Chapter 3 A Thai Brak ( 1940-45 )

 Chapter 3 A Thai Brak ( 1940-45 )

The sad state of Vietnamese revolutionary activities in Siam improved during World War II, thanks to regional and international changes and above all because of new Siamese policies towards the Vietnamese. Emboldened by the German defeat of France in mid-1940 and Japan’s simultaneous expansion into Southeast Asia, Siamese leaders dusted off their plans to recover Indochinese territories ‘lost’ to the French at the turn of the century. Although Japan was the crucial backer for the Siamese in their bid to break up western Indochina, what is less known is how the weakening of France in 1940 allowed Siamese leaders to bring their clandestine relationship with Vietnamese anticolonialists into the open (see Chapter 1). From 1940 Siamese leaders of all political persuasions began to adopt a remarkably sympathetic view of the Vietnamese anticolonial movement, communist or not. This first occurred when Phibun Songkhram sought the support of the Vietnamese in his brief war against the French in western Indochina in 1940–41. To this end, his government reversed its previous hard line by relaxing immigration requirements, freeing ICP militants from jails, and supporting certain Vietnamese militants who would later lend their services to the Viet Minh.

Phibun was not alone. His counterpart, Pridi Phanomyang, lent Vietnamese anti-colonialists a helping hand as the Pacific War came to a sudden end in August 1945. Working clandestinely with the Allies against the Japanese, Pridi’s partisans secretly entered into contact with local Vietnamese communists before the Japanese capitulated. While cooperation between the two sides against the Japanese was very limited, the contacts established at the end of the war carried into the postwar period and help to explain the subsequent expansion of a wide range of Vietnamese activities in Siam after World War II (see Chapters 4 and 5).

Let us begin with Phibun Songkhram’s volfe face on Vietnamese immigration at the outset of the Pacific War to understand how a changing Siamese view of the region would facilitate the rebuilding of the ICP’s operations in Siam by the end of the same war.

THAILAND, JAPAN AND THE ‘LOST TERRITORIES’

Since the turn of the century, Siam had downplayed its claims to territories in western Laos and Cambodia in favour of maintaining amicable relations with the militarily stronger European powers (see Chapter 1). This policy of détente allowed Siamese leaders to safeguard their independence and to embark upon wide-ranging modernisation programmes. This did not, however, mean that Siamese leaders were oblivious to what was going on in Vietnam’s anti-colonial circles – on the contrary. In 1930, for example, the Minister of the Interior. Prince Boriphath, reported to the Cabinet that the French had requested the immediate extradition of the Vietnamese communists arrested in Phichit in mid-1930 (see Chapter 2). The Prince noted that a few months earlier the local press had criticised the government vigorously for having handed over two Vietnamese to the French (a clear reference to Vo Tung and Dang Canh Tan). Boriphat felt the Phichit detainees were not, for the most part, communists but rather simple ‘undesirables’. The Prince forwarded petitions and letters from these Vietnamese, who called for support from their Siamese ‘brothers’ and accused the French of painting all Vietnamese in Thailand in red. Another Vietnamese author wrote a petition to the Siamese King. In it, he invoked principles of Buddhist compassion and called for clemency for the arrested. The writer assured the Siamese King that the Vietnamese in Siam ‘had never sought to compromise the security of [his] kingdom’.

Although the question of the Phichit detainees could have been left at that, the King turned the matter over to his Cabinet and Prince Damrong, who, in turn, referred it to the Supreme Council of State. Damrong argued that these Vietnamese seeking the independence of their country should not be deported, although they could not be allowed to cause problems between Siam and France. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Devawongse, then drafted an internal position paper on the matter. The Prince rejected the French claim that they were all communists, saying that it was ‘clear from the evidence that their chief purpose is to establish [the] independence of their country’. The Minister of Foreign Affairs then continued with a paragraph which captured nicely the double Siamese view of the Vietnamese during the colonial period:

Obviously, the recent movement in certain Eastern countries to regain their independence presents a difficult problem for His Majesty’s government. It is but natural that such a movement should find a certain amount of sympathy amongst the people in this country. On the other hand, it is the sincere desire of His Majesty’s Government to preserve its relations of friendship and comity which happily exist between itself and all European Powers. The course which His Majesty’s Government should pursue is clearly marked. It cannot be expected that it would give aid and help to the European Powers in putting down insurrections or movements aimed at independence. On the other hand, it does not intend to give aid or encouragement to such movements.

At least not yet. Having travelled to Indochina in July 1930 to meet with the French on security and immigration matters,3 King Prajadhipok knew that the French would not have appreciated such an ambiguous view of the Vietnamese independence movement. He crossed out the entire paragraph. But in a show of Siam’s independence, the King refused to extradite these Vietnamese to the French. A bureaucratic ‘misunderstanding’ allowed most of the Phichit prisoners to walk free in southern China. The French were enraged. Siamese diplomats explained that an investigation had shown that ‘these Annamites were not genuine communists engaged in a plan of overturning a capitalist government and the establishment of a Soviet or a communist government. Some of them, of course, were, but that was not the point.

The King’s nationalist showing on this Vietnamese extradition affair was not an accident. Sectors of a fiercely nationalist press had, in fact, severely criticised the government following the extradition of Dang Canh Tan and Vo Tung. As for the Phichit detainees, a Thai Noum editorial argued bluntly that these Vietnamese were ‘political’ refugees, and the Siamese government was thus not legally bound by international law to turn them over to the French. To heed French demands blindly was to compromise Siam’s independence.

More concrete forms of Siamese nationalism and concomitant sympathy for regional neighbours opposed to the French began to surface as the Japanese expanded their military presence throughout the region. Japanese promises of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ and an ‘Asiatic League’ were particularly encouraging for young Siamese nationalists, unhappy with their still inequitable relationship with the European powers. Praiyun Phamonmontri, a statesman who studied with Phibun and Pridi in Europe during the 1920s, wrote in his memoirs later that discussions among young Siamese leaders in France during the 1920s focused both on ways whereby the Siamese system of government could be changed and on how the territories lost to France in Indochina at the turn of the century could be recovered.

