Indochina War of 1940–1941 | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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Indochina Wars Summary

Indochina War of 1940–1941

The Japanese threat to French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) became clear in the late 1930s, when it began its war of aggression against China in 1937 and occupied the island of Hainan in February 1939, all the more so because to the west the Japanese could count on the support of the government of Siam. In fact, since the coup of Pibul Songgram (1897–1964), Siam had begun drawing nearer to Japan. It changed its name to Thailand, a clue to its expansionist position because "Thailand" seemed to correspond to pan-Thai ideology. Facing this double threat, the French colony organized its defense. When Europe entered into a state of war in 1939, the army in Indochina boasted ninety thousand men (fewer than fifteen thousand of them Europeans) but only mediocre equipment. It was a force to maintain colonial order, not an army formed to confront the troops of a great power such as Japan.

Japan's Demands

Since 1937 Tokyo had been criticizing Paris for permitting the resupplying of Nationalist China by the Yunnan railroad. In June 1940 Japan took advantage of France's defeat by Germany. On 19 June an ultimatum was sent to Indochina's Governor-General Georges Catroux that all transport of goods toward China must be stopped and that the Japanese must be able to verify this stoppage. Catroux yielded, in the belief that the balance of power left him no other option. The Vichy government of Philippe Pétain replaced him as leader of Indochina with Admiral Jean Decoux. The latter had to face new Japanese demands and a military convention was negotiated. Since Decoux delayed signing, the Japanese sent a new ultimatum that if the matter were not settled within three days, the Japanese would force the issue. The convention was signed on the afternoon of 22 September, just before the ultimatum. It organized and limited the stationing and passage of Japanese troops to the north of Indochina. This agreement did not prevent the Japanese Army of Canton from opening hostilities that same evening. For four days, a battle raged around the city of Lang Son. The French troops were overcome and Lang Son was taken. A landing in the region of Haiphong constituted another blow to colonial France. This time Decoux did not resist. This double humiliation did not call into question the agreement of 22 September; in theory French sovereignty over Indochina remained complete. But this Japanese eruption had struck a blow at the prestige of the colonial power.

Further Erosion of French Power

In the autumn of 1940, the French colonial government had to confront two revolts. In the north, at the Chinese border, various gangs, notably Vietnamese partisans of Prince Cuong De (1882–1951), attacked French outposts, killing isolated soldiers and local notables. Order was swiftly reestablished by the colonial army. In the south, in Cochin China, a Communist insurrection broke out on 22 November. In Saigon the Sûreté (investigation police), forewarned, nipped the movement in the bud. But in rural areas in the west (especially in the province of My Tho), the uprising lasted several weeks. The insurgents, numbering more than ten thousand, killed about thirty Vietnamese notables. Here and there a people's regime was installed, very briefly, and land was confiscated and redistributed. The foreign legion and air corps participated in a brutal repression of the insurgents. The number of insurgents killed is not known with any certainty, but courts martial pronounced one hundred death sentences. Admiral Decoux refused to show clemency in those cases, despite a recommendation to that effect from the minister of colonies in Vichy. Added to arrests made in 1939, this repression struck a harsh blow to the PCI (Indochinese Communist Party). It was from China that its leaders, still free, continued to fight. In 1941 the border region would see the creation, around the future Ho Chi Minh (born Nguyen That Thanh, 1890–1969), of the Viet Minh, a National Front with Communist tendencies.

The End of the Conflict

The government of Thailand learned a lesson from the French difficulties. It made territorial demands, then entered into hostilities. The "war," which lasted from September 1940 to January 1941 and consisted only of skirmishes, reached its culmination in the middle of January 1941. On 16 January the French troops had to fall back when they experienced the same weaknesses they had exhibited at Lang Son, in particular the desertion of Indochinese soldiers. But on 17 January 1941, the best ships in the Thai fleet were sunk at Ko Chang, in the Gulf of Siam. Japan then imposed an armistice and its mediation. Negotiations ended in a compromise that accorded Thailand the two Lao provinces to the west of the Mekong and a third of Cambodia's territory (in short, what Siam had had to cede to Indochina at the beginning of the century). Peace was signed in Tokyo on 9 May 1941. It satisfied Thai public opinion, which had fully supported Pibul Songgram during his war against France.

The entente with Thailand was all the more useful to Japan because the latter had decided to expand toward the south rather than the north, at the expense of the colonial empires of the European powers that had been defeated or were in difficulty. The new concessions demanded by Japan in Indochina revealed this orientation. Vichy yielded. The Darlan-Kato agreements (29 July 1941) allowed Japanese troops to be stationed throughout Indochina; moreover, they instituted the principle of a common defense of the colony. At the same time, Japan imposed its economic stranglehold on Indochina. Given the state of France and the situation of its forces in the Far East, this chain of concessions could have been avoided only with the intervention of some outside support, which at the time was not forthcoming.