Vietnam 1945: Quest for Power

David G. Marr scored a knock-out or at least a TKO with, "Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power." David G. Marr launched the readers into Ba Ðinh Square, Ha Noi on that hot muggy Sunday afternoon, 2 September, 1945, to listen to Nguyen Ai Quoc, the founder of the Indochinese Communist Party, read the Vietnamese version of the Declaration of Independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the new name for a united Vietnam. The amount of research that David G. Marr put into this book was phenomenal making the readers drooling for more.

The title of this book is misleading. Marr's topic is not 1945 alone but the period beginning in 1940, when the Germans conquered France and the colonial adminisrators at the other end of the huge Eurasian landmass were left in confusion -- a period that reached a climax of sorts in 1945, with the surrender of the Japanese and the inevitable manuveuring among the various contending factions within Indochina for power in the post-war picture.Back in 1940....some of the French colonials were happy to follow the lead from the new Vichy govt in France (the puppets of the Germans) and so to co-operate with the Japanese. Others had more or less open Gaullist sympathies. One develops some sympathy, in the course of this book, for the Gaullists -- who must have thought, after the liberation of their country in Europe in 1944, that they were entitled to a restoration of the colonial status quo ante as their share of the post-war settlement.Early in 1945, the Japanese decided the French could no longer be trusted to run Indochina in Japan's interests, and they placed it under the control of their own military. This put the French and the VC in an odd alliance. It was also a very ineffective alliance -- the Japanese remained firmly in control up to the time their god/emperor told them in a radio address the war was over and they must lay down their arms.In these events, and much more (I can't convey the thoroughness of Marr's account in this review!), one comes to see the future, the next thirty years of it!, as so much inevitable misery, like a wound-up spring destined to uncoil slowly and painfully for all concerned.So read this book to give yourself the background for any understanding of those 30 years. If you can bear to do so.

Scholar and Vietnam historian, David G. Marr has created a work of epic scope in his finely tuned account of the year that saw the end of World War II and defined the postwar world. The detailed study of Allied, Japanese, and Vietnamese involvement during the war and in the postwar maneuver for dominance in Vietnam, is essential for the reader who seeks to probe the politics of a cold war struggle that continued to rage for thirty years of land war in Southeast Asia. France was occupied by Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940 while Axis power, Japan, prepared to invade Vietnam in September. With its seaports, airbases, and overland transportation routes, along with its abundant natural resources and rice belts, Vietnam was crucial to Japan's war errort. In Vietnam a French colonial government had ruled its Indochinese Union, exploiting Vietnam's natural resources and manipulating its economy for close to one hundred years. Fearful of losing its colonial possession entirely by force, the French collaborated with Japanese military forces that allowed a functional French colonial administration to sustain the machinations of government in Vietnam from 1942 to 1945. The Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, began covert operations in Vietnam in the spring of 1943, working directly with respected and admired communist-nationalist, Ho Chi Minh. Substantial research, eye-witness analysis, photgraphs, and extensive footnotes support Marr's account of Ho's newly formed Viet Minh forces working with OSS "Deer Team" operatives to achieve Allied war goals and oppose the Japanese war effort. The year 1945 is to Vietnam what 1776 is to the United States; it marks the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam headed by Ho Chi Minh. Ho made it clear to his US friends that his primary aim was not to promote communism but to achieve independence and self-determination for Vietnam. All Americans who knew him personally saw him first as a nationalist and second as a communist. Japan seized power entirely in Vietnam from a French colonial administration 9March1945. Vietnamese leaders saw the ousting of the French as a window of opportunity. By the end of July with Japan on the brink of defeat, members of the Viet Minh, Indochinese Communist Party, and associated nationalists seized history in what was termed the "August Revolution." A tidal wave of revolutionary and nationalist zeal for independence swept the country. On 2September Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in a public address to a nation unified in its desire for independence, quoting from the United States' Declaration of Independence, "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Ho concluded his speech with: "Vietnam has the right to enjoy freedom and independence, and in fact has become a free and independent country. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and