S5 Episode 2 - The French Connection AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Blowback

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (S5 Episode 2 - "The French Connection") to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Blowback) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Blowback episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: S5 Episode 2 - "The French Connection"

Author: Blowback
Duration: 01:00:56

Episode Shownotes

Indochina rises up, the French Empire ends, the Cold War begins.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_11
A hero of wartime resistance, Ho Chi Minh. At 55, Ho has become a legend. He grants an exclusive interview to CBS News correspondent David Shulman.

00:00:11 Speaker_13
Ho came into the room that night wearing the uniform that had been made popular by Stalin, by Chiang Kai-shek. Just a simple khaki, high-colored uniform, no decorations, no insignia of any kind.

00:00:24 Speaker_13
I looked at him and said, President Ho, how can you possibly fight war against the modern French army? You have nothing. You've just told me what a poor country you are. You don't even have a bank, let alone an army and guns and modern weapons.

00:00:37 Speaker_13
The French have planes, tanks, napalm. How can you fight the French? And he said, oh, we have a lot of things that can match the French weapons. Tanks are no good in swamps. And we have swamps in which the French tanks will sink.

00:00:50 Speaker_13
And we have another secret weapon. It's nationalism. And don't think that a small ragged band cannot fight against a modern army. It will be a war between an elephant and a mouse. and a tiger.

00:01:00 Speaker_13
If the tiger ever stands still, the elephant will crush him and pierce him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger of Indochina is not going to stand still. We're going to hide in our jungles by day and steal out by night.

00:01:14 Speaker_13
And the tiger will jump on the back of the elephant and tear huge chunks out of his flesh and then jump back into the jungle. And after a while, the mighty elephant will bleed to death. That was the prediction of Ho Chi Minh on September 11th, 1946.

00:01:31 Speaker_13
Speak about this luck, son!

00:01:40 Speaker_07
Speak about this luck, son! Speak about this luck, son!

00:01:54 Speaker_06
Welcome to Blowback, I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 5, Episode 2, The French Connection.

00:02:04 Speaker_06
Last time, as always, we provided a prelude to the season, a look at the legacy of the Vietnam War, the Cambodia Campaign, and the Khmer Rouge. In this episode, we begin our story.

00:02:17 Speaker_06
We'll stand before the massive temples of the ancient Khmer Empire, navigate the South China Sea during the rise of French colonialism, and survey the carnage of the First Indochinese War.

00:02:32 Speaker_05
We'll see how the kingdoms in Indochina were turned into workhouses and buffer states by France, and how modern nationalism took root there.

00:02:42 Speaker_05
We'll see how, in the aftermath of World War II, when France itself was liberated from the Nazis, the French went straight back to recover the crown jewel of their holdings in Asia.

00:02:53 Speaker_05
Their wars in Indochina, much like the British in Afghanistan last season, set the course for everything to come.

00:03:02 Speaker_06
In this heady mix of occupation, exploitation, and war, we'll meet figures like Ho Chi Minh, the kitchen worker-turned-revolutionary who led his country against both the Japanese and the French, Prince Sihanouk, the wily and unpredictable king of Cambodia who wheeled and dealed to preserve his country's fragile neutrality, and a young man named Salath Sar.

00:03:28 Speaker_06
a quiet student whose studies in Paris would catapult him into a life of secrecy, extremism, and revolution.

00:03:38 Speaker_05
Driving through the Second World War into the French-Indo-Chinese War will emerge in the 1950s in Geneva, Switzerland, where backroom intrigue will produce vastly different realities for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

00:03:54 Speaker_05
These years would shape the motives and the destinies of kings, revolutionaries, and whole empires.

00:04:15 Speaker_06
The French called it Indochina. a patchwork of three different territories in Southeast Asia, sitting between China and Thailand.

00:04:28 Speaker_06
Until France declared it so, these places were not in fact a single unit or federation, but countries with distinct yet intertwined histories.

00:04:38 Speaker_06
All three, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, traced their existence back to ancient times as a constellation of separate kingdoms.

00:04:49 Speaker_05
Vietnam, by far the largest and most powerful of the three, was located south of China on territory held by the Viet ethnic group.

00:05:00 Speaker_06
For a long while, the main invader of Vietnam was China, writes historian Mark Lawrence, which conquered the Viet people in 111 BC and ruled its territory as a province of the Chinese Empire for a thousand years.

00:05:16 Speaker_06
To the west, running down Vietnam's spine, is Laos, whose golden era spanned the 16th to 18th centuries. Of the three pieces of Indochina, Laos was the most mountainous, the least populated, and the most ethnically diverse.

00:05:33 Speaker_06
After splitting into several fiefdoms, by the 19th century, Laos had been gobbled up by the Kingdom of Siam, modern-day Thailand, to the west. It would not be unified again until French domination.

00:05:47 Speaker_05
Then there was Kampuchea. What is now modern Cambodia, a rather small state surrounded by powerful neighbors, was for half a millennium the most powerful and glorious civilization in Southeast Asia.

00:06:01 Speaker_05
This was the Empire of the Khmers, the majority ethnicity in Cambodia. At its height, the empire's northern border stretched up to China, while the southern coasts ran the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.

00:06:16 Speaker_05
And to the east, it encompassed southern Vietnam and southern Laos. To the west, Thailand and even bits of Burma.

00:06:24 Speaker_05
Situated between the spheres of influence of India and China, with the city Angkor as its capital, the Khmer Empire drew from both of those great other empires.

00:06:36 Speaker_05
Over the centuries, Angkor ping-ponged between Hinduism and Buddhism, depending on the whims of the ruler, lending Cambodia a dual heritage. By the 14th century, Theravada Buddhism, incorporating elements of Hindu culture, reigned supreme.

00:06:54 Speaker_06
Journalist Elizabeth Becker calls the Angkor Empire a water kingdom, tied together by the irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes, which were revolutionary in their time.

00:07:07 Speaker_06
Ironically, centuries after Angkor's fall, it would be French scholars and archaeologists that pieced together a picture of this civilization.