Soon after the 1932 change of government, Siam’s new leaders began increasing their military preparedness with an eye on regaining the Indochinese territories. In 1934, Prince Purachot reported that Siamese leaders had actually made secret military plans by which the territories would be retaken. A year later, Bangkok’s Minister to Paris drew strong criticism from the French, when he referred to the ‘lost’ Loei Lao and Cambodian provinces as ‘the Siamese Alsace-Lorraine’. Mistrust grew in 1936 when the Siamese Ministry of Defence published a national map showing western Indochinese provinces ceded in treaties as a part of Siam. Despite French and British protests, this map was circulated widely among the military and in many schools.

Meanwhile Wichit Hakwatkan, who was a close associate of Phibun and the Director of the Siamese Fine Arts Department, put his cultural and historical expertise behind the irredentist movement by publishing a number of popular plays and articles extolling the common heritage and racial affinity of the Thai, Lao and Khmer. Wichit’s publications and Cabinet advice went a long way to linking the recovery of the ‘lost territories’ in Indochina to what was effectively a full-blown nationalist revolution. During a trip to Hanoi in May 1939, Wichit was overcome with joy, when he learned from colonial maps he consulted at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient that large ‘Thai’ populations lived in Indochina, southern China, Burma, and as far away as Assam. On returning to Bangkok, he used this ‘knowledge’ as evidence to support his case for a change in the name of the country from ‘Siam’ (Pratheh Siam) to ‘Thailand’. (Prabhet Thai). In doing so, Wichit sought to back with maps and ethnographic data the idea of a ‘Greater Thai Dominion’ (Maha Anacak Thai), a concept that was designed to link together all the ethnically ‘Thai’ peoples under Bangkok’s leadership. In 1934 Phibun announced that ‘Siam’ would henceforth be called ‘Thailand’, a term that I shall use from this point in my text.

None of this bode well for the French, who were worried about holding on to western Indochina. Alarmed by the growing irredentist movement symbolised by this change in name in 1939 and the increasing likelihood of war in Europe, authorities in Indochina proposed the signing of a mutual non-aggression pact. In accepting the offer, Phibun informed French officials that the Thais wished to negotiate a revision of France’s claim to territories on both sides of the Mekong River. A Franco–Thai Non-Aggression Pact was signed on 12 June 1940. The Thais claimed there was an oral understanding providing for follow-up talks on the need to re-establish the Mekong River as the border between French Laos and Thailand, thereby allowing the Thais to acquire Luang Prabang and Paksé. This was to be discussed by the time the non-aggression pact was ratified. However, on 20 June France fell to Germany. Determined to hold on to its colonial possessions thanks to its European alliance with Germany, France’s newly formed Vichy government took a much less flexible line towards Thailand.

This hardening French position came as Japan loomed on Indochina’s northern border. Phibun, who had staked much of his political future on the success of returning parts of western Indochina to Thailand, feared that unless progress were made soon, Indochina would fall to the Japanese before he had time to stake a claim to anything. Vichy’s collaboration with Germany, the latter now allied with the Japanese against the Allies, must have also dimmed Phibun’s territorial optimism. In early August he informed the Japanese that the Thais were considering the need to take advantage of Japanese pressure on the French in Indochina in order to further the aims of Thai irredentism. As Japanese military forces moved into Indochina a few months later, Phibun informed Tokio that he had decided to rely on Japan. In exchange for Japanese assistance in recovering Indochinese territories, Phibun said that Thailand would allow Japanese troops to cross Thai territory if necessary.

At the end of September 1940 the Thai press rallied to Phibun’s cause, calling for the immediate return of Laotian and Cambodian territories ceded to the French. By the end of the year a mini-war was building between the French and the Thais. Outwardly confident of Japan’s sympathy for their territorial designs, on 16 January 1941 the Thais launched a ground attack on French forces in Cambodia. Although this strike was largely successful, with the Thai army pushing 25 miles into Cambodia, the French struck back with a surprise attack on the Thai Navy, dealing Bangkok a massive defeat in the Gulf of Thailand.

In the end it was the Japanese who decided the outcome of the Franco–Thai dispute. What mattered most to them was their larger military operations in the Pacific, not the validity of Decoux or Phibun’s nationalist claims to Indochina. Most of all the Japanese were keen on resolving the Franco–Thai dispute as quickly as possible. Following the Thai naval defeat, the Japanese informed the latter that they would pressure the French to halt the fighting in exchange for an ‘understanding with the Thai regarding a Japan–Thai pact’. On 11 March, after weeks of intense negotiations, an agreement was signed under Japanese auspices in Tokyo. According to this agreement, France was obligated to return to Thailand all territories lost under the 1904 Treaty (territories west of the Mekong), but the provinces of Battambang, Siemreap and Sisophon up to the Tonle Sap, but not the town of Siemreap or Angkor Wat. While the French conceded that the deep-water channel would form the riverine border, the Thais, under Japanese pressure, had to demilitarise all areas turned over to them. This would have important implications for Vietnamese activities there in the post-war period. Parts of Sayaboury and Champassak on the right bank of the Mekong also reverted to Bangkok’s control. But the Thais found the Japanese deaf to their wider claims on Laos and Cambodia.

By relying on Japan in the Franco–Thai dispute, however, Phibun soon found himself under increasing pressure to align Thailand with Japan as the Pacific War drew nearer. In November, Phibun’s attempts to keep his country neutral became increasingly difficult as the Japanese prepared to move against British colonies in Malaya, Burma and the strategically important island of Singapore. On 28 November Phibun told his Cabinet that in the event were to break out between Japan and the Allies, Thailand should join Japan, for Thailand would regain more territory in Indochina and would suffer less if the Japanese were victorious. In the wake of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Thai troops were ordered not to resist as Japanese troops occupied most of mainland Southeast Asia. A Japanese–Thai pact was signed in Bangkok on 21 December. Four days later Thailand declared war on both the United States and Great Britain.

THAI NATIONALISM AND PHIBUN’S PRO-VIETNAMESE FOREIGN POLICY

But if the history of Thailand’s relations with Japan during World War II is well documented, less is known about Phibun’s secret relationship with the Vietnamese anticolonial movement. This change in policy occurred when Phibun began soliciting the support of the ‘Indochinese peoples’ in his war against the French over western Indochina in mid-1940. Given that the Vietnamese were the most populous of these Indochinese peoples, Phibun hoped to draw upon their shared antipathy to French colonialism to help him retake western Indochinese territories.

