The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence

On Sunday 2 September 1945, at around 2 p.m., on a broad square in the western part of Hanoi – known today as Ba Đình Square – Hồ Chí Minh read out the declaration of independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He began with the words: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The sentence came from the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776. A few hours earlier, in Tokyo Bay, Japan’s representatives had signed the instrument of surrender aboard the battleship Missouri.

War chronologies sometimes sum up the event as follows: Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed independence “drawing heavily on the American Declaration of Independence, a copy of which had been supplied to him by the OSS”, declared himself president and sought in vain to win recognition from President Harry Truman. This needs several qualifications. The declaration quoted not only the American document but also the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (dated in the text to 1791, when it was incorporated into France’s first constitution), and its main body was an indictment of French colonial rule. The story of the copy of the American text handed over by officers of the Office of Strategic Services comes mainly from the memoirs of participants, above all Major Archimedes Patti. Nor did Hồ Chí Minh declare himself president that day: since 28 August he had headed the provisional government, in whose name he read the declaration, and he was elected president by the National Assembly in March 1946. His letters to Truman, for their part, date from later months, from the autumn of 1945 onwards.

The road to 2 September

Vietnam had come under French rule in the second half of the 19th century. Japanese troops had been stationed in Indochina since 1940, and on 9 March 1945 the Japanese overthrew the French administration and proclaimed a nominally independent Empire of Vietnam under Emperor Bảo Đại. After Japan’s surrender, the communist-led Việt Minh front exploited the power vacuum: on 19 August it took power in Hanoi, in the following days in Huế and Saigon, and on 25 August Bảo Đại announced his abdication. On 30 August, in Huế, he handed the imperial seal and sword to representatives of the new authorities.

Hồ Chí Minh arrived in Hanoi around 25–26 August. The National Liberation Committee, formed on 16 August at Tân Trào, was turned into a provisional government whose membership was announced on 28 August: Hồ Chí Minh became its chairman and foreign minister, and Võ Nguyên Giáp minister of the interior. The government included several non-party and non-communist figures, intended to show the broad, national character of the new regime. During those days, in a house on Hàng Ngang Street, Hồ Chí Minh was writing the text of the declaration.

The Americans in Hanoi

Since the spring of 1945 the Việt Minh had been cooperating with American intelligence. Hồ Chí Minh’s men helped to rescue downed airmen of the Fourteenth Air Force and supplied information on the Japanese, and in July a small OSS team (the so-called “Deer” Team) was parachuted into the base at Tân Trào, where it trained Giáp’s unit. At the end of August Major Archimedes Patti, head of OSS operations in Indochina, flew into Hanoi with the task of looking after Allied prisoners of war. He was accompanied by a small French mission under Jean Sainteny, which the Japanese and the Việt Minh kept in isolation.

Patti met Hồ Chí Minh several times. In his book Why Viet Nam?, published in 1980, he recalled that Hồ read him passages from the draft declaration and asked about the exact wording of the American text; other members of the OSS teams later claimed that it was they who had helped him reconstruct its words. Historians stress, however, that Hồ Chí Minh, who years earlier had lived in the United States and in France, had long known both revolutionary texts, and that as early as 1919, during the peace conference in Paris, he had campaigned for the rights of the Vietnamese by invoking President Wilson’s principles. Reaching for the words of 1776 and 1789 was a deliberate move: according to historians, among them David Marr and Pierre Asselin, it was meant to win the new state the sympathy of the victorious powers and to obscure the communist roots of its leaders.

The ceremony in Ba Đình Square

From the morning onwards crowds poured into Hanoi from the city and the surrounding villages – in their best clothes, carrying banners and red flags with a yellow star, which became the flag of Vietnam. Official Vietnamese historiography puts the size of the gathering at around half a million people; more cautious estimates by historians speak of several hundred thousand. Members of the provisional government stood on a wooden platform. Hồ Chí Minh, in a faded jacket and rubber sandals, at one point broke off his reading to ask: “Can you hear me clearly, compatriots?”, to which the crowd answered with a roar. The song “Tiến Quân Ca”, adopted as the national anthem of Vietnam, was played.