00:07:17 Speaker_06
Quote, by the time their work was halted in the 1960s, Becker writes, the French had proved the Khmers ranked with the Romans and Greeks as unrivaled artists and innovators of the ancient world.

00:07:30 Speaker_06
The reclamation or renaissance of these glory years would factor into almost every single modern Cambodian political movement, from the monarchy of Prince Sihanouk to the radicals of the Khmer Rouge.

00:07:45 Speaker_05
By the 15th century, the Khmer Empire slipped into decline. Quote, since the empire was centered on the country's northwest plains, writes Becker, Angkor was largely cut off from the new thriving trade with China.

00:07:59 Speaker_05
And to the west and east, new states were coming of age, states that would eventually compete over the right to annex the entire Khmer Kingdom, end quote.

00:08:09 Speaker_05
And one of these states was the rising Vietnamese kingdom, which had begun to conquer its southern neighbors, coveting, quote, the fertile coastal plain and the vast Mekong Delta.

00:08:22 Speaker_05
By the 19th century, Cambodia would be picked apart not only by Vietnam to its east, but Thailand to the west, becoming a vulnerable pawn for French colonialists.

00:08:37 Speaker_06
But the Vietnamese kingdom was having some crackups of its own. In the 17th century, a civil war between two ruling dynasties split the country into North and South, a prelude to the mutilation by Western powers centuries later.

00:08:54 Speaker_06
By the time the Nguyen dynasty unified the country in the early 19th century, Vietnam too was exposed to a hungry French empire.

00:09:07 Speaker_08
Last class we talked about dictatorship, so today we'll start with Hegel. It was Hegel who said that all the greatest world events happened twice, and then Karl Marx added the first time it was a tragedy, the second time it was a farce.

00:09:33 Speaker_06
The French began colonizing Vietnam in the late 1850s, during the reign of Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Nephew to his more famous uncle, Napoleon III was the subject of Karl Marx's famous maxim, first as tragedy, then as farce.

00:09:52 Speaker_06
France hoped that colonies in Asia would, quote, bathe his regime in imperial glory and keep pace with Great Britain.

00:10:00 Speaker_06
By colonizing into China, the empires hoped not only to profit from the area, but also to open a southern gateway to the even vaster resources and markets of China.

00:10:12 Speaker_05
France initially announced its entry into Vietnam as a military campaign to avenge Catholic mercenaries persecuted within the country.

00:10:21 Speaker_05
French gunships, aided by Catholic Spain, attacked the eastern coastal city of Da Nang, and later Saigon, grinding down the resistant but vulnerable Vietnamese kingdom over several years.

00:10:34 Speaker_05
By the early 1860s, the Vietnamese sued for peace and inked the Treaty of Saigon. What did the French gain from this deal? Trading rights in the precious Mekong Delta, whose veins emptied into the sea and was considered a prized road to China.

00:10:52 Speaker_05
And within a few more years, the empire formally annexed and colonized South Vietnam, dubbing it Cochin, China.

00:11:00 Speaker_05
France did not forget to force its subjects to legalize the practice of Catholicism, which would serve as a useful way to westernize parts of the population and win loyalty and commercial influence.

00:11:14 Speaker_06
Next came Cambodia, no longer an empire itself, but a small and weak kingdom. Unlike Vietnam, with its rubber factories and coal mines, France was not into Cambodia so much for its resources as for its position on the map.

00:11:30 Speaker_06
Rather than developing Cambodia, writes journalist William Shawcross, quote, French concern lay much more in erecting a buffer between Vietnam and Thailand, where the British had established strong trading interests.

00:11:46 Speaker_06
The leader of Cambodia, King Norodom, let the French in. King Norodom signed the treaties with France, writes Becker, quote, to protect his throne from a series of claims by pretenders and from control by the Vietnamese or the court of Siam.

00:12:04 Speaker_06
In fact, the French ended up using King Norodom far more than the other way around. In Vietnam, the French conquest dismembered a powerful state, write scholars Evans and Rowley.

00:12:17 Speaker_06
In Cambodia, they proclaimed a protectorate over a kingdom already in decline.

00:12:25 Speaker_05
Having secured southern Vietnam in the 1860s, the French took over the northern half in the 1880s and broke what remained of Vietnam into three protectorates.

00:12:37 Speaker_05
In 1885, write Evans and Rowley, the declining Chinese empire signed a treaty with the French, quote, by which they formally renounced suzerainty over Vietnam.

00:12:50 Speaker_06
The last piece of the equation was Laos, which the French formally acquired in the early 1890s. This came out of a series of brawls between France and Thailand. The French came out on top and received Laos as a trophy.

00:13:05 Speaker_06
Over the years, France would redraw the borders between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The French tended to push the Vietnamese borders northward and westward at the expense of Cambodia, writes Shawcross.

00:13:19 Speaker_06
We'll see this colonial territory swapping will lead to serious land disputes between Vietnam and Cambodia later in our story.

00:13:40 Speaker_05
To the envy of its rivals, France had conquered and in so doing created the Indochinese Federation. and Vietnam was always the crown jewel. Cambodia and Laos served as buffers.

00:13:56 Speaker_05
The French, Wright, Evans, and Rowley, quote, both dismembered Vietnam and joined it with Laos and Cambodia.

00:14:03 Speaker_05
And what's more, they argue, it is precisely this colonial period and that dismemberment, not ancient history, that is the key to understanding what unravels across the 20th century.

00:14:24 Speaker_05
The colonies of Indochina were fertile soil for European capital, and they sprouted new markets.

00:14:30 Speaker_05
As the Industrial Revolution transformed the French economy, writes Lawrence, political and business elites looked abroad for raw materials and consumer markets necessary to keep French factories humming."

00:14:44 Speaker_05
As we've seen elsewhere before on this program, the French developed Vietnam for the benefit of its own empire and its local collaborators, rather than ordinary people.

00:14:56 Speaker_06
The most fundamental change was the commercialization of agriculture, write Evans and Rowley. Quote, under French rule, the Mekong Delta became a major exporter of rice.

