3 - Legacies of World War II in Indochina

Summary

“It's going to be awfully hard straightening out Asia, what with China and Thailand and Indochina. I'd like to get into that.”

– U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, talking to his wife, March 1945

The components of French Indochina (Cambodia, the protected kingdoms that constituted Laos, and France's three possessions in Vietnam — Tonkin, Annam and Cochin-China) shared an anomalous experience in World War II, and for this reason the impact of the war was different there from elsewhere in the region.

To highlight the anomalies: no Indochinese soldiers (or very few) fought the Japanese in World War II. France, unlike the Netherlands, Great Britain, China and the United States, was never at war with Japan. Japanese troops came into Indochina in September 1940 with French permission and stayed on until the end of the war, while the French continued to administer the region right up to the Japanese coup de force of 9 March 1945, as discussed below. Finally, although Indochinese shipping suffered from Allied attacks, and some Allied bombardments of Indochinese cities occurred in 1945, Indochina emerged from the war with its population — except for massive deaths in northern Vietnam due to famine in the summer of 1945, discussed below — and landscape relatively unscathed.

The Japanese behaved differently in French Indochina during the war from the way they did in other colonized parts of Southeast Asia. They made little or no effort to arm and empower Indochinese youth. They recruited no labour forces and bankrolled no nationalist figures. Indochina's large ethnic Chinese minority, protected by France, suffered none of the indignities that their counterparts experienced elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In Indochina, World War II produced no resistance heroes, no collaborators with the Japanese and no outright villains. There are no World War II museums or memorials in Indochina, no dominant narratives for school texts, no problems connected with collective memory and no bestsellers dealing with the war.