Already in the mid-1930s there were clear signs that Phibun and his advisers had begun revising Bangkok’s ancient immigration policy towards the Vietnamese with these ideas in mind. In June 1937, for example, the Minister of the Interior, Thamrong Navasawat, wrote to Phibun, then Minister of Defence, that the government had begun a ‘new’ policy towards Vietnamese, Lao and Khmers wanting to immigrate to Thailand. Border officials received instructions from the Ministry of the Interior ordering them ‘not to interfere with their entry or request papers’. In fact, Vietnamese circulation across the border was to be not impeded but encouraged. Thamrong informed Phibun that ‘the authorities have also been told to offer their assistance where available, without appearing too obvious or guaranteeing anything’. Of course, the French did not remain idle. In August 1937 the Thai consulate in Indochina reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the French resident at Battambang had told local officials to offer a five-year tax moratorium to returning Vietnamese. In November, Phibun sent a letter to the Prime Minister, Phya Phahon, informing him that border authorities had reported an increase in the number of Vietnamese crossing into Thai frontier areas during the last two to three years. According to these reports, the Vietnamese and other groups were seeking refuge in Thailand in order to escape ‘high taxes’ and the ‘repressive’ French government in Indochina. Perhaps. But Phibun also noted that the increase in the number of Vietnamese along the border was good for Thailand, for it would ‘increase our border population’ opposite French Indochina. In the provisional days, this would be an effective way of increasing Bangkok’s hold on these peripheral regions. Phibun concluded his memo by recommending that because the French were trying to encourage their [Indochinese refugees] return, we should encourage more to come [to Thailand]. He countered with his own tax amnesty for refugees choosing the Thai side.

As Franco–Thai border skirmishes mounted towards the end of 1940, a large number of Indochinese refugees began to cross into northeast Thailand. Responding to this influx, on 20 December the Ministry of the Interior sent circulars to border officials in northeast Thailand concerning the government’s decision to relax further immigration laws on Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese émigrés. This change was made, the Ministry said, ‘in order to be in consonance with the Government’s policy in its justifiable request for territorial concessions from French Indochina’.^

According to Article II, a special concession in regard to alien registration fee is granted to the Annamites. This is because the Annamites are a race inhabiting the Golden Peninsula, just like the Thai nation. In former days Annam was an independent country in the Golden Peninsula. Later on, she lost her independence unjustly and became a French colony. The Ministry of the Interior considers the Annamites to be inhabitants of a former independent country, so, from now on, in the census or in any dealings with them, the authorities shall treat the Annamite race and nationality and as Annamite subjects [and not French].

On 29 December the Thai Broadcasting Station issued an official communiqué reiterating Bangkok’s recognition of a future independent Vietnam, free of the French:

We would like to see the entire Annamite people getting back their independence soon. Now in Thailand we regard the Annamites as independent people in every way. We no longer regard them as French subjects with French nationality. We treat them as Annamite subjects with Annamite nationality.

Such statements were unprecedented in Thai–Vietnamese relations to this point. Not only did these juridical amendments make it easier for Vietnamese émigrés to cross into Thailand, but they also brought Prince Devawongse’s recognition of the Vietnamese independence movement in 1930 into the open.25 In exchange for these concessions, however, Bangkok hoped to maintain the support of the large Vietnamese communities in the fight against the French. As the Ministry of the Interior put it, changes in immigration laws had been made 

so that they [the Vietnamese] may fully understand that the Thai Government sympathizes with them ... and that they should return the good wishes by cooperating with the Thai Government in every way. But the most important point is that they shall in no way perform any action that may benefit the French and be detrimental or dangerous to Thailand.

By early 1941 some 13,000 ‘Indochinese’ refugees were reported to have arrived in Thailand.27 While this figure is certainly exaggerated, the Thai government dispatched the head of the Department of Indochina Affairs to northeast Thailand and urged Thai citizens to help their ‘brethren’ by contributing to a special ‘refugee fund’. Some of the main contributors were high-level members of the Ministry of Defence, including Police General Adun Decharat, Colonel Luang Chaweksang, Phya Sundon Phipith, Colonel Phra Ramnarong, and even Prince Sakon Worawan [Voravan].

Meanwhile, Phibun’s government began recruiting disenchanted Vietnamese soldiers in the French colonial army. This work was facilitated by the fact that the French policy of forcibly conscripting Vietnamese soldiers to man the Thai–Cambodian front throughout 1940 was unpopular among the Vietnamese who dominated the Garde Indigène. In November, for example, Vietnamese soldiers in Saigon opposed a French order sending them to the front. The Thais, who had a Consul in Saigon, were no doubt aware of such protests. In October Phibun told Crosby that he was sure that the ‘revolt of the native population in Indochina was imminent’, citing an unspecified revolt of 250 Vietnamese troops in Indochina.

To foster defections, the Thais began airing anti-French radio propaganda in Vietnamese. It seems that one of the first significant defections came in late October when an unspecified number of Vietnamese colonial soldiers (probably numbering from 50 to 75) entered Thailand. In November more Vietnamese troops were reported to have arrived in Thailand from Vietnamese with a ‘large quantity of arms and ammunition’. Thai military officials organised special trains to transport them back to Bangsue, a major military base located just outside Bangkok, to which we shall return in Chapter 5. In December 1940, some 50 Vietnamese soldiers, including two officers, were interned in Udon Thani. Thai authorities gave them new uniforms and told them to learn Thai fast.

One Vietnamese officer to defect to the Thais during this period was Vu Huu Binh, a former warrant officer in the Garde Indigène in Vietnamese and an individual who would play an important role in postwar base building in Thailand and Cambodia. Fluent in Lao and Thai, he defected to Thailand where he served as an officer in the Royal Thai Army (RTA). Because of his service in western Indochina, he was familiar with French operations and no doubt provided the RTA with intelligence. In the early 1940s Binh made connections with senior Thai military leaders, including Field Marshal Phin Chunhwan, an important Thai military leader who would later aid the Viet Minh. Binh’s contacts eventually transformed him into a bridge between Thai authorities and the Vietnamese communities in upper northeast Thailand. One Vietnamese cadre who worked in Thailand after World War II indicated that Binh’s anti-French views and fluency in Thai attracted the personal attention of Phibun Songkhram, who met Binh some time in the early 1940s (probably in late 1940). French intelligence concurred, stating that ‘Vu Huu Binh … is an old friend of Phibun from the time of the 1940 campaign against the French in Indochina.’ Although Binh was alleged to not be a communist in 1940, it is possible that he may have been an undercover member, given his subsequent entry into very high-level ICP cadre organisations (see Chapters 7 and 8). This might also explain why he was able to work with surviving Vietnamese communist militants in the northeast in the early 1940s.