00:15:08 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, the French transformed thousands of Vietnamese into miners, factory hands, and rubber workers. Lawrence sums up, quote, Vietnamese faced long hours, miserable pay, and brutal discipline.

00:15:23 Speaker_06
So horrendous were conditions in the South that managers had to recruit workers from the North, where potential laborers were less likely to know about the cruelty, disease, and malnourishment that awaited them.

00:15:36 Speaker_06
On the harshest plantations, more than one in four rubber workers died. Runaways faced executions by torture, hanging, or stabbing."

00:15:50 Speaker_05
Modern class society developed alongside these factories and plantations, which included, of course, a nascent working class. Quote, few, if any, benefits filtered down to the ordinary people.

00:16:02 Speaker_05
Vietnamese peasants and coolie laborers were among the poorest in all Asia, but a commercial middle class grew up in the main towns, especially in Saigon, Wright, Evans, and Rowley.

00:16:14 Speaker_06
Cambodia was a different story.

00:16:17 Speaker_06
Quote, the French had decided that the Vietnamese were the industrious race of the future, writes Becker, whereas the Khmer of Cambodia were a lazy, doomed people, grown decadent on Buddhism and the rule of their opulent monarchs.

00:16:32 Speaker_06
And so, to get Cambodia up to code, the French imported Vietnamese into Cambodia. But they brought indentured Vietnamese laborers to work in Cambodia rubber plantations, rather than trust lazy Cambodians.

00:16:47 Speaker_06
Vietnamese were also conscripted as middlemen and bureaucrats to run the colonial apparatus. This, too, would not be forgotten by Cambodians down the line.

00:16:59 Speaker_05
Cambodia lagged far behind Vietnam in development. That went for industry, railways, education, you name it.

00:17:09 Speaker_05
Cambodia, notes Becker, did not have a French lycee or high school until 1935, and even then the majority of students were Vietnamese and French. And this produced one key detail to our story.

00:17:23 Speaker_05
Since France did little to provide the Khmers with a Western-style education, it staved off the arrival of a modern Cambodian nationalist movement until well into the 20th century.

00:17:36 Speaker_06
Finally, Laos was perhaps the most hands-off of these territories. Quote, French rule disrupted life even less in Laos than it did in Cambodia. Right, Evans and Rowley?

00:17:47 Speaker_06
Laos was, at that point, really a confederation of small principalities, with regionally based aristocratic families wielding political power. Peasant life was barely touched.

00:18:00 Speaker_06
But in Vietnam and Cambodia, France's swift and brutal transformation of these traditional kingdoms all but guaranteed revolt. Armed rebellion in Indochina materialized as soon as the French took over in the mid to late 19th century.

00:18:22 Speaker_06
Local militias, some of them made up of scholar warriors, some made up of workers turned soldiers, staged attacks on the empire's outposts.

00:18:33 Speaker_06
Unlike Vietnam, notes Becker, Cambodia had no powerful Mandarin class, only an aristocratic oligarchy that administered the government and whose fortunes were largely controlled by the king.

00:18:46 Speaker_06
And this traditional system faced no mass discontent until the middle of the First World War.

00:18:59 Speaker_12
This scene of desolation was filmed after the Battle of Chateau Thierry, where American and French troops won a decisive victory.

00:19:09 Speaker_06
What began as a tax revolt of a few hundred peasants in the capital, Phnom Penh, grew into a rebellion.

00:19:16 Speaker_06
According to historian David Chandler, French police estimated that some 40,000 peasants passed through Phnom Penh in the early months of 1916 before being ordered back to their villages by the king.

00:19:30 Speaker_05
Buddhist agitators led protests against sending Cambodians to fight for the French in World War I, writes Becker, tearing down recruitment posters in Phnom Penh.

00:19:43 Speaker_01
Reports from the Far East say that Japan is removing her troops from central China and the European situation is given as a possible cause.

00:19:50 Speaker_06
Around 1939, as World War II was spreading from Asia to Europe, Soniak Tan and other Khmer nationalist leaders, quote, began visiting different Buddhist temples, writes scholar Ben Kiernan, talking to the monks about the intellectual reawakening of the Khmer, discreetly criticizing French rule.

00:20:12 Speaker_06
1940 saw the birth of the Khmer Esserak or the Khmer Independence Movement. It was supported by the Thai government, which was growing anxious about the threat of Japan.

00:20:26 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, Cambodia didn't have much to show by way of communist left-wing resistance inside the country. Part of that may have been due to the origins of communism in Cambodia.

00:20:38 Speaker_06
In October 1929, the French authorities arrested a group of left-wing militants in the capital. Not surprisingly, writes Ben Kiernan, the first communists reported to be in Kampuchea were Vietnamese. The first watch, the second, the third, dies.

00:21:06 Speaker_06
I toss about, restless. Sleep would not come, it seems. The fourth watch, the fifth. No sooner have I closed my eyes than the five-pointed star haunts my dreams. A poem by Ho Chi Minh from his prison diaries.

00:21:30 Speaker_06
At the turn of the century, a club of Vietnamese elites formed the clandestine Nationalist Party, which advocated violent revolution against the French.

00:21:40 Speaker_06
Following the example of Sun Yat-sen in China, Vietnamese elites formed their own brand of nationalism in the early 20th century. But they had no real connection to either the small working class or the much larger class of peasants.

00:21:57 Speaker_06
So they remained unable to mobilize many people around their ideas.

00:22:02 Speaker_05
Then came Uncle Ho. Ho Chi Minh, son of a Confucian scholar, had actually spent three decades in exile, organizing abroad and advocating for independence.

00:22:15 Speaker_05
Having co-founded the French Communist Party, and soon the Indochinese one, after World War I, as world leaders deliberated at the Versailles Conference, Ho appeared as a delegate for Vietnam.

00:22:28 Speaker_05
His delegation's relatively modest demands, quote, called not for immediate independence, but for reforms including recognition of equal rights for Vietnamese and French people living in Vietnam, and the inclusion of Vietnamese representatives in the French parliament, writes Lawrence.

