Japan's March 1945 Coup in Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 102-103, 105-106:

SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON MARCH 9, 1945, A VISITOR ARRIVED AT the opulent Saigon offices of the French governor-general, Admiral Jean Decoux. It was Shunichi Matsumoto, Japan’s ambassador to Indochina, there ostensibly for the purpose of signing a previously worked-out agreement concerning rice supplies and French financial support for Japanese troops. As the signing ceremony ended, Matsumoto asked Decoux to linger for a private conversation. Matsumoto appeared nervous, the Frenchman later recalled, “something rare in an Asiatic.” It soon became clear why: Tokyo had ordered the ambassador to present an ultimatum, which required unconditional French acceptance no later than nine o’clock that same evening. The entire colonial administration, including army, navy, police, and banks, were to be placed under Japanese command.

For almost five years, Decoux had dreaded the arrival of this moment. Ever since he took office, in July 1940, his overriding objective had been to preserve French sovereignty over Indochina, at least in a nominal sense, so that after the armistice the colony could still be a jewel in the empire. Now Tokyo had issued a demand that, if agreed to, would abolish French colonial control over Indochina. Decoux played for time, but Matsumoto did not budge—the deadline was firm. The Frenchman consulted with several associates, and at 8:45 sent a letter via messenger urging a continuation of the discussions beyond the nine o’clock deadline. The letter carrier went to the wrong building, and it was not until 9:25 that he could at last present the letter to Matsumoto. By then, reports of fighting in Hanoi and Haiphong had already come in. Matsumoto scanned the document, declared, “This is doubtless a rejection,” and ordered the Japanese military machine into action.

It was a carefully planned campaign, code-named Operation Bright Moon. Ever since October 1944, when U.S. forces began their reconquest of the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Military Command had feared that the Allies would use the islands to invade Indochina in order to cut off Japan from her forces in Southeast Asia. And indeed, South East Asia Command (SEAC), based in Kandy, Ceylon, under British admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, viewed Indochina as an increasingly important theater of operations. Bombers of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Major General Claire L. Chennault operating from South China regularly attacked Japanese targets in Vietnam, sometimes ranging as far south as Saigon to hit ports and rail centers. To add to Tokyo’s concerns, French resistance inside Indochina appeared to be growing, and the Decoux regime seemed clearly to be switching its allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle’s Free France. The concerns grew in January 1945, when American forces attacked Luzon in the Philippines. In conjunction with this attack, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, launched a brief but devastating naval raid along the Indochina coast between Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, in order to deflect Japanese attention from Admiral Nimitz’s advance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese Thirty-eighth Army responded with a major reinforcement of garrisons in Indochina, especially in Tonkin, Annam, and Laos.

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Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance. It’s also clear that their task was made easier by the chronic inability of French Resistance forces to keep their activities and plans secret. Many colons openly expressed their support for the Resistance, and French soldiers collected arms dropped in the countryside and deposited them in arsenals in full view of the Japanese. Portraits of de Gaulle even hung in the public offices of the French High Command. On top of all that, the Japanese had cracked the French codes and were reading all the French ciphers. Their surveillance of French activities was child’s play, and on the evening of March 9 they had their troops ready in strategic positions to negate the anticipated French moves.

Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell. Almost without exception, the senior French commanders were captured in their homes or in those of Japanese officers with whom they were dining (the meal invitations being part of the ruse). In Saigon, Japanese forces moved immediately on Decoux’s palace and seized him as well as several other high-ranking French ministers. Throughout Indochina, they took over administrative buildings and public utilities and seized radio stations, banks, and industries. Public beatings and executions of colonial officials occurred in numerous locales, and there were widespread reports of French women being raped by Japanese soldiers—including in Bac Giang province, where the province résident’s wife was gang-raped.