In any case, between 1942 and 1944 Thai authorities softened their line towards Vietnamese political activists. In fact, Thai authorities freed a large number of those Vietnamese communists, whom they had imprisoned at the Ban Khwang jail in the early 1930s, including veteran communist leaders such as Nguyen Chan (Tran To Chan) and Ba Quynh Anh. Chan, who had long worked among the émigré communities prior to the war, immediately resumed his work in northeast Thailand, revamping Vietnamese organisations destroyed during the 1930s. The Thais also gave Vietnamese activities in Thailand an added boost, when they arrested and held without bail Do Hung, the redoubtable Vietnamese intelligence officer whom we met at the French Legation in Bangkok in 1930 (see Chapters 1 and 2). He had provided the Sûreté with the information leading to the arrests of several key ICP members in Thailand. On 14 March 1941, as Franco–Thai relations took a turn for the worse, Do Hung was sentenced to death on charges of spying. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment upon a plea of guilty. He remained in Ban Khwang until 1944.

Meanwhile Thai newspapers stepped up their support of the Indochinese people’s claims to independence, making virulent attacks on French colonial rule and promising Thai support for those fighting the ‘colonialists’. New words were used in print. Phrases such as ‘oppressed’, ‘enslaved’ and ‘the yoke of slavery’ were splashed across front pages to describe French colonialism. In line with the accelerating irredentist movement, it was reported that the ‘summons’ from Thailand’s Indochinese ‘brethren’ fighting the French was likely to come at any time.

 It came in late 1940, when Phibun announced a new policy towards the Vietnamese during a nationally broadcast speech on 21 October. He explained to his listeners that ‘[a]part from our Thai brethren, a tribute should be paid to our Asiatic brethren, namely, the Annamese, both inside and outside Thailand, who support the Thai Government in its readjustment of the border line, very sympathetically.’ Envisioning a postcolonial regional order not quite synonymous with the one existing before the creation of French Indochina, Phibun continued:

So when that time comes our Thai brethren in the Khmer regions, Laot and also the Annamese will be free and will be able to re-establish their countries anew, independently. And all our Thai brethren … will then be living together under the protection of our Constitution and under our Thai Government. As for the Annamese, when they have become independent, they will be ruled by their King as in the days gone by before the French came and destroyed their independence.

A front-page article in Prachamit informed the Thai public that they should no longer refer to their ‘Thai brothers’ fighting for independence from the French as ‘rebel groups’ (phuak kabot), because this term carried negative connotations and implied illegitimacy. Prachamit insisted that these militants be considered as ‘revolutionaries’ (phuak patiwat). The Thai Ministry of Defence announced that Vietnamese refugees coming into Thailand and were to be considered ‘Thai brethren from Annam’ (though it remains unclear what this meant juridically).

In late November 1940 this new Indochinese policy was symbolised nicely by the formation of an unprecedented ‘Department of Indochinese Affairs’ in the Thai Ministry of the Interior (but not, significantly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The sudden need for this office was made clear by the great haste with which the government rushed the Bill through the National Assembly on 21 November. There was little debate and it was accepted in principle unanimously on the very same day. In discussing it with members of the Assembly, a spokesman explained that one reason for the establishment of this Department would be to make a ‘study and investigation of administrative and other conditions in Indo[c]hina’. He said that the other reasons for the establishment of the Department ‘were well known to the members and … there was no need to mention them again’.46 One assumes Bangkok had preparations to win over the support of peoples in Indochina in mind.

On 5 January 1941 the Thai High Command announced that a Free Indochina Army (FIA) would soon be formed. According to official Thai Radio, numerous letters had been received by the Thai government from Vietnamese expressing ‘their desire to restore the independence of Vietnam and urging Thailand to organise such a force to aid the purpose’.47 On January 6, the  Governor of the northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani called a special meeting of Vietnamese representatives in the area. In a speech to this gathering, the Colonel announced that the the Thai government would help the Vietnamese via the creation of an independence army. Second, Bangkok would relax regulations on Vietnamese activities in and immigration to Thailand. Third, the Colonel explained that the “Thai government now trusts the Vietnamese and is happy to admit them into the army and police in order to conquer the French.” On January 15, Thai Radio announced that a “Free Indochina Army” had been successfully organised and was ready for action “in collaboration with the Thai Armed Forces” to regain Indochina’s independence. The Thai Ministry of Defence presided over the Free Indochina Army, both arming and training it. Its membership was comprised of Vietnamese (some of whom later joined the Viet Minh) and Cambodians, with no Laoian members. It went into battle with the Thai Army in early 1941.

This coincided with a Thai-fashioned political programme for Indochina. On 21 November Phibun created the Independent Indochina Party. It was officially designed to lend ‘active support and assistance in the campaign for the restoration of independence now carried out by the people at Lang-sorn [sic] in North Annam and at Saigon in South Annam’.49 By singling out the Vietnamese cities of Langson and Saigon as specific destinations for Thai aid, Bangkok leaders probably had the recent Vietnamese uprisings in these two locations in mind and sought to win over increased Vietnamese support by mentioning them. As we have seen, Thai leaders were certainly following events in Indochina closely, convinced that revolt was imminent. One of the tasks of the Independent Indochina Party was to ‘supply arms to soldiers and civilians in Indochina who may need them to fight for their cause’. The Thais had diplomatic representatives in Hanoi and Saigon.