00:22:47 Speaker_05
the Western leaders ignored him. Soon, Ho would find a much more sympathetic and supportive audience in Moscow. He was recruited to the Comintern, the USSR's international network of communist organizers.

00:23:05 Speaker_06
Despite his globetrotting, Ho did find time to found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Under Ho's leadership, the party won the mantle of Vietnamese nationalism.

00:23:18 Speaker_06
Evans and Rowley note that while the urban working class did play some role, the Communist Revolution in Vietnam was basically a peasant uprising organized by intellectuals from a middle-class and even aristocratic background.

00:23:34 Speaker_05
but the communists paid a price for their effectiveness. As the party gained more influence, the colonial police annihilated the movement, not unlike how fascist police and the Gestapo would soon hunt down the French resistance in Europe.

00:23:49 Speaker_05
During the Great Depression, notes Lawrence, a series of peasant revolts began to produce local Soviets, and the police laid waste to the communist party, wiping out up to 90% of its organizers.

00:24:05 Speaker_06
At this time in Cambodia, we see a very different scene. Despite several revolts since the French takeover, the basic structure of pre-colonial Cambodia was untouched. The French had abolished certain antique practices, most significantly slavery.

00:24:22 Speaker_06
But in political terms, the monarchy remained the legitimate authority to most Cambodians. Two different families jockeyed for the throne. But that simply made it easier for the French, the actual power in the country, to pick winners and losers.

00:24:39 Speaker_06
This meant that revolutionary and nationalist politics would enter Cambodia from next door, Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, after all, had transformed his Vietnamese Communist Party into the Indo-Chinese Communist Party.

00:24:54 Speaker_06
He'd done so, writes Elizabeth Becker, with directives from the Comintern in Moscow, that he build a party incorporating the communist movements in Cambodia and Laos, as well as Vietnam.

00:25:07 Speaker_05
Some, especially in Cambodia, thought Vietnam was trying to dominate its Laotian and Cambodian neighbors.

00:25:16 Speaker_05
Others in the resistance defended the idea of a single Indochinese Communist Party, as all three countries shared the same fate under the French Confederation. Wouldn't their efforts be more effective under the roof of one party?

00:25:31 Speaker_05
This debate may have seemed academic at the time, but it was in fact deadly serious. The conflict festered for decades, and it would one day explode into a brutal war.

00:25:44 Speaker_14
Organized resistance in France was no longer possible. The government faced two alternatives. Retire to North Africa and carry on from there, or give up the struggle. On June 16th, Pétain asked for an armistice.

00:26:01 Speaker_14
The news is carried to Hitler, who received this word of a great nation's fall in a characteristic manner.

00:26:08 Speaker_06
The French Republic fell to the Nazis in June 1940, replaced by the pro-German Vichy government. The collaborators in Vichy were eager to retain France's colonies,

00:26:20 Speaker_06
In Cambodia, writes Shawcross, the French decided that their best protection against nationalism was to switch royal families once again.

00:26:28 Speaker_06
This set up a palace rivalry between one ambitious prince, Sirik Matak, who was, quote, now forced to watch, as his 19-year-old cousin, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whom the French had selected because of his pliable youthfulness, was crowned king.

00:26:46 Speaker_00
On October 28, 19-year-old King Norodom Shironofu's coronation ceremony was held with great pleasure for the South Kutsuin Kingdom of Cambodia.

00:26:58 Speaker_05
18-year-old Sihanouk began his career handpicked by Vichy France to keep order and to justify colonial rule.

00:27:06 Speaker_05
Quote, at the time, Sihanouk seemed little more than a carefree lycee student in Saigon, fond of horses, ice cream, and the cinema, and eminently pliable, Becker writes. Alongside the Second World War, the war against French colonialism ground on.

00:27:24 Speaker_05
Sun Yat-sen and the country's Buddhist monks mounted attacks against the French who continued to kill, imprison, and exile anyone viewed as a threat. But Vichy France was itself about to lose its own position in Indochina to another empire.

00:27:51 Speaker_06
As we saw in our third season, by the early 20th century, the Japanese Empire painted itself as a kind of anti-colonial liberator for the peoples of Asia.

00:28:02 Speaker_06
When the imperial army reached into China, Germany ordered the Vichy French to cede their authority to Tokyo. The French, in effect, became middlemen rather than colonial overlords.

00:28:15 Speaker_06
The Japanese proceeded to chop up Cambodia and ceded much of the Western provinces to Thailand. Meanwhile, Tokyo rather paradoxically ordered the creation of independent states in Vietnam and Laos.

00:28:30 Speaker_05
Ho Chi Minh, now leading the resistance movement known as the Viet Minh, was not fooled by Tokyo's appeals to Asian solidarity. The Viet Minh worked with the Allied powers and carried out guerrilla warfare.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
Between 1941 and 1945, the only effective resistance to the Japanese in French and China was that of the Vietnamese communists known as the Viet Minh.

00:28:56 Speaker_02
To help the Viet Minh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, fight the Japanese, the United States supplied the Viet Minh with arms and ammunition.

00:29:04 Speaker_02
In return, the Viet Minh supplied the United States with military intelligence concerning the Japanese and helped rescue downed American pilots.

00:29:13 Speaker_05
If the communists weren't already the most popular movement around for their struggle against the French, their struggle against the Japanese left their credentials undisputed.

00:29:24 Speaker_05
All the while in Cambodia, the Vietnamese-led communist movement, along with Khmer nationalist rebels, were coming into their own, as Sihanouk continued to play puppet for Japan.

00:29:37 Speaker_06
By spring of 1945, with General Douglas MacArthur's forces advancing on Japan's Pacific Empire, a desperate Japan dumped their Vichy allies altogether and staged a coup in Phnom Penh.

00:29:51 Speaker_06
In one sweep, writes Becker, the Japanese arrested the French military, police, and native guards, and imprisoned the entire French civilian population.

00:30:02 Speaker_06
Sihanouk declared the period of the French protectorate over, and credited Japan, the liberator of the Asian people, for granting Cambodia its independence. But the new empire was just as rapacious as the old.

