Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- defenders to one side while on the other set fire to the houses and killed all suspicious persons. If we departed, believing a region pacified, they would arrive on our heels and the terror would start again. There was only one possible defense: to multiply the posts, to fortify them, to arm the villagers, and to train them for a coordinated and enlightened self-defense through a thorough job of information and policing.
- "But this required men and weapons. what was needed was not 35,000 men (of which Leclerc was then disposed) but 100,000, and Cochinchina was not the only problem."41
- c. Nationalist Government in North Vietnam, 1945–1946
- (1) The Government of 2 September 1945
The salient problem other than Cochinchina facing the French in the fall of 1945 was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Hanoi government of Ho Chi Minh claimed dominion over all of Vietnam, but as far as French challenge to its authority was concerned, ruled in fact only in Annam and Tonkin. The DRV was neither wholly Viet Minh nor communist composition. Despite the vigor and initiative of the Viet Minh, the salient political fact of life in North Vietnam was Chinese Nationalist army of occupation, and the Chinese presence had forced Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh to accommodate Chinese-backed Viet Nationalists, and defer to Chinese policy in other respects.
The numbers of Chinese who entered North Vietnam is not known precisely, the totals having been obscured not only by inadequate reports, but by the Nationalists' use of Tonkin for passage of troops from Yunnan and Kwangsi en route to other parts of China. French estimates ran as high as 180,000, but the Chinese occupation forces per se probably numbered about 50,000.42 Even fewer foreign troops would have gravely overburdened North Vietnam, where because of a bad crop year, and war-disturbed commerce, famine was rampant. Most of the Chinese troops were ill-disciplined and poorly-equipped, living, perforce, off the land. Their exactions of the peasantry stirred the traditional animosities of the Vietnamese for the Chinese — resentments untempered by gratitude to the Chinese as liberators, since the Vietnamese believed they had already been liberated by the Viet Minh. And the transgressions of the Chinese troops were matched by the Chinese high command; the warlords promptly began to plunder North Vietnam. The Chinese dollar was made legal tender at an exorbitant rate of exchange with the Vietnamese piastre, which exacerbated an already serious inflation, and opened new vistas for the black market. Chinese profiteers began large scale buying of French and Vietnamese enterprises and real estate.43
As the Chinese forces marched into North Vietnam, they ousted local Viet Minh governments, and replaced them with VNQDD, and Dong Minh Hoi groups; Phuc-Quoc (Restoration League) groups seized power elsewhere.