The Thai creation of the Khmer Issarak was also part of this counter-Indochinese project. On 20 December Cambodians, under the leadership of the Thai-speaking Cambodian Phra Phiset Phanit (Pokhun), organised a Free Khmer Party (Phak Khmer Issarк) to oust the French from Indochina and to restore Cambodian independence. This movement was said to have had the support of ‘many well-known [Thai] personalities’. Phanit was a member of the Ahphaow family, which was one of the branches of the Cambodian monarchy. A few days later, a meeting was held in Bangkok during which Phanit was selected as the leader of the Free Khmer Party. According to Phanit, this organisation was established, funded and supervised by the Thais. Before concluding his inaugural address to the Khmer Issarak on 22 November, Phanit thanked the Thai government and the Premier for ‘the right to hold the meeting, the right to organise the Independent Khmer Party [Khmer Issarak] and in giving them every help in accordance with the policy in which H.E. the Premier [Phibun] firmly believed’.

No matter how limited his material aid to the Vietnamese most certainly was, Phanit’s new line towards the Vietnamese between 1940 and 1945 was"important for two other reasons. First, it reflected a renewed, favourable view of the Vietnamese in line with Thailand’s resurrected claims on western Indochina. Second, Phibun’s revision of immigration laws for the Vietnamese, his arrest of Do Hung, and support of Vietnamese independence aspirations laid the groundwork for a more serious Thai–Vietnamese postwar partnership that would last into the early 1950s. While he could not know at the time, Phibun had helped Vietnamese militants regain a hold on their ‘lost’ bases in northeast Thailand. In this context, we should be careful not to accept uncritically Cold War portrayals of Phibun as a fanatically anti-Vietnamese leader. 1940 was not 1950 …"

"THE ICP’S AMBIGUOUS POLICY TOWARDS THE THAIS

So, how did the ICP leadership view these favourable changes in Thai policy towards the Vietnamese? To answer that question, it is important to underscore that the Vietnamese communist leadership positioned along the Sino–Vietnamese border in 1940 had no links to its Thai-based operations until 1943 and did not establish direct control over the ICP’s prewar Mekong bases until mid-1945. Whatever Thai-based Vietnamese communists did prior to mid-1945 was largely based on local initiatives and what the latter thought the ICP leadership would want them to do."

We know from Chapter 2 that the Siamese commission had lost contact with the ICP’s Central Committee in 1938. During the late 1930s, the southern branch of the ICP, in collaboration with Trotskyist groups, had become the centre of gravity of the ICP leadership thanks in no small part to the more liberal policies of the Popular Front government. Picking up where the SCP had left off, the Laotian Territorial Committee (Xu Uy Ai Lao), now operating openly, kept the ICP Central Committee informed of Thai affairs. However, intra-regional liaisons deteriorated drastically following the failed uprising of southern communists in 1940–41. French repression almost completely destroyed the ICP’s headquarters in Cochinchina by 1941, while the brusque termination of the Popular Front had forced the Lao Territorial Committee underground. By 1941, the Party’s centre of gravity had shifted back to bases in southern China and the ‘Oversdas Directing Bureau’. Interestingly, the link between southern China and northeast Thailand remained in effect. According to a report by a ‘serious informant’ to the Sûreté in March 1941, Vietnamese communists had originally targeted both southern China and the ‘lost Cambodian’ provinces in Thailand as potential sites for their envisioned Party meeting. However, French repression of the southern ICP apparatus in 1940–41 must have reinforced the ICP’s shift back towards southern China. Moreover, the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and their opposition to both the CCP and the KMT made it all the more difficult for ICP locals in Thailand to contact the Central Committee via overseas Chinese networks, especially via Bangkok.

In southern China, due to the changed international situation caused by the World War and CCP and KMT’s decision to fight the Japanese together,Vietnamese revolutionaries once again found favourable conditions for rebuilding their bases along the Sino–Vietnamese border. Following a long stay in Moscow, Nguyen Ai Quoc returned to southern China in 1939 or 1940 to take up where he had left off in 1927. Thanks to Viet leaders like Ho Ho Lam in the KMT army (see Chapter 2), Quoc began work building a government in waiting along the northern Indochinese frontier. By early 1941, he moved his men into northern Vietnam. In February of that year, he returned to Vietnam and in May he presided over the creation of the Viet Minh, short for the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Minh Doc Lap Dong Minh). This national front was formed with the aim of attracting a wide range of supporters, regardless of class, in the fight against the Japanese and in the struggle for national independence. The earlier ICP stress on ‘class struggle’ and ‘proletarianism’ gave way to a policy emphasising broad-based cooperation and national unity.

Interestingly, not unlike Phibun’s and Wichit’s dream of a ‘Greater Thai Dominion’ (Maha Ahanack Thai), ICP leaders also had a postcolonial vision of the region which extended beyond Vietnam’s traditional precolonial borders. Upon the formation of the Viet Minh in 1941, Vietnamese communists simultaneously tried to establish parallel organisations in Cambodia and Laos via the Cambodian Independence League (Cao-mien Doc Lap Dong Minh) and the Lao Independence League (Ai-lao Doc Lap Dong Minh). Together with the Viet Minh, these three bodies would form a projected ‘Indochinese Independence League’ (Dong Duong Doc Lap Dong Minh).55 As Hoang Quoc Viet, a ranking Vietnamese communist at the time, remembered this Indochinese League in 1951:

Fully aware of the close ties between the three countries, the Viet Minh League right after its founding set for itself a task of establishing relations with the peoples of Laos and Cambodia to create an Indochinese National Independence League to oppose imperialist aggression.

"Nguyen Ai Quoc himself expressed unhappiness at the loss of territory to the Thais. In a June 1941 letter to the Vietnamese people, he criticised the French for deciding that they could ‘take our land’ (dat dai cua ta) and give parts of it to Thailand. He was referring to Laos and Cambodia.

While local leaders in northeast Thailand may have balked at the ICP’s hard line towards the Thai government given Phibun’s favourable immigration policies, they would no doubt have welcomed the Viet Minh’s more flexible line stressing national unity instead of international proletarian struggle.58 The problem, however, was that new of the Viet Minh and its political programme did not reach Vietnamese activists in northeast Thailand until 1943 at the earliest.59 Some time in this year, several Vietnamese cadres fled to Thailand from Quang Binh province to escape increased Japanese and French repression. They brought copies of the Viet Minh’s political programme with them. According to Le Manh Trinh, this was the first time surviving ICP cells in Thailand had obtained concrete information about the Viet Minh. News of it spread immediately.