00:30:18 Speaker_06
In Vietnam, the chaos and destruction of the war, combined with Japan's stockpiling of the rice crop, led to a famine that killed somewhere from half a million to two million Vietnamese, according to the Asia-Pacific Journal.

00:30:33 Speaker_05
In Cambodia, the Japanese occupiers raided the economy, stole tons upon tons of rice, and hunted for locals to draft into their army. But by mid-1945, Japan's empire was slipping away.

00:30:49 Speaker_05
In Vietnam, writes Lawrence, quote, revolutionary leaders decided that the moment had come to begin planning a popular uprising to coincide with Japan's final collapse.

00:31:04 Speaker_09
Arrangements are now being made for the formal signing of the surrender terms at the earliest possible moment. General Douglas MacArthur has been appointed the Supreme Allied Commander to receive the Japanese surrender.

00:31:20 Speaker_09
Great Britain, Russia, and China will be represented by high-ranking officers. Meantime, The Allied Armed Forces have been ordered to suspend offensive action.

00:31:35 Speaker_06
Japan's summer surrender cleared the way for the Viet Minh to take Hanoi and depose the emperor collaborator, Bao Dai.

00:31:47 Speaker_02
On September 2nd, 1945, the same day that the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allies, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence from France.

00:31:58 Speaker_06
The day that the United States dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, a final act of palace intrigue reportedly unfolded inside of Cambodia.

00:32:09 Speaker_05
Allies of the right-wing nationalist Sun Yat-sen staged a coup in Phnom Penh. But, Becker reports, Tan's own defense minister, secretly encouraged by King Sihanouk, fled to Saigon to warn the French of Tan's plans.

00:32:26 Speaker_05
In Sihanouk's name, the defense minister asked the French to return to Phnom Penh immediately and prevent an association with the Vietnamese.

00:32:35 Speaker_05
King Sihanouk remained on the throne, and the French granted Cambodia the status of autonomous state within the French Union."

00:32:46 Speaker_06
It was a fitting first chapter for Sihanouk. Through a mix of cunning and charisma, and at a tender young age, he had played the French, Japanese, and the Allies against each other to stay in power.

00:33:00 Speaker_06
In less than a decade, he would repeat the performance to secure an even greater prize.

00:33:12 Speaker_05
In August 1945, rights historian Marilyn Young, quote, most Vietnamese believed their country was at last independent of all foreign rule and at peace, end quote.

00:33:27 Speaker_05
With the surrender of Japan and the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Viet Minh, quote, set about establishing the rudiments of government in a country occupied by the troops of three hostile and anti-communist countries, Nationalist China, Great Britain, and France, Young writes.

00:33:46 Speaker_05
In an effort to disarm suspicion, that proved futile in the long run. The Communist Party dissolved itself in November, 1945, end quote.

00:33:57 Speaker_06
Early next year, Vietnam held its first national elections. Soon after, famine conditions began to ease, major government reforms were underway, and there was a mass literacy drive. But France was not giving up its colony.

00:34:13 Speaker_06
Based on an agreement reached with Nationalist China, France was set to begin landing in the north of Vietnam, at Haiphong Harbor, in early March.

00:34:24 Speaker_05
Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to Harry Truman in February asking for the US to intervene against the French. Ho brought up that it had actually been Viet Minh forces and not the French who had fought the Japanese in Indochina.

00:34:39 Speaker_05
According to Young, quote, it was Ho's last letter to the United States. And like the earlier ones, it was never answered.

00:34:51 Speaker_06
So instead, Ho struck out on his own, and spent most of 1946 negotiating with the French directly. All the while, France began rebuilding its presence in North Vietnam.

00:35:04 Speaker_11
Guns of a French cruiser fire on the town as colonial extremists decide to teach the Vietnamese a lesson.

00:35:10 Speaker_06
Even after French forces killed an estimated 6,000 people in a November assault on Haiphong, Young writes, still Ho Chi Minh attempted to negotiate.

00:35:21 Speaker_06
On December 19th, as Viet Minh militias in Hanoi attacked French positions, a near decade-long war for national liberation lurched into motion.

00:35:32 Speaker_11
In this type of war, the hunters quickly become the hunted.

00:35:40 Speaker_05
The French were at their strongest one year on from the Second World War, but the conflict soon degenerated into a stalemate, one that favored Viet Minh forces.

00:35:51 Speaker_05
They controlled the countryside, and they attacked exposed positions while the French were forced to hide in the better protected cities.

00:36:00 Speaker_06
But the Viet Minh were resourceful. They used captured French weapons, bought guns and ammo in China and Thailand, and even cut deals with the Chinese nationalists, who were anti-communists, of course.

00:36:13 Speaker_11
This is a clandestine war of ambush. Weapons are more valuable than gold. They must be used sparingly and hidden carefully in the ground and in swamps. Mines and sometimes bamboo spikes soaked in poison are planted."

00:36:27 Speaker_05
General Vonwin Zapp, in particular, stood apart. As Sheehan puts it, Zapp befuddled French commanders during the campaigns of 1949 and 1950.

00:36:39 Speaker_11
At his northern headquarters, General Vo Nguyen Yap, the tough commander of the Viet Minh Army, prepares his strategy. Yap now figures he has enough strength for a frontal assault, but he must move carefully. He plans to draw the French into a trap.

00:36:53 Speaker_05
Zap managed to trap the enemy on an evacuation route, along which, quote, 6,000 French colonial troops disappeared.

00:37:02 Speaker_05
This man who had earned his living as a history teacher at a lycee in Hanoi, lecturing on the French Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon, writes Sheehan, demonstrated that he was a classic Vietnamese scholar-general who could employ the classic Vietnamese strategy against the French."

00:37:21 Speaker_05
End quote.

00:37:22 Speaker_11
Sabotage of railroads and communications spreads throughout the countryside.

00:37:27 Speaker_05
It was arguably the worst French defeat since the Napoleonic era. Not long afterward, more Chinese and Soviet support began making its way into Vietnam.

00:37:39 Speaker_05
But while a well-organized communist army fought for independence in Vietnam, a more diverse array of forces challenged the French in Cambodia.

