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Paper Trails: Connecting Viet Nam and World History Through Documents, Film, Literature and PhotographsMarc Gilbert |
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Part I Part II Part III |
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at War |
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The major role played by women in Vietnamese warfare was not confined to
that country's struggles with the Chinese. Women generals served in the
Tayson rebellion against Nguyen and Trinh lords in the late eighteenth century
and provided volunteer (as well as coerced) labor charged with maintaining
the Ho Chi Minh Trail, freeing thousands of male soldiers for combat operations.
Fortunately, there exist two accessible works that can be used to draw students
into a better understanding of the place of gender in the political struggles
of the eras of de-colonization and the Cold War. The late Madame Nguyen
Thi Dinh (commander of a Viet Cong battalion south of Saigon and subsequently
a delegate at the Paris Peace Talks) wrote a short account of her early
life as a revolutionary entitled No Other Road to Take: Memoir of Mrs.
Nguyen Thi Dinh, translated by Mai V. Elliott (Ithaca, New York, Cornell
University, Data Paper Number 102, Southeast Asia Program, Dept. of Asian
Studies, 1976) that illuminates the sacrifices she, as a woman, was forced
to make to fight against the French, and that also explores the sources
of her hostility for Ngo Dinh Diem and his American supporters. Le Ly Haslip
(with Jay Wurts), When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (New York:
Plume, 1993) offers a view from many sides of the conflict, first that of
a messenger for the Viet Cong, then as a victim of the impact of the war
on Vietnamese culture, and later as an immigrant to America. It is often
said that the first few pages of this work are perhaps the best ever written
on the subject of the American War in Viet Nam. A moving glimpse of the
place of women in Vietnamese folklore within and beyond patriarchy, in peace
and war, is offered at http://www.geocities.com/chtn_nhatrang/women.html.
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Thousands of women revolutionaries died in the wars
in Viet Nam, such as Vo Nguyen Giap's first wife, who perished under torture
in the French prison known to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton. Many other
women endured great hardship. Yet, it is rare for even a course on the wars
in Viet Nam to devote much attention to American service women, rarer still
Vietnamese women combatants, and rarest of all, Vietnamese war survivors
and widows. However, the sources above, and the following titles, make these
subjects simple to address in a world history context: Linda Van Devanter's
Home Before Morning (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, reprint
2001), Keith Walker's Piece of My Heart: Stories of Twenty-Six Women
Who Served in Vietnam (San Francisco: Presido Press, reprint ed., 1997),
Sandra C. Taylor's Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh
and the Revolution (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999)
and Lady Borton's After Sorrow (New York: Viking, 1995). The 1998
film version of Taylor's work, Long-Haired Warriors, is available
from the University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent
Learning, 2000 Center Street, Fourth Floor, Berkeley, California, 94704-1223,
Phone: 510-642-0460). It can be usefully paired with Gillo Pontecorvo's
1967 film, The Battle of Algiers, as a study in "women's work" during
a revolution. Students viewing both films can be asked to examine what role
women played in these wars and at what cost, how Western perceptions of
women's roles made women especially valuable in anti-colonial/revolutionary
work, and how women, often wrongly, believed their participation in their
people's wars would yield greater rights and opportunities (though lesser
advances did usually follow, in Viet Nam, the U. S., and elsewhere). A bibliography
of women and Viet Nam is provided at http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman/women.htm. |
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The Life of Ho Chi Minh in Global Perspective |
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The place of the Vietnamese revolution and that of its foremost leader,
Ho Chi Minh (1990-1969), in world history has recently been illuminated
by William Duiker (pronounced Dye'ker), in his Ho Chi Minh: A Life
(New York: Theia Books, 2000). It is not intended here to review
this seminal work on the subject, but to point out that it provides a global
view of the one-time globe-trotting Ho, his early membership in the Communist
party, his difficulties with Stalin and the Comintern, and Viet Nam's struggle
to survive its reliance on its two strongest, yet predatory allies, the
Soviet Union and China. Duiker's book helps identify and clarify what specialists
have long known about Ho Chi Minh: that his allegiance to communism was
tripartite: only communism offered to bring an end to the class-ridden social
system of Viet Nam (where inferiors never spoke to their superiors without
being spoken to); only communism seemed adequate to the challenge of taking
a poor agricultural society and economy into the modern world; and only
communism offered the means and necessary foreign support for the overthrow
of the French colonial order in Viet Nam. Ho Chi Minh's self-conception
as a nationalist is revealed in his letter to Robert Lansing, the American
