If, at the solemn surrender of Japan, on September 2, in Tokyo Bay, Leclercre represented France aboard the Missouri. the same day, in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of Vietnam. North of the 16th parallel, France remained ignored, and the place at the local surrender ceremony for the Japanese troops was scheduled at such a rank that our representatives deemed it preferable not to attend.
And yet all could still be saved. So much ruin, so much blood, so much bitter regret could still be spared. If we had been free in our movements, supported by our allies in northern Indochina as we were in the south, helped in our sincere desire for rapprochement and understanding with our former proteges, and not systematically suspected and discarded, an acceptable modus vivendi would have been possible between the French and the Vietnamese. The five-point message that Ho Chi Minh sent to me at KouentiMing in July seemed to want it and paved the way. The agreements which, despite everything, would be signed seven months later, on March 6, 1946, would prove it.
If I draw a comparison between North and South Vietnam, it's is that the situation was indeed very different in Cochinchina. Our British allies, responsible for disarming the Japanese there, scrupulously acquitted themselves of their mission, demanding that the Japanese general staff maintain order, for which they held it responsible, and put an end to the disorders which, in the days preceding their arrival, had already made victims among the French population. As of September 4, the British released and rearmed French, Australian, Indian and Dutch prisoners of war. They returned to the French the responsibility for services essential to the normal life of the country; never did they seem to question the legitimate rights of France.
North of the 16th parallel, the Chinese yielded to very different concerns. Tonkin, North-Annam and North-Laos were first cut off by a soldiery to which certain elements of the high command did not hesitate to set an example. Moreover, China, taking over the work undertaken by the agents of the Japanese Kempeitai, was working to accentuate, to the point of making it irreversible, the rupture between the French and the Vietnamese. "Asia for Asians" is always the same objective and the same slogan.
Until the departure of their last units, which prolonged their presence in
North Vietnam well beyond the surrender operations (end of September 1946), the Chinese, and mainly Marshal Tchang Fa Kouei and his agents, sought, through the Vietnamese nationalist movements to their devotion, to ensure a more or less total control over North Vietnam.
The maneuver was so obvious that it was not long in worrying the Viet-Minh himself, who deemed it wise not to completely cut ties with France.
In an interview he granted, in January 1946, to a Parisian newspaper, Ho Chi Minh clarified the bottom of his thought:“We have no hatred against France and the French people. We admire them very much and we do not want to break the ties that unite our two peoples so strongly. But we ask that France take the first sincere and concrete step. We want it all the more when we see other nations trying to interfere in matters that concern us. Our two peoples must not allow these countries the opportunity to lecture us. We want, we have to arrange between us. But, know it well, we are determined to fight until the end if the fight is imposed on us. »