00:37:54 Speaker_05
While the Viet Minh did battle against France, Cambodia's King Sihanouk signed an agreement formalizing French control over his foreign policy.

00:38:04 Speaker_05
No one is more desirous of complete independence than I, Sihanouk said, but we must look facts in the face. We are too poor to support or defend ourselves. We are dependent on some major power to give us technicians and troops.

00:38:21 Speaker_06
But whatever Sihanouk said, Cambodia was noticeably chafing under French rule in the late 1940s. The Khmer Isarak, nationalist brigades, executed raids on French officials and their Cambodian subordinates.

00:38:36 Speaker_06
More nationalists, like Son Nhoc Tan, now supported by Thailand, had returned to the country from exile, making noise about overthrowing France.

00:38:46 Speaker_06
With his finger to the wind, Sihanouk negotiated control of his foreign and defense ministries back from France. As mass protests broke out across Cambodia in 1952, Sihanouk sided with the demonstrators and lambasted French colonialism.

00:39:04 Speaker_06
At the same time, he dissolved his national legislature. This was Sihanouk's balancing act at the dawn of the Cold War. Fight off his domestic rivals while co-opting the popular cause for national independence. We go now to Paris.

00:39:28 Speaker_06
In 1949, Khang Van Sac, one of the most prominent Cambodian expats living in Paris, was asked a favor by a friend. Could he help a fellow Khmer transplant find a place to stay? The young man's name was Salath Sar.

00:39:47 Speaker_06
Reserved and quiet, Sar was soon joined by fellow Khmer comrades such as Yang Seri and Hu Sen. All these young students would later become key leaders in the Khmer Rouge. But for now, they were merely students.

00:40:06 Speaker_06
Journalist Philip Short provides a portrait.

00:40:10 Speaker_06
The young Cambodians climbed the Eiffel Tower and marveled at the ancient stonework of Notre Dame in the Ile de la Cité, at the broad, tree-lined boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann in the 1890s, with their elegant boutiques, classical facades, and polished Belle Époque department stores.

00:40:31 Speaker_06
Into this romantic scenery, Khang Van Sac welcomed the young men. Salath Sar, Hussein, Yang Seri, and others joined the Khmer Students' Association. They embedded themselves into the Marxist discussion groups of the French Communist Party.

00:40:50 Speaker_06
But they also sang the praises of the nationalists back home, like Son Nhac Tan.

00:40:56 Speaker_06
Quote, it was in Paris, not Moscow or Beijing, that in the early 1950s Salath Sarr and his companions laid down the ideological foundations on which the Khmer Rouge nightmare would be built.

00:41:17 Speaker_05
While Saar lived the bohemian life in Paris, the war between France and Vietnam had spilled over into Cambodia. This was the conflagration of several struggles, between Sihanouk and his domestic opposition, strikes by students in Phnom Penh,

00:41:35 Speaker_05
protests by the influential Buddhist monks who, Short writes, accused the government of complicity with the French, and, of course, the Viet Minh guerrillas attacking French positions inside of Cambodia.

00:41:48 Speaker_05
Quote, the bloodshed was not on remotely the same scale as in neighboring Vietnam, writes Short. But still, the casualties were mounting into the hundreds day by day.

00:42:00 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, internal communist politicking resulted in that Indo-Chinese Communist Party re-splitting back into three parties, one for Vietnam, one for Laos, and one for Cambodia. The Cambodian party did not identify as socialist.

00:42:17 Speaker_06
In a country that resembled the 18th century more than the 20th, this was not a choice branding, nor did the party control many cadres or much territory.

00:42:27 Speaker_06
By 1951, in fact, according to Byrne after reading Vietnamese intel obtained by the French, the Khmer spin-off party boasted 1,000 Khmer fighters and 3,000 Vietnamese fighters.

00:42:42 Speaker_06
Under the tutelage from the Vietnamese, the Khmers who did join up were instructed that their mission was to pressure Sihanouk to secede from French rule.

00:42:51 Speaker_06
How this was to be done was rather unclear, and everyone seemed to dance around the question of armed resistance.

00:43:00 Speaker_05
When Salazar himself returned to a chaotic Phnom Penh in 1953, he was equipped with an intellectual pedigree, an appreciation of the Stalinist and Maoist traditions, and most of all a vision to use socialist ideas to forge an independent Cambodia.

00:43:20 Speaker_06
The Cambodian fight, like the Vietnamese one next door, would soon reach a stalemate with the French. Royal Cambodian officers scored victories against the rebels throughout 1953 and 54.

00:43:34 Speaker_06
And King Sihanouk, displeased with an increasingly rambunctious opposition party, had implemented martial law. And to the east, France's war in Vietnam would soon end. But a new chapter was beginning for all of Indochina.

00:43:54 Speaker_11
As the war in Indochina mounts in intensity, the French plead for increased American aid and get it. In 1950, it comes to about a hundred million dollars. Four years later, it will be nearly four times that much.

00:44:07 Speaker_11
In all, the United States pours nearly $4 billion worth of military, financial, and economic assistance into Indochina in an effort to avoid a French and a free world defeat.

00:44:18 Speaker_05
Although the Americans had long shouldered the cost of France's Indochina War in the name of fighting communism, they doubled their efforts after the Korean War began in 1950 and Western arms and troops began flooding into the hemisphere.

00:44:34 Speaker_05
At the end of 1953, America's aid made up between 70 and 80% of France's budget for its war in Vietnam, a dramatic increase from the war's early years. But there was little to show for it.

00:44:50 Speaker_05
In 1954, having swapped out general after general, France's effort was now on its last legs.

00:44:59 Speaker_06
But General Zapp and the Viet Minh were under their own pressures. They sought to deal the French a decisive loss before the rainy season came. And as Zapp notes in his memoirs, quote, the enemy's forces far outnumbered ours by almost 200,000 troops.

00:45:16 Speaker_06
and they were being directly supported by the CIA. But he reports that in late 1953, communist China's intelligence provided the Viet Minh with actual plans of the French general Henri Navarre.

