10 - Britain, America and Indo-China, 1942–1945

Summary

Second only to India among the problems Roosevelt's anticolonialism set for his British allies in the years of the Grand Alliance was that of French Indo-China. It was not so much that Roosevelt's antipathy to de Gaulle and all he stood for expressed itself peculiarly strongly in relation to the question of the establishment of Gaullist troops in Indo-China, though that was undoubtedly a complicating factor. Nor was it only that so long as the Third Republic continued, even in its Vichy form, to exert its attraction on some of Roosevelt's entourage, Admiral Leahy for example, what was promised to Pétain could be ignored in relations with the French Committee of National Liberation. Nor was it only that the Indo-Chinese nationalist movement on the whole resisted the Japanese where the Indian nationalist movement remained neutral and those of Burma and Indonesia lent themselves to the propaganda purposes of the New Order of Japan. It may be that, hemmed in by political inhibitions elsewhere, Roosevelt's anti-colonial sentiments broke out with redoubled strength on the Indo-Chinese issue. But that he expressed himself on the subject of French rule with a violence, an extremism, an irrational vehemence that ignored justice, past professions and any pretence at objectivity, cannot be denied. Wherefrom came this vehemence, this bitterness, is still largely unexplained by any of the American historians who have so far examined his record.