Among the Viet kieu in Thailand, this resulted in the formation of ‘National Salvation Associations’ (Hoi Cuu Quoc), mass organisations that were designed to link groups of Vietnamese society – artisans, Buddhists, Catholics, students, workers, etc. – into the wider Viet Minh front. Of those formed in Thailand, the ‘Viet kieu National Salvation Association’ (Hoi Viet Kieu Cuu Quoc) was the most important and had the largest membership. ‘Within a few months’, Le Manh Trinh claims, this organisation was able to attract Vietnamese members from the long dormant Viet kien Thai Ai of the 1920s and 1930s, urging them to ‘Fight the French and Drive out the Japanese’."

"None the less, Trinh concedes that the ICP leadership in Thailand was still without direct links to the communist-run Viet Minh General Bureau (Tong Bo) recently created in northern Vietnam or southern China. Official communist historians confirm that the ICP in Thailand was only able to ‘establish contact’ with Viet Minh organisations in northern Vietnam in 1944.62 This may have been linked to directives from the Viet Minh headquarters singling out the importance of ‘linking closely with fellow Southeast Asian revolutions’ and organisations to create favourable conditions for a successful uprising for national independence.63 In late 1944, the Tong Bo sent a letter to its partisans in China and Thailand, explaining that events ‘were rapidly changing’ in the world and in Indochina. It was necessary to prepare for the upcoming revolution by unifying ‘forces abroad’ with the emerging struggle inside the country. The letter ended by asking delegates abroad to prepare to attend a national meeting in Vietnam.

More than anything else, it was the March 1945 Japanese coup that provided Vietnamese communists in Thailand with the favourable conditions needed to relink their Thai operations to the ICP’s Central Committee in Vietnam. On 9 March, the Japanese ousted the French in eastern Indochina, and quickly proceeded to do the same in Cambodia and Laos. For the first time since the late 19th century, Vietnamese anticolonialists could penetrate Indochina more easily by the western and northern flanks. Their efforts were given a major boost a few weeks later when the Thais closed the French Legation in Bangkok, and thereby shut down one of France’s most important bodies for monitoring the ICP’s Southeast Asian movements.

At the end of March, activists in Thailand secretly organised special revolutionary teams in preparation for increased activities along both sides of the Mekong. A group of Viet kieu youths formed a combat team called the ‘Vietnamese Independence Army’ (Viet Nam Doc Lap Quan). Supported by local Viet kieu, within the span of three months this rag-tag military force grew into a respectable paramilitary group, numbering 180 persons. It expanded its activities to include some military and political training. It published a Viet kieu newspaper and provided protection to cadres travelling in Indochina. This ‘Independence Army’ would later form the backbone of a larger Lao–Vietnamese combined military force after the Pacific War.66 Similar moves were made among the Viet kieu in southern China.

However, as long as the Japanese remained in power, the Viet Minh could still not move freely inside Indochina. In Laos, the Japanese accelerated their efforts to win over the support of local Vietnamese communities to the Japanese-backed Tran Trong Kim government. And not without success. Le Manh Trinh says that Vietnamese resistance leaders along the Mekong tried to counter this policy, but concedes that their efforts faded in comparison to the influence exerted by the pro-Japanese Dai Viet (Greater Vietnam) Party. Moreover, the ICP was not alone in rethinking a new set of independent, Indochinese relations. The Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian governments that came to life after the Japanese coup of 9 March 1945 made the first concrete efforts to establish formal diplomatic relations via their own Ministries of Foreign Affairs. If Son Ngoc Thanh, the new Prime Minister of Cambodia, recognised the importance of maintaining good relations with the Vietnamese as the tide of the Pacific War started to turn against the Japanese, he also reached out to Siam. In a desperate letter to Pridi Phanomyos dated 7 October, Thanh begged the Thai statesman to transmit to the United Nations Cambodia’s ardent desire to regain her independence.

“The Vietnamese had similar interests in linking Vietnam to Thailand. However, as of April 1945, Vietnamese communist leaders in Thailand had still been unable to establish ‘direct’ contact with the Viet Minh headquarters in northern Vietnam. Without instructions from the General Bureau, the leadership in Thailand was unsure how to respond to new and rapidly changing conditions. Guidelines defining Vietnamese cooperation with the ‘Seri Thai’ and the ‘Lao-pen-Lao’ was an area of particular uncertainty.

VIET MINH-SERI THAI COOPERATION

If Phibun Songkhram aligned Thailand with Japan during World War II, Pridi Phanomyoing developed secret contacts with the Allies in opposition to the Japanese. Pridi and a number of his close associates did this by organising an underground resistance movement. Directing affairs from his post as Regent, this group eventually developed into what became known as the Seri Thai, the 

widely known Thai coupling for the Free Thai Movement (Khabuan Kaan Seri Thai). Like the Viet Minh, the Seri Thai sought to attract a wide spectrum of Thai society and to be in a favourable position to take over from the Japanese once the latter had been defeated by the Allies.

The details of the Seri Thai have been covered elsewhere. What concerns us most here is that in order to build his movement, Pridi relied upon trusted colleagues in the northeast, often ethnic Lao such as Tiang Sirikhan and Thongin Phupirat. Pridi also commanded strong support within the Thai Navy, especially the collaboration of Admiral Sangwon. Like the Viet Minh in Tonkin, Seri Thai leaders in northeastern Thailand provided intelligence to Allied air operations on Japanese installations and troop movements. Thai guerrillas also played an important role in circulating Allied spies and hiding weapons parachuted into the region towards the end of the Pacific War.

As part of these underground activities, Pridi directed Seri Thai leaders to form secret ‘anti-Japanese resistance zones’ in northeast Thailand. To this end, Pridi contacted Nguyen Chan (Tran To Chan) to request Vietnamese assistance. Hoang Nhat Tan confirmed in an interview that the Vietnamese in Thailand ‘supported Pridi’ in the formation of these bases, known as chien khu (fighting zones) to them. Pridi helped the Vietnamese establish one in Na Kae, a small, northeastern Thai village, located south of Nakhon Phanom. Under the leadership of Vu Huu Binh, the Na Kae base consisted of 20–30 Vietnamese youths who made weapons. In September 1945, the Viet Minh’s official nationalist newspaper, Cuu Quoc, revealed in an article that during the ‘anti-Japanese resistance’ the overseas Vietnamese had supported the Siamese people competently in several guerrilla battles. This cooperation between the Viet Minh and the Seri Thai only lasted a few months before the end of the war. As Hoang Nhat Tan admitted, in the end it amounted to ‘very little’. To my knowledge, neither the Seri Thai nor the Viet Minh fought any battles against the Japanese before the latter capitulated.”