00:45:31 Speaker_06
Quote, Navarre's first actions proved he was not only an energetic and daring commander in chief, writes Zapp, but also that he was too self-confident. Case in point,

00:45:43 Speaker_06
Navarre's decision to go ahead with a French occupation of the village Dien Bien Phu.

00:45:49 Speaker_11
The stage is set for a showdown. It comes when the French launch an airborne attack against an obscure northern village named Dien Bien Phu. Its chief military asset is an airstrip built by the Japanese in World War II.

00:46:03 Speaker_06
Despite guidance from Paris to instead hit the Viet Minh square on, General Navarre pressed ahead with this plan. In November 1953, battalions of soldiers parachuted in to Dien Bien Phu.

00:46:18 Speaker_05
General Zapp and his men were shocked by their good fortune. Quote, we longed to have the enemy remain at Dien Bien Phu, he writes. They had been hoping for just this kind of concentration of troops to attack.

00:46:33 Speaker_11
To French military commanders who cling to their concept of defensive forts, the N'Bien Phu will become the greatest fort of all. 3,000 tons of barbed wire are strung, triple the normal quota for such a defensive position.

00:46:47 Speaker_11
Units are provided with nine days of rations, eight days of ammunition, and such special aids to modern warfare as flamethrowers and nighttime infrared sights called sniper scopes.

00:46:58 Speaker_06
Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, whom we previously encountered on this program in Korea, reported on Deng Bianfu at Ho Chi Minh's side.

00:47:08 Speaker_06
Quote, the countryside, so quiet and passive, especially as seen from the air, in daytime, boiled with activity at night.

00:47:17 Speaker_06
From trucks to oxcarts, bicycles and human backs, every imaginable form of transport hauled supplies through the jungle and up and down the steep mountains.

00:47:29 Speaker_11
The bulk of Viet Minh supplies now comes from Communist China. They're carried across the border 200 miles northeast by a force of 75,000 coolies.

00:47:39 Speaker_05
Vietnam's siege against the French dragged into 1954. By April, anxieties in the Pentagon ran high. Eisenhower was presented with plans to use tactical nuclear weapons on Viet Minh positions.

00:47:56 Speaker_05
But Eisenhower, according to the meeting minutes, demurred on a U.S. escalation. He had come to power wrapping up the Korean War. He wasn't exactly eager to roll the nuclear dice again.

00:48:10 Speaker_11
The app surrounds the French with four divisions. March 13th, 1954. The French are surprised, psychologically and physically stunned. The French planes drop napalm bombs, liquid fires. The French artillery commander is driven to suicide.

00:48:40 Speaker_05
On May 7th, the French commander on the ground surrendered to the Vietnamese. This win at Dien Bien Phu could not have been better timed. It placed the Vietnamese in a much stronger position ahead of the negotiations scheduled for Switzerland.

00:48:59 Speaker_05
The victory, Zapp says, quote, was a bomb dropped onto the head of the French government before the opening day of the conference in Geneva.

00:49:10 Speaker_13
It was the end of the garrison. It was the end of the French adventure in Indochina. It was indeed the end of the French Empire.

00:49:27 Speaker_06
The Geneva Conference of 1954 would set the table in Indochina for the rest of the 20th century.

00:49:35 Speaker_06
It was not only a resolution of the French war against Vietnam, not only a passing of the torch from France to the United States, and not only a standoff between the Western powers and an anti-colonial revolution, it was also the beginning of a long and tortured tale for Cambodia.

00:49:59 Speaker_03
The 83rd Congress reconvenes with Vice President Nixon swearing in two new senators. The next day, representatives and senators meet in joint session to hear President Eisenhower deliver his State of the Union message.

00:50:11 Speaker_10
So long as action and aspiration, humbly and earnestly, seek favor in the sight of the Almighty, there is no end to America's forward road.

00:50:22 Speaker_05
In 1952, Sihanouk visited Washington and met with the Secretary of State and High Priest of the Cold War, John Foster Dulles.

00:50:32 Speaker_05
Quote, Sihanouk felt both snubbed and rebuked by Dulles, writes Shawcross, who lectured Sihanouk that French protection was essential if Cambodia was to be saved from the communists.

00:50:45 Speaker_05
Dulles could not accept Sihanouk's contention that French control was what was feeding the Communists' basic support.

00:50:54 Speaker_06
King Sihanouk had no love for the communists in his own country. In fact, as we will see, he was exceedingly good at imprisoning them. But he was floored by Dulles' strong-arm tactics.

00:51:06 Speaker_06
The king became far more partial to the Soviet bloc and the People's Republic of China, who treated him and his country's borders with greater respect. In a flourish that would come to define the U.S.

00:51:18 Speaker_06
attitude, Dulles's boss, Ike Eisenhower, stated the American point of view on Indochina in a press conference just before the negotiations in Geneva.

00:51:29 Speaker_06
The president laid out what would become the infamous domino theory regarding communism in Southeast Asia.

00:51:37 Speaker_05
You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

00:51:52 Speaker_06
Eisenhower listed the valuable resources, tin, tungsten, rubber, embedded in the region, not to mention the millions of people. So, the president concluded, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world, end quote.

00:52:11 Speaker_06
It was in this atmosphere that in April 1954, representatives from the US, Britain, China, the USSR, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos strode into the imposing Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

00:52:32 Speaker_04
Again, Geneva plays its part in the world's constant endeavours for peace. Nineteen delegations from both sides of the Iron Curtain attend a conference on the many Far Eastern problems. Mr. Chao Enlai, Prime Minister of China, arrives.

00:52:45 Speaker_04
Next is Mr. John Foster Dulles, America's Secretary of State. Mr. Molotov, Russia's Foreign Minister, and Mr. Gromyko enter the Palais des Nations. Now, Monsieur Bideau, the French Foreign Minister who will press for Anglo-American help in Indochina.

00:53:03 Speaker_04
Mr. Anthony Eden, whose memory must surely harken back to the days before the war, when he figured so prominently in the same building when it housed the ill-fated League of Nations.