Secretary of State, asking for the application to Viet Nam of Woodrow Wilson's
declaration of support for the concept of "Self-Determination of Peoples"
during the Peace Conference at Versailles in the wake of the Great War:
N. B. Nguyen Ai Quoc ("Nguyen the Patriot") was one of the pseudonyms of Nguyen That Thanh, later Ho Chi Minh. |
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| This document can be used to help students understand the wide disparity between the application of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" (for the full text of that document, see http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wilson14.htm) to western and non-western societies. | 4 | |||||||||||
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Ho Chi Minh's failed effort to be admitted to the
Peace Conference, and the historical context of that denial of entry, is
traced in the Public Broadcasting System Education videocassette, Between
the Wars: Versailles-The Lost Peace, and is readily available
for purchase online at http://pbsvideodb.pbs.org/programs/all_chapters.asp?item_id=7769). |
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Ho Chi Minh's commitment to communism was illuminated
by his subsequent taking of the ostensibly friendly French Socialist Party
to task for not being more forthcoming in their support for Vietnamese independence
in 1930 and in his program for the Communist Party of Indochina that same
year, which embraced equality for men and women, as well as a commitment
to freeing the masses suffering under colonial rule (see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1930hochiminh.html
for the full text of the latter document). |
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Much to the benefit of instructors of world history,
the American Forum for Global Education's Viet Nam and Cambodia Project
has prepared a complete "Discussion Based Question" approach to Ho Chi Minh's
writings that offers a nine-question document analysis set. It can be accessed
at http://www.globaled.org/vietnamandcambodia/lessons/hochiminhdbq.php. |
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Vietnamese Anti-Colonialism and Nationalism: Document-based Approaches |
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| Document-based approaches to Viet Nam's place in world history can be quite fruitful. Two sources for such an approach are Alfred J. Andrea and James H. Overfield, The Human Record, Volume II, Since 1500 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1998) and Philip Riley, et. al, The Global Experience: Readings in World History to from 1550 (New York: Prentice Hall, 2001). Though the content differs with each edition, the 1998 edition of Riley's anthology contains an excellent selection from Elegy by Nguyen Dinh Chieu, the great blind poet who called to the Vietnamese aristocracy to join the peasants in resisting the initial phase of French colonization. That edition also contains excerpts from the Vietnamese Communist Party's Platform of 1930 and the Declaration of Independence of 1945, along with an interview with the Republic of Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem. Each document is accompanied with questions that urge comparison and change over time. The 2002 edition of The Human Record offers another look into that same period via Phan Thanh Gian's "Letter to Emperor Tu Duc and Last Message to His Administrators," and a ringing attack on French colonial administration ("Letter to the French Chamber of Deputies") by the soon-to-be executed Nguyen Thai Hoc, whose view is doubly of value as it is, like the above-mentioned interview with Ngo Dinh Diem, a rare document. See below for other document sets that do not accompany their materials with study questions. Much of what follows offer 'DBQ' approaches to Viet Nam's place in world history with supporting questions for student readers. | 8 | |||||||||||
Partition as a Means of Decolonization |
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Among the most important processes effecting both the decolonization process
and modern world history is partition. Virtually all European colonial powers
considered or gave effect to partition as an exit strategy from possessions
where colonial policy and local resistance had given rise to indigenous
factions whose differences the colonial order could produce or re-enforce,
but not resolve. The partition of the Indian subcontinent is often referenced
by world historians as an example of this process, but they often fail to
note that, at the very least, this process was set in train by the partitioning
of indigenous states in Africa (Western Africa, Somalia, etc.) and Viet
Nam (Cochin, Annam, Tonkin). Rarely do world historians consider that the
first instance of partition as a colonial exit strategy was Ireland, and
that the French considered a similar approach in Viet Nam (retaining Cochin-china
for themselves or a puppet regime) even before the partition of India and
Palestine in 1947-1948. Viet Nam itself was partitioned as a colonial exit
strategy, through its division in 1954 was initially designated as a cease-fire
and a temporary, not a permanent, international border—until the United
States chose to enforce it as such as part of its anti-communist Cold War
crusade. Instructors can very easily locate maps of colonial partitions
and those partitions that served as exit strategies and thus expand their
treatment of the decolonization process while adding little to the already
heavy burdens of content and time that weighs upon courses in world history.
