Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Co-Prosperity Sphere. This unification of Vietnam by the faltering Japanese under the ineffectual Annamese Emperor opened new political opportunity for the Viet Minh. On April 6, 1945, the ICP Central Committee directed the forming of a shadow government throughout Vietnam, to extend to every echelon of the society, prepared to mobilize the whole people for war. In May, 1945, a Viet Minh "liberated zone" was established near the Chinese border.
Whatever may be said for the distortion of the historical record by communist historians to magnify the importance of the Viet Minh, it is fact that the American O.S.S. during World War II dealt with the Viet Minh as the sole efficient resistance apparatus within Vietnam, for intelligence and for aid in assisting downed allied pilots.27 It also seems clear that in terms of popular reputation in Vietnam, no Viet political movements save the ICP and the Viet Minh added to their stature for their wartime activities.
- (5) The Liberation of North Vietnam
As the war drew to a close, the Viet Minh proved to be as adroit strategically as it had showed itself on the tactical level — or, as Truong Chinh, the Secretary General of the ICP was careful to point out in 1946, the ICP proved to be adroit. According to Truong Chinh, on August 13, 1945, the Party, informed of Japan's collapse, decided to preempt Allied occupation of Vietnam, and hurriedly convened a Viet Minh congress that had been pending since June:
- "During the historic Congress, the Indochinese Communist Party advocated an extremely clear policy: to lead the masses in insurrection in order to disarm the Japanese before the arrival of the allied forces in Indo-China; to wrest power from the Japanese and their puppet stooges and finally as the people's power, to welcome the allied forces coming to disarm the Japanese troops stationed in Indo-China."28
A possibly more accurate record — since it jibes with other accounts and alludes to spontaneous local uprisings in advance of Party's "order for general revolution" — was published by the DRV in September, 1946:
- "These epoch-making developments prompted the Viet Minh Party to convene without further delay the National Congress. A revolutionary committee was crated and the general revolution was ordered on the night of August 13, immediately after the news of Japan's unconditional surrender.
- "On August 16, the National Congress opened at Tan Trao, a locality in Thai Nhuyen province, in the liberated zones. Sixty representatives from all parts of the country came to learn additional details on the order for the General Revolution. The home and foreign policies of the Revolutionary