00:53:12 Speaker_04
So violently do East and West seem opposed on such matters as the future of Korea and, of course, Indochina, that it'll take great patience and wisdom from all if satisfactory solutions are to be found.

00:53:27 Speaker_05
The first thing on the Geneva agenda was in fact the issue of post-war Korea.

00:53:33 Speaker_05
If listeners recall season three of this show, that war ended in a stalemate between a devastated industrial north, with its rather popular communist government, and the agrarian south, with its rather unpopular government, propped up by the United States.

00:53:48 Speaker_05
The loose ends of the Korean War, where Americans and Chinese had fought each other directly, deeply influenced the negotiations over Indochina. When meeting Zhou Enlai, the premier of Communist China, John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand.

00:54:06 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, North Vietnam's delegate to Geneva, Pham Van Dong, arrived with clear and bold demands, listed here by Michael Lawrence.

00:54:16 Speaker_06
Quote, international recognition of the independence and unity of all three Indochinese states, withdrawal of foreign troops, and locally supervised elections for new governments.

00:54:29 Speaker_06
He also insisted that Laotian and Cambodian communists be seated as official participants in the Geneva meetings.

00:54:37 Speaker_05
Ultimately, though, the Vietnamese and their communist supporters in Moscow and Beijing were open to compromise.

00:54:45 Speaker_05
The Vietnamese, writes Becker, quote, faced strong Chinese and milder Soviet advice, as well as the American threat, and agreed to give up southern Vietnam and Cambodia in exchange for North Vietnam and the part of Laos that borders it.

00:55:01 Speaker_05
Vietnam itself, much like Korea a year earlier, would be temporarily cut in half along the 17th parallel.

00:55:10 Speaker_05
The two halves would be made whole, it was agreed, by nationwide elections in two years' time, for the communist Vietnamese who had already won the legitimacy of a real government. This was not perfect, but it was enough for now.

00:55:33 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, King Sihanouk was finagling his own arrangement out of Geneva. Having played the French puppet for several years and having received many concessions from them for self-government, the king now saw an opportunity to win.

00:55:48 Speaker_06
In the first of many legendary acts of canny dealings, Sihanouk maneuvered his way into becoming the leader who, quote-unquote, won Cambodia's independence.

00:56:01 Speaker_05
Geneva was a massive victory for the king, but it was also the founding defeat for the Cambodian communists. Quote, they were not even seated at Geneva, writes Becker, as were the Vietnamese and Lao communists.

00:56:15 Speaker_05
They had no territory to use as a staging base in their country. They lost the right to bear arms or to participate in the commission set up to study how they, the chief remaining resistance fighters in Cambodia, would be treated. End quote.

00:56:31 Speaker_05
The quiet bitterness that would drive the Cambodian communist movement can be traced to this moment. The men who would later become leaders of the Khmer Rouge were not at Geneva, young as they were.

00:56:43 Speaker_05
And so, in addition to feeling powerless, they felt betrayed. Becker states frankly, quote, their later, highly developed sense of xenophobia was not without foundation.

00:56:56 Speaker_06
But in fact, while the Vietnamese had attempted to negotiate for their fellow communists in Cambodia, they were blocked by the King of Cambodia.

00:57:06 Speaker_06
According to Philip Short, Hanoi and Beijing, quote, forcefully pressed the Khmer communist case for two regroupment zones, east and southwest of the Mekong. But Cambodia's Sihanouk refused to budge. Ultimately, Beijing and Hanoi shrugged it off.

00:57:23 Speaker_06
Cambodia was, after all, a small player, an afterthought. It had more or less served its purpose as a bargaining chip to achieve parity with the West at Geneva.

00:57:37 Speaker_04
In the Green and Bronze Conference Hall at Geneva, the last hours of the Indochina War were played out. Viet Minh delegates agreed the truth with Vietnam and French representatives.

00:57:46 Speaker_06
And so the Geneva Conference produced a split Vietnam, which had won an independent government in the north, but lost the rich and fertile south.

00:57:56 Speaker_06
In Laos, a traditional royal government received independence, though communists were awarded two provinces near the Vietnamese border. The Laotian communists were given all the rights denied to the Cambodian communists, notes Becker.

00:58:10 Speaker_06
But of all the Indochinese leaders, she writes, Sihanouk left Geneva the biggest winner. And he had done nearly nothing to fight French colonialism. The United States, for its part, flouted the deal. It refused to sign the Geneva Accords.

00:58:34 Speaker_05
Hanoi went to work setting up a government that, assured of its own popularity, expected to unify Vietnam within a few short years.

00:58:43 Speaker_05
But, writes Lawrence, quote, American determination to build a distinctly anti-communist state in southern Vietnam flew in the face of provisions for the reunification of the country.

00:58:55 Speaker_06
In Laos, the royal government stared down a nascent communist resistance, not to mention the much larger Viet Minh just over the border. For the next several years, many expected Laos, not Vietnam, to be the country that would spark wider conflict.

00:59:13 Speaker_05
And in Cambodia, as Sihanouk commenced parades celebrating independence, and of course the benevolent king who had achieved it, around a thousand Cambodian communist fighters smuggled themselves out of the country with the Vietnamese and headed north.

00:59:29 Speaker_05
Having been cut out at Geneva, about half of the Khmer communist movement would now be sheltered and trained by their Vietnamese comrades in Hanoi.

00:59:44 Speaker_06
Among those who remained in Cambodia was Salath Sar. He must have earned some degree of respect from the Vietnamese, writes Becker, for Sar was one of the 20 Cambodians selected for secret political work inside the country.

01:00:01 Speaker_06
As the Viet Minh exited Cambodia, Sar and his Khmer comrades plotted on foot from the north of the country all the way to Prey Vang in the southeast.

01:00:14 Speaker_05
In their political education classes with the Vietnamese, Short reports, the Cambodians had often heard that the three countries of Indochina needed one another, that each formed lips, tongue, and teeth.

01:00:30 Speaker_05
Now, Salazar was becoming quite the operator in the Cambodian underground. The question for him would become when to hold his tongue, and when to bear his teeth and bite.