The declaration listed the wrongs of eighty years of French rule – exploitation, exorbitant taxes, the imposition of opium and alcohol, prisons, the bloody suppression of uprisings – and accused France of having handed Indochina over to the Japanese in 1940 and of having failed to defend it in March 1945. It recalled the famine of 1944–1945, speaking of more than two million dead; historians estimate its victims at anywhere from several hundred thousand to two million. It stated that Vietnam had taken power from the Japanese, not from the French, that it was breaking off all relations with France and annulling the treaties France had concluded. It ended by announcing that the Vietnamese people would devote “all their physical and mental strength” and “their lives and property” to the defence of their independence. It was signed by the fifteen members of the provisional government.

Hồ Chí Minh was followed by Võ Nguyên Giáp, who set out the government’s programme and its foreign policy; he spoke warmly of the United States and China as friends of Vietnam. Patti and other Americans watched the ceremony, and according to Patti’s account several American aircraft flew over the square, which part of the crowd took as a gesture of support. That evening Patti dined with Hồ Chí Minh.

Incidents in Saigon

In the south, in Saigon, the same day passed far less peacefully. Crowds gathered at a rally in support of the new government waited for the broadcast of the speech from Hanoi, which for technical reasons never came through; the local Việt Minh leader Trần Văn Giàu spoke instead. As the procession passed the cathedral, shots were fired – according to most accounts from nearby houses inhabited by French residents, though those responsible were never identified. Rioting broke out: the crowd attacked French residents, several Europeans were killed, among them Father Tricoire, and several dozen Vietnamese were killed or wounded (Vietnamese sources speak of 47 dead). These events heightened the tension that three weeks later turned into open fighting.

The Chinese, the British and the return of the French

The declaration did not change the decisions of the victorious powers. Under the arrangements made at Potsdam and General Order No. 1, the Japanese north of the 16th parallel were to be disarmed by the Chinese, and those to the south by the British. In September the Chinese troops of General Lu Han entered northern Vietnam, numbering, according to various sources, some 150,000–200,000 men; they tolerated Hồ Chí Minh’s government but also backed his nationalist rivals. On 13 September the British General Douglas Gracey, commander of the 20th Indian Infantry Division, flew into Saigon. Going beyond the instructions of Admiral Louis Mountbatten – as the British themselves later admitted – he armed French prisoners of war, who on 23 September seized control of the city. Fighting began in the south, and on 26 September the OSS officer Peter Dewey was killed – the first American to die in Vietnam. On 5 October General Philippe Leclerc arrived in Saigon, sent by Charles de Gaulle’s government to restore French rule in Indochina.

Between October 1945 and February 1946 Hồ Chí Minh sent at least several letters and telegrams to President Truman and the State Department asking for support for Vietnamese independence; they came to light only with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. None received a reply. Washington, which was anxious to rebuild France as an ally in Europe, recognised French rights in Indochina. For more than four years no state recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam – the People’s Republic of China and the USSR did so only in January 1950.

Significance

The declaration of 2 September closed the Second World War era in Vietnam and opened thirty years of wars. Hồ Chí Minh manoeuvred between the Chinese and the French: on 6 March 1946 he agreed to the return of French troops to the north in exchange for the recognition of Vietnam as a “free state” within the French Union, and in March Leclerc entered Hanoi. The negotiations, however, produced no lasting settlement, and on 19 December 1946 fighting in Hanoi began the First Indochina War. In 1949 France threw its weight behind the State of Vietnam headed by Bảo Đại, and after the defeat at Điện Biên Phủ and the Geneva Conference in 1954 the country was divided along the 17th parallel. Reunification came only after the Vietnam War, in 1976.

The reading of the declaration was one of the first acts in the dissolution of the European colonial empires in Asia – two weeks earlier Indonesia had proclaimed its independence. 2 September is celebrated in Vietnam as the national day, and Ba Đình Square is today the site of the Hồ Chí Minh Mausoleum.