For partition maps:
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An example of a "change over time essay" using partition
as colonial exit strategies (in this case, India) can be found at http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t3w30pakistanindia.htm. |
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Students can be given the task of examining each
partition experience, perhaps role playing through the self-justifying motives
of colonial masters, the pro- and anti-partition rationales of participating
indigenous peoples and parties, and the partition's ultimate victims and
benefactors. Students can then (or alternatively) compare these events,
identifying larger patterns within colonial traditions (French, British,
etc.) and indigenous attitudes (religion, political ideology. etc.) Students
may also be assigned to compare the literature of partition, such as Khushwant
Singh's Train to Pakistan (1990 Grove Press reprint) and Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children (Penguin reprint, 1995). For the most recent
comparative literature approach to this subject, see Joe Cleary, Literature,
Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel
and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). |
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Vietnamese Anti-Colonial Movements Compared: Viet Nam and Indonesia |
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Those who have the time to more closely explore the outcomes of decolonization
patterns can greatly profit from the use of a self-contained segment (Episode
3) of the Annenberg-funded Pacific Century series that compares the
lives, circumstances and political philosophies of Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno
entitled, "From the Barrel of a Gun." This film is narrated by Peter Coyote,
who was then still not far removed from his years as a "Digger" in political
struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The film is a model work of concise documentary
analysis that tries to show how, when examining historical events, content
is determined by context. Students will readily be able to see several important
issues of the type that have been addressed in Advance Placement World History
examinations, such as why did the Vietnamese choose the communist path and
Indonesia the non-communist authoritarian route to development; what role
did the Japanese occupations of both countries during the war play in their
choice of development paths; and what was the outcome for the peoples of
both societies in the near- and long-term? |
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Both Viet Nam and Indonesia faced a process of re-colonization,
rather than de-colonization, after the Second World War. Much as they had
done after the First World War, the Western powers began reevaluating their
colonial policies as the Second World War came to a close. As on the previous
occasion, though alternatives abounded, the victors did not wish to stray
too far from the status quo in Asia. However, conditions did not favor such
a course. The Japanese Empire had greatly damaged the European ruling mystique,
and in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, they had ended European
hegemony, howsoever temporarily. Britain, while jailing much of the Indian
subcontinent's nationalist leadership for the war's duration, had still
all but set the date for the end of the British Raj. Yet the temptation
for putting the Imperial Humpty Dumpty back together was too still too strong
to abandon without a fight. As a result, Britain was instrumental in supplying
troops to return Viet Nam to French control and Indonesia to the Dutch authorities.
They did so under the license of wartime Allied agreements regarding the
shape of post-war world. Instructors may make use of the following document
to illustrate this process:
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Students can be tasked with analyzing what colonial
purposes were served by this directive, the colonialist's attitude toward
"native" rule and peoples, and the colonial assumptions embedded in the
Yalta Agreements (for example, what does the term "loyal" mean in this context?).
