Blowback - S5 Episode 2 - "The French Connection"

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

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

A hero of wartime resistance, Ho Chi men. At 55, Ho has become a legend. He grants an exclusive interview to CBS News correspondent David Schoombrun. Ho came into the room that night, wearing the uniform that had been made popular by Stalin by Chunkai Shack. Just a simple, khaki, high-collarge uniform, no decorations, no insignia of any kind. 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.

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. And we have another secret weapon. It's nationalism. And don't think that a small, ragged band cannot fight against the modern army.

It will be a war between an elephant and a... tiger. 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. 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 Mean on September. November 11th, 1946. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn.

And this is Season. And this is Season 5. Episode 2, the French Connection. 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. 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, Indo-Chinese War. We'll see how the kingdoms in Indochina were turned into workhouses and buffer states by France and how modern nationalism took root there. 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. Their wars in Indochina, much like the British in Afghanistan last season, set the course for everything to come. 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 Sianuk, the wily and unpredictable king of Cambodia, who wheeled and dealed to preserve his country's fragile neutrality. And a young man named Solothold. Tsar, a quiet student whose studies in Paris would catapult him into a life of secrecy, extremism, and revolution. Driving through the Second World War into the French Indochinese War will emerge in the 1950s,

in Geneva, Switzerland, where backroom intrigue will produce vastly different realities for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These years would shape the motives and the destinies of kings, revolutionaries, and whole empires. The French called it Indochina. A patchwork of three different territories in Southeast Asia, sitting between China and Thailand. Until France declared it so, these places were not, in fact, a single unit or federation,

but countries with distinct yet intertwined histories. All three, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, traced their existence back to ancient times as a constellation of separate kingdoms. Vietnam, by far the largest and most powerful of the three, was located south of China on territory held by the Viet ethnic group. For a long while, the main invader of Vietnam was China, writes historian Mark Lawrence,

which conquered the Viet people in 11 BC and ruled its territory as a province of the Chinese Empire for a thousand years. To the west, running down Vietnam's spine is Laos, whose golden era spanned the 16th to 18th century. Of the three pieces of Indochina, Laos was the most mountainous, the least populated, and the most ethnically diverse. 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. Then there was Campuchia.

What is now modern Cambodia, a rather small state, surrounding the country. by powerful neighbors, was for half a millennium the most powerful and glorious civilization in Southeast Asia. This was the Empire of the Khmerz, 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, and to the east it encompassed southern Vietnam and southern Laos, to the west, Thailand, and even bits of Burma. 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. 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, Teravada Buddhism, incorporating elements of Hindu culture, reigned supreme. 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. Ironically, centuries after Angkor's fall, it would be French scholars and archaeologists that pieced together a picture of this civilization. Quote, by the time their work was halted in the 1960s, Becker writes, the French had proved the command of the command of. ranked with the Romans and Greeks as unrivaled artists and innovators of the ancient world.

The reclamation or renaissance of these glory years would factor into almost every single modern Cambodian political movement, from the monarchy of Prince Sianuk to the radicals of the Khmer Rouge. By the 15th century, the Khmer Empire slipped into decline. Quote, since the empire was centered on the country's northwest plains, writes Becker, Anchor was largely cut off from the new thriving trade with China. 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. 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. 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

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

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, the farce. 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. France hoped that colonies in Asia would, quote, bathe his regime in imperial glory and keep pace with Great Britain.

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. France initially announced its entry into Vietnam as a military campaign, to avenge Catholic mercenaries persecuted within the country. French gunships, aged by Catholic Spain, attacked the eastern coastal city of Donang and later Saigon, grinding down the resistant but vulnerable Vietnamese kingdom over several years. 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. And within a few more years, the empire formally annexed and colonized to South Vietnam, dubbing it Cochin China.

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 in commercial influence. 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. 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. The leader of Cambodia, King Noradam, led the French in. King Noradam 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.

In fact, the French ended up using King Noradam far more than the other way around. In Vietnam, the French conquest dismembered a powerful state, Wright scholars Evans and Rowley. In Cambodia, they proclaimed a protectorate over a kingdom already in decline. 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. In 1885, Wright Evans and Rowley,

the declining Chinese empire signed a treaty with the French, quote, by which they formally renounced suzerainty over Vietnam. 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. Over the years, France would redraw the borders between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The French tended to push the Ville.

Vietnamese borders northward and westward at the expense of Cambodia, writes Shawcross. We'll see this colonial territory swapping will lead to serious land disputes between Vietnam and Cambodia later in our story. To the envy of its rivals, France had to. conquered and in so doing created the Indo-Chinese Federation. And Vietnam was always the crown jewel. Cambodia and Laos served as buffers. The French, Wright Evans and Rowley, quote, both dismembered Vietnam and joined it with Laos and Cambodia. 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.

The colonies of Indochina were fertile soil for European capital, and they sprouted new markets. 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, end quote. 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. The most fundamental change was the commercialization of agriculture, right, Evans and Rowley.

quote, under French rule, the Mekong Delta became a major exporter of rice. 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. 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. On the harