Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- French citizens during the morning of Sunday, 23 September, absolutely ensured that countermeasures would be taken by the Annamites [Vietnamese]. The more emotional of the French citizens, who, after all, had suffered considerably at the hands of the Annamites during the past few months, unfortunately took this opportunity of taking what reprisals they could. Annamites were arrested for no other reason than that they were Annamites; their treatment after arrest, though not actively brutal, was unnecessarily violent."37
The following day, the Vietnamese struck back: the economic life of Saigon was paralyzed by strikes, and that night groups of Vietnamese – principally a gangster sect called the Binh Xuyen – began a series of attacks on municipal utilities. On 25 September, in an assault through a French residential district, over one hundred Westerners were killed, and others carried off as hostages; on 26 September, the U.S. commander of the O.S.S. in Cochinchina was killed. Thus, the Indochina war began in Cochinchina in late September, 1945, and American blood was shed in its opening hours.
The Committee of the South issued a statement deploring the British actions:
- "Suppression of the press, which was unanimously defending the independence of Vietnam, prevented us...from controlling and directing public opinion at a time when the mob was already exasperated by provocations of the French...The British Army, to accomplish its mission of disarming the Japanese forces, had no need to disarm our police force and suppress our government as it did. Yet we have demonstrated by our actions that our government is most cordial in its desire to lend every possible assistance to the British Army in the accomplishment of its task."38
At that juncture, the ICP in Cochinchina was in a particularly vulnerable position. The ICP — the core of the Viet Minh — had permitted the Independence League to pose as the arm of the Allies, and had supported cooperation with the British and amnesty for the French. The Party had even undertaken, through the Committee of the South, to repress the Trotskyites. It was apparent that advocacy of political moderation, public order, and negotiations with the French — by the ICP, by the Viet Minh, or by the Committee of the South — was quite futile. Further, the ICP was apparently assured by French communists that they would received no assistance from Party brethren abroad. An American correspondent in Saigon was shown a document dated 25 September 1945, which:
- "...advised the Annamite [Vietnamese] Communists to be sure, before they acted too rashly, that their struggle 'meets the requirements of Soviet policy.' It warned that any 'premature adventures' in Annamite independence might 'not be in line with