They can also measure these orders against the view taken of post-war agreements
by the Vietnamese in 1919 and 1945 (see above letter to Robert Lansing and
the telegram dated February 28, 1945 that appears below). |
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The arrival of British-Indian troops under General Douglas Gracey sent to accomplish parallel tasks in Viet Nam were not established "in country" until after Ho Chi Minh had, as mentioned above, declared Viet Nam an independent nation before a crowd of thousands in Hanoi on September 2, 1945:
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Students can be directed to analyze what sources
were cited by Ho Chi Minh in support of Viet Nam's independence and why
these were chosen, as well as why they were so well known to him; why, according
to the Vietnamese, France had betrayed its "civilizing mission" in Viet
Nam; why the Vietnamese had reason to expect fair treatment from the victorious
allies in the Second World War; and whether the declaration of independence
was, indeed, a true expression of the will of the Vietnamese people. Students
may also read Office of Strategic Services Archimedes Patti's oral history
testimony on the writing of the Vietnamese declaration of Independence,
and the contemporary pro-Ho Chi Minh reflections of the State Department's
Abbot Low Moffat at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/series/pt_01.html.
Students may enquire as to why these experienced leaders saw Ho Chi Minh
in far different terms than their Cold War successors. Patti's Why Viet
Nam? Prelude to America's Albatross (Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1997) and David G. Marr's more scholarly
Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley, California: University
of California Press, 1997) are authoritative accounts of these events. |
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The Vietnamese authorities subsequently learned
that Gracey intended to use his troops and those Japanese soldiers he was
covertly re-arming to re-establish French control. They did not know that
British officers under Gracey—not aware of his express orders—begged
him to support the Vietnamese and had a hard time accepting the re-arming
of the Japanese or understanding why the Vietnamese began shooting at them,
as Sergeant Stan Thomson remembers:
In October 1945 we were sent to Saigon in Indo-China . . . to round up the Japs and ship them back to Japan. They were concentrated at Cap St. Jacques. Owing to the upheaval with the local population wanting their freedom from the French, they were often shot at and killed our men in the belief that we were holding the fort until the French forces arrived. It got so bad at one point that we actually armed some of the Japs!!! I got a funny feeling when I saw a Jap sentry practicing bayonet drill when he thought he was not observed.4 |
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The Vietnamese revolutionaries appealed to the non-white
rank-and-file Indian contingents of the British forces of occupation to
abstain, as fellow Asians, from assisting in the re-colonization of their
country:
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Students can be directed to examine this document,
whose errors in English reveal a Francophone education, as an example of
the fledgling or tenuous nature of an "Asian" identity, the difficulty of
forming common cause against Asia's colonial masters, and the resultant
violence and factionalism among Asian liberation movements. Also interesting
is the complete failure of this appeal, not the least because these Indian
troops (including Nepalese Gurkhas, Sikhs from northwest India, and Muslims
form Central India) were minorities within India and were professional soldiers
who had fought with, and suffered alongside, their British overlords against
the Japanese. French authority was re-established by early 1946 at the cost
of 40 killed and 100 wounded British Indian troops and more than a thousand
Vietnamese lives, and Viet Nam's "Thirty Year War for Independence" had
begun. A subsequent appeal to the President of the United States to prevent
the French from re-establishing their regime failed to earn a response:
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Ho Chi Minh subsequently sent eight letters to gain
the attention of the President of the United States that evoke the tumult
of contemporary global affairs. One of these letters, dated February 16,
1945 (not declassified until 1972) is one of many of Ho's writings at http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/collection_of_letters_ho_chi_.htm.
Ho Chi Minh then wrote:
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| Students can be asked to answer how the French re-occupation of Viet Nam was or was not in violation of the Atlantic Charter (see http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/53.htm or http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/atlantic.htm) and the subsequent "San Francisco Charter" which refers to the signing in that city of the Charter of the United Nations (see http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/ch-cont.htm for full text) on 22 June, 1945 and entered into force on October 22, 1945. Ho Chi Minh's evocation of the fact that he worked closely with Allied military forces against the Japanese in 1941-1945, and of the Philippine model, is also worthy of examination. | 21 | |||||||||||
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A somewhat parallel course of events took place
in Indonesia. Pursuant to the orders of Southeast Asia Command, British
Indian troops landed in Indonesia where, as in Viet Nam, they also met resistance
when their intentions became known. The commander of the British brigade
in Java, Brigadier General A. W. F. Mallaby, was ambushed and killed
by Indonesian patriots. Over a thousand Japanese, rearmed by the British
as in Viet Nam, were also killed in combat with indigenous insurgents. Over
900 British and Indian troops and 10,000 Indonesians died before sufficient
Dutch forces arrived to allow British troops to be withdrawn in December
1946. The ferocity of the Indonesian resistance can be traced to the fact
that the Japanese, in desperate need for Indonesian resources, had permitted
a degree of self-rule in the Dutch East Indies, insofar as local leaders,
such as Sukarno and Hatta, were given important administrative responsibilities.