“Thanks to this Seri Thai support, though, local Vietnamese entered into contact with the newly formed Laotian nationalist organisation: the Lao-pen-Lao (Lao for the Lao) movement. This group had taken form within the Seri Thai some time in 1945. Anti-Japanese in outlook, its leaders hoped the Americans would help them form a ‘Greater Laos’, englobing all the ethnic Lao living not only in Laos, but throughout most of present-day northeastern Thailand. Important Laotian nationalists living on both sides of the Mekong led this group, such as Thao Oun Sananikone, Thongin Phupirath, Fong Sitthitam and Tiang Sirikhan. Like the Seri Thai, they had access to Allied arms being parachuted into northeast Thailand at this time (see Chapter 5).77

Towards the end of the war, the northeastern Seri Thai Committee, led by Chamlong Daoruang and Tiang Sirikhan, worked directly with Viet Minh representatives in Thailand. Thongin Phuriphat, an ethnic Lao member of parliament, cooperated with Tiang to recruit Vu Huu Binh into a number of 

their operations.78 By this time Binh was an ICP member working along the Mekong River in the name of the Viet Minh. A ranking ICP cadre trained by Hoang Van Hoan, Mai Van Quang, was also in contact with Chamlong Daoruang. They were reported to have been friends by a Viet Minh representative who worked out of Thailand in late 1945.79 While Viet Minh–Seri Thai cooperation amounted to very little in military terms, these contacts provided Vietnamese communists in the northeast with an invaluable entry into postwar Thai officialdom following the Japanese defeat and Phibun’s provisional withdrawal from the political scene.

What remains less clear is to what extent these early contacts represented local, independent ICP initiatives. For it was only in June 1945 that the ICP Central Committee was able to establish direct contact with its cadres working along the Mekong. Some time during that month, the Party centre sent Nguyen Chinh Cau to Laos, where he re-established the ICP’s prewar ‘Laotian Territorial Committee’ (Xiu Uy Ai Lao). At the same time, a ‘Special Committee for the Viet kieu’ in Laos and Thailand (Dac uy Viet kieu) appeared, considered the main organ of the ICP and Viet Minh for both countries. From this point, according to Japanese historian Furuta Motoo, ‘Vietnamese communists in Thailand came to be directed by the ICP.’80 Le Manh Trinh confirms this. He wrote in his memoirs that before the war ended, the Viet Minh General Bureau in Vietnam sent a special representative to Laos and Thailand to establish formal ties with Vietnamese organisations. A Viet kieu Special Committee for Laos and Thailand was created under the ‘direct leadership’ of the Viet Minh Tong Bo and the General Association of the Viet kieu in Thailand before the war ended.81 Thus, it was only around June 1945 that the ICP Central Committee finally regained direct control over its Thai operations.

“It was also around this time that a special ICP representative arrived in Thailand. He conveyed the ICP’s instructions to Party branches in Thailand and Laos to dispatch participants to an upcoming national resistance congress at Tan Trao. In late July, with time the utmost importance, the Thai-based ICP branch selected Tran Duc Vinh and another delegate known as Khieu to attend the national meeting.82 The Lao Party branch sent Duong Thi Trung.83 According to a ranking ICP delegate who was attended the Tan Trao meetings, Vinh and Trung made it in enough time to take part in the ICP All-Country Congress.

On 13 August, two days before the Japanese publicly accepted the Allied terms of unconditional surrender, a special ICP All-Country Congress opened at Tan Trao, a jungle base located in northern Vietnam. On 15 August, Nguyen Ai Quoc presided over a National Congress there during which guidelines were set whereby the Viet Minh would seize power, establish a provisional government, and negotiate with the Allies. During these meetings, Quoc also raised the possibility that the arrival of the Allies in Indochina might presage a full-scale French attack on Vietnam. Describing a worst-case scenario, he pointed out the possibility that the French, with ‘the full support’ of the Americans, the British and the consent of the KMT, might attempt to retake all of Vietnam in the immediate wake of the war. In such a case, Quoc argued, the Vietnamese must be ready both to fight and to negotiate.85 Quoc and his partisans were particularly worried by the presence of French troops in southern China, who had fled Indochina after the 9 March coup. With the end of the war at hand, Vietnamese leaders worried that these troops might gain Allied permission to return to Indochina.86 In such a case, the Viet Minh would face a threat of invasion from the northwest. This concern is evident in the resolution passed by the ICP All-Country Congress at Tan Trao on 15 August, in which the problem of rebuilding ICP sections in Laos and Cambodia was singled out, with ‘special assistance to be given to the Lao Party branch’. This would suggest that Vietnamese strategists at Tan Trao were, as before World War II, more concerned with Laos than Cambodia. Immediately after the Congress, a ‘special representative’ of the Viet Minh’s Tong Bo was sent to Laos. This delegate was none other than Tran Duc Vinh.88 He returned to Savannakhet on 28 August.

The question, however, is what exactly did the ICP instruct Tran Duc Vinh to do on his return? A Japanese historian has suggested that the ICP’s actions in Laos in mid-1945 were devised in the context of the need to promote a larger Indochinese revolution. The hypothesis is not as far-fetched as some might think. In June 1945, for example, the ICP’s theoretical leader, Truong Chinh, wrote in the ICP’s mouthpiece that resistance forces would defeat the Japanese and then ‘establish an Indochinese Democratic Republic’. Even in the famous Directrive No. 1 calling for the general insurrection, Truong Chinh was preparing for an ‘Indochinese uprising’ and not just a Vietnamese one.

It is unclear whether the ICP meeting held at Tan Trao had authorised Tran Duc Vinh to initiate the Laotian part of this 'Indochinese revolution'. There are several possibilities, but they are only speculations. First, the revolutionary mobilisation of the Viet kieu in Laotian urban centres may have been an independent decision taken by local Vietnamese internationalists formed along the Mekong in the 1930s and still there in 1945. On this note, it would be useful to know what Nguyen Chinh Cau had been instructed to do by resurrecting the Laotian Territorial Committee, first formed by Thai-based Vietnamese communists in the early 1930s. Second, it is possible that following the establishment of 'direct contact' with the Tong Bo in mid-1945, local cadres were authorised by the ICP to try to take power in Lao. Knowledge of the Viet Minh's desire to create a 'Laotian Dependence League' as part of a larger 'Indochinese Independence League' may have reinforced such thinking.

A final and more likely scenario is that no one was really in control in Laos in August 1945. Local Vietnamese cadres along the Mekong may have been responding to a spontaneous outbreak of nationalist fervour among the majority Viet kieu populations in Laotian urban centres. Most of them were bureaucrats and would have thus been the first to learn of the Japanese defeat and the success of the August revolution in northern Vietnam thanks to their access to radios and telegraphic communication with Hanoi and Hue. Moreover, urban-based Japanese patriotic mobilisation movements had long focused on the Viet kieu in Laotian cities rather than on the Lao organizations in the countryside. If there was an ‘August Revolution’ in Laos in 1945, it may well have been a largely urban, spontaneous and very Vietnamese affair, for representatives made it to Tan Trao in time for the Party Congress, it is not at all clear that they made it back to the Mekong before the urban-based Viet kieu took the streets in the name of the Viet Minh. Local ICP cadres probably acted on what they thought the Party would have wanted them to do.

According to Furuta Motoo, even before Viet Minh representatives had arrived in Savannakhet from their Tan Trao meetings, Vietnamese communists in Thailand had begun ‘to prepare the uprising in Laos’ on their own initiative. Le Manh Trinh would claim years later that upon learning by radio of the Soviet defeat of the Japanese in Manchuria, the unconditional Japanese surrender, and the seizure of power by the Viet Minh in Hanoi on 19 August, local Vietnamese communists in Thailand decided to launch a Laoian uprising. As Le Manh Trinh recalled it, the Đac uy Viet kieu and the Viet kieu National Salvation headquarters for Laos and Thailand concluded that with the enemy crumbling, the favourable moment is now ripe. The Viet kieu are hereby resolved to serve as the vanguard for the Lao-pen-Lao as well as the Laotian people in their seizure of power from the Japanese and in preventing the return of the French colonialists.

Arriving on 28 August, Tran Duc Vinh met with Japanese officials concerning guarantees for the safety and well-being of the Viet kieu and the right to organise local militia forces (tu ye). We shall return to Laos in the next chapter.

Although there was no representative from Cambodia present at the ICP Congress at Tan Trao, Vietnamese communist cadres began some small-scale work in Cambodia before the Pacific War ended. Tran Huy Lieu wrote in his history of the August Revolution that activities were concentrated in Battambang province, then largely under Thai control. A Viet kieu Mobilisation Committee (Ban Van Dong Viet kieu) was formed, allegedly sending a team of cadres to work among the Vietnamese there in early 1945. The small village of Ba Son outfitted Vietnamese youths for the projected revolution, while Co Quen was a military training camp which fed into a larger base camp known as Giong Tram. When World War II ended, Giong Tram became a Viet Minh military base in western Cambodia, allegedly responsible for one of the first combat units sent back to southern Vietnam to fight the French. However, in our knowledge, there is no evidence showing Vietnamese communists in southern Vietnam or Thailand preparing an uprising in Cambodia in August 1945. The prewar geography of the ICP's operations in Thailand had kept Vietnamese communists from Nghe-Tinh in much better touch with Laotian affairs than their southern counterparts were with Cambodian politics. Moreover, many Viet kieu in Phnom Penh had rushed off to Saigon in August 1945 to support the Vietnamese revolution, not a Cambodian one."

There was another reason for the weaker state of ICP bases in lower eastern Thailand and Bangkok during World War II: the ICP had stiff competition for the Viet kieu, especially among the Viet kieu in Bangkok, Ubon and the province of Battambang. This competition came from a non-communist nationalist party named the League for the Restoration of Vietnam (Viet Nam Phuc Quoc Dong Minh Hoi). Formed under the direction of a top Japanese spy named Matsutsuhita and with the backing of several Japanese secret services, this party aimed to take power via a Japanese-backed coup. Led by Duong Van Giao among others, this party sought to bring Prince Cuong De back to Vietnam. To this end, Duong Van Giao had travelled to Thailand, where Japanese secret services had long been working among the overseas Vietnamese and Chinese communities, in order to transfer the party's headquarters to Bangkok because of effective French repression in Vietnam. Together with several other Vietnamese nationalist groups, such as Tran Trong Kim, Trinh Dinh Thao and Prince Cuong De's two sons, these Vietnamese entered into secret contact with Phibun Songkhram and Pridi Phanomyoing. As we know, Duong Van Giao and Pridi had been good friends since their days together in Paris.98 In late 1942, as the party’s delegate abroad, Duong received instructions to enter into negotiations with the Thai government in order to form a provisional Vietnamese government in Bangkok. This was not so far-fetched. In 1943, Phibun’s government recognised Chandra Bose’s resistance government based either in Bangkok or Rangoon.

In southern China, of course, Nguyen Ai Quoc had been thinking in similar terms when he began putting a provisional government together on the Sino–Vietnamese border. As for Thailand, northern communists at Tan Trao selected a new representative for the provisional government in Thailand. Nguyen Ai Quoc was said to have appointed Nguyen Duc Quya, a member of the Viet Minh from northern Vietnam, who had worked there against the Japanese and rescued downed Allied pilots. In making this selection, Quoc reportedly100 sought to appoint a polished, effective representative of Vietnam, someone who was multilingual, cultured and not openly associated with the Communist Party. In this connection, Quy was a member of the Vietnamese ‘Vanguard Youth’, proficient in French, English and Chinese, and a member of the non-communist Democratic Party (Dan Chu Dang). He had the ICP’s trust, however, given that he had secretly joined the Party in 1942.101 Although it is unclear why Quy did not leave for Bangkok until a year later (see Chapter 6), his selection by Nguyen Ai Quoc at the Tan Trao Congress, if true, provides us with an early postwar example of how the ICP was already looking back to Thailand to rebuild its Southeast Asian operations, especially as the possibility of a clash with the French could never be ruled out, even as Nguyen Ai Quoc, now taking the name of Ho Chi Minh, announced formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945.”