaded. The Japanese then machine-gunned or bayoneted hundreds of prisoners. On 12 March the Japanese attacked Đồng Đăng on the border, whose garrison – a company of Tonkinese riflemen and an artillery battery – held out for three days; more than 50 surviving soldiers were beheaded or bayoneted after the surrender. According to figures cited in English-language literature, more than 540 Frenchmen died at Lạng Sơn, nearly 390 of them murdered after being taken prisoner, together with more than 1,800 Tonkinese soldiers, over 100 of whom were executed after the fighting. These figures come mainly from French sources and differ in detail, but the mass killing of prisoners is beyond doubt – after the war it became one of the principal charges in the trials before the French military tribunal in Saigon.

Retreat to China

Only in the north did some of the French forces manage to escape disarmament. General Gabriel Sabattier, commander of the Tonkin division, and General Marcel Alessandri with the 2nd Tonkin Brigade – which included battalions of the 5th Regiment of the Foreign Legion – led several thousand men from the Hanoi area north-west towards the Chinese border. The columns, harried by Japanese aircraft and pursuers, abandoned their heavy equipment beyond the Red River, and when it turned out that the crossings at Lào Cai and Hà Giang were blocked, they fought their way through the mountains via Sơn La and Điện Biên Phủ.

The Allies gave them little help. The United States and China had no wish to become involved in restoring French colonial rule, and the command in Chongqing was influenced by Roosevelt’s reluctance to see France return to Indochina. General Claire Chennault, commander of the US Fourteenth Air Force, nevertheless sent aircraft on bombing, reconnaissance and supply missions on his own responsibility; according to American figures, several dozen sorties were flown between 12 and 28 March. Their effect was slight, and on 12 March American aircraft mistakenly attacked a column of Tonkinese prisoners being driven along by the Japanese, killing or wounding – according to reports – several hundred of them.

In mid-April Alessandri, cut off and without supplies, disbanded the units made up of local soldiers and left them to their fate – some fell into Japanese hands, others later joined the Việt Minh. By early May the remnants of the columns, several thousand men in all, had crossed the Chinese border, where they were interned in harsh conditions. De Gaulle ordered Sabattier by radio to hold on in Indochina at all costs, so as to mark France’s presence in the fight against Japan, but militarily this was no longer possible.

The coup was a catastrophe for the French. According to the most frequently cited estimates, the Japanese took about 15,000 French and colonial soldiers prisoner, while some 4,200 were killed, roughly half of them Frenchmen; many were murdered after surrendering. French officials, officers and planters were interned in designated districts of the towns and in camps, and those suspected of organising resistance were interrogated and tortured by the Kempeitai. According to French figures, about 1,500 more people died in captivity by the autumn of 1945.

A puppet “independence”

Alongside the military action, the Japanese demanded declarations of independence from the traditional rulers. On 10 March the Japanese diplomat Yokoyama called at the palace in Huế on Emperor Bảo Đại, the last ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty, and announced that Tokyo would recognise the independence of Annam within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. On 11 March the council of ministers read out a proclamation in the emperor’s presence: Vietnam annulled the protectorate treaty of 1884, declared its independence and pledged cooperation with Japan. The new state formally comprised Annam and Tonkin; Cochinchina, a French colony, the Japanese kept under their own administration and handed over to Vietnam only in August. A government of Western-educated intellectuals, with the historian Trần Trọng Kim as prime minister, was formed on 17 April. It tried to restore the name “Vietnam”, introduce Vietnamese as the language of administration and schools and begin the fight against famine, but it had no army, no money and no real power, which remained with the Japanese army.

In Cambodia King Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed the independence of the Kingdom of Kampuchea on 12 or 13 March (sources give both dates), although the Japanese distrusted the Francophile court and brought back from exile the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh, who became foreign minister and in August prime minister. In Laos King Sisavang Vong, who was attached to France, long refused and proclaimed independence only on 8 April. On 15 May General Tsuchihashi declared the operation complete and began releasing brigades for other fronts.

Famine and the Việt Minh

The coup came in the midst of a catastrophe that meant more to the Vietnamese than a change of rulers. Since the autumn of 1944 Tonkin and northern Annam had been in the grip of a famine, known in Vietnam as the famine of the year Ất Dậu. It had many causes: compulsory deliveries of rice at artificially low prices, which the French administration also collected for the needs of the Japanese army; Japanese demands that rice be replaced with industrial crops; the burning of rice and maize in power stations when American bombing cut off coal supplies; the destruction by air attack of the roads and railways from the south, from where food might have come; and finally floods and crop failure. The coup only deepened the chaos, because it shattered the administration that – however ineptly – had been distributing stocks. The death toll is disputed: estimates range from about 400,000 to 2 million; Vietnamese historiography usually gives about 2 million, while many Western scholars cite lower figures.

The chief beneficiary was the Việt Minh – the League for the Independence of Vietnam, founded in 1941 by Hồ Chí Minh and led by communists. The disappearance of the French police and army from the provinces allowed its units to establish bases in the mountains of Tonkin, near the Chinese border. The guerrillas raided rice stores – several dozen, according to various accounts – and distributed the grain to the starving, which won them popularity. In doing so they enjoyed the help of the American Office of Strategic Services, which after the collapse of the French intelligence network needed new informants and from the summer of 1945 trained and armed small Việt Minh units. Their fighting against the Japanese was limited, but the political capital of being the only force that had fought both occupiers proved invaluable.

At the same time, on the night of 9–10 March, American B-29 bombers burned out a large part of Tokyo, while in Burma the British and Indian forces that had taken Meiktila were closing in on Mandalay. Japan, defending itself on every front, secured Indochina as a rear base and a potential front against a landing that never came.

Significance

The coup of 9 March 1945 ended French rule in Indochina in the form it had taken since the nineteenth century. The humiliation of the French forces before the eyes of the population, the internment of the French and nominal independence, even when granted by the occupier, transformed the political landscape of the colony. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Việt Minh launched the August Revolution: on 19 August it seized power in Hanoi, on 25 August Bảo Đại abdicated (the formal ceremony took place on 30 August), and on 2 September Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Trần Trọng Kim’s government had already resigned at the beginning of August.

France did not accept the loss of the colony. In September 1945 British and Indian troops arrived in Saigon, freeing and rearming the French prisoners, while Chinese troops occupied the north down to the 16th parallel. The attempt to restore French rule led in December 1946 to the outbreak of the First Indochina War, which ended in France’s defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 – the very place to which Sabattier’s columns had fled nine years earlier. Bảo Đại returned once more as head of the State of Vietnam created by the French in 1949. From 1946 the crimes of March 1945 were tried by the French permanent military tribunal in Saigon, which by 1950 had tried more than 200 Japanese; dozens of them were sentenced to death. Admiral Decoux, freed after Japan’s surrender, was sent back to France and charged with collaboration; the proceedings were dropped in 1949. For Indochina, 9 March 1945 marked the beginning of thirty years of wars that ended only in 1975.