This regime had served the Japanese war effort well by concealing the horrible
fate met by workers conscripted to serve the Japanese as laborers. Having
paid what they considered to be a high price for their wartime political
opportunities, the leaders of this regime welcomed the decision of Japan
on August 9th to give the former Dutch colony its independence on August
24th. Sukarno and Hatta had been summoned to Japanese headquarters
in Saigon to receive this news, but it proved unsafe to do so. On August
17th, Sukarno and Hatta exploited the surrender of the Japanese
on August 15th by publishing a declaration of independence of
the Republic of Indonesia, the Proklamasi:
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| Indonesia would have a less difficult road to travel to freedom than Vietnam. Never having been members of Communist International Movement like Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno and Hatta were not as wedded to socialism. They also had already demonstrated in their relations with the Japanese that they possessed a proven immunity to the guilt associated with sacrificing the poor of Indonesia in the name of development. Once Sukarno's and Hatta's radical rivals had been extinguished in two campaigns by the Dutch, only four years of protracted conflict was required for the triumph of Indonesian nationalism, as opposed to thirty years in the case of Viet Nam. In 1949, the Dutch more or less amicably ended their 300 hundred year dominion in this corner of Southeast Asia. | 23 | |||||||||||
| Students might explore why Viet Nam's declaration of independence was so much longer than that of the Indonesian declaration, and why the cost to the colonial occupiers was so much greater in Indonesia than Viet Nam in the short term, while the cost to all parties was so much greater in Viet Nam in the long term. | 24 | |||||||||||
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The Gallery of Failed Cold War Nation-Builders |
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| In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended his support for the brutal, but non-communist, dictator of Nicaragua as "an S.O.B., but our S.O.B." Thirty years later, another American President and follower of FDR, Lyndon Baines Johnson, deliberately referred to the Republic of Viet Nam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in the same terms. Students might profit from engaging in the study of these leaders, perhaps alongside the Shah of Iran and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, to comprehend the complex nature of the Cold War. Since Ngo Dinh Diem is not well-served in either in books or on the internet, students can begin with William Head's entry on Ngo Diem in Spencer's Tucker (ed.) Encyclopedia of he Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) and use it as a baseline for an Internet search examining the many web sites that treat the Shah of Iran (such as http://www.iranchamber.com/History/mohammad_rezashah/mohammad_rezashah.php) and also Nicaragua's Somoza family dynasty (http://library.thinkquest.org/17749/lsomoza.html). Each of these leaders relied on personalist religious philosophies (Catholic or Muslim), secret police or paramilitary action, and authoritarian development strategies that exhibited little sensitivity for the interests of the masses as well as over-confidence in American support. Students can explore these themes and discuss why each of these anti-communist nation-builders initially attracted many friends. |
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| Part I Part II Part III | ||||||||||||
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Notes 1 From The National Archives, Washington D. C., translated from the original French, cited in Marvin E. Gettlemen, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1995), 19-20. 2 See http://www.britains-smallwars.com/RRGP/4282.html, which includes marvelous oral history content. 3 Text available thanks to Vern Weitzel at http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/declar.html. 4 See SGT, Stan "Tommy" Thomson's account at http://www.burmastar.org.uk/thomson.htm. 5 This is a facsimile of original document in the Gracey Papers, Kings College, London, 4/20. 6 Facsimile of original document reproduced at http://killeenroos.com/5/hcminhmemo.jpg. 7 This facsimile of the Proklamzsi and its English translation reproduced at http://home.swipnet.se/~w-15266/indons/instant/politics.htm. A constitution was adopted on August 29, and a nationalist government installed on August 31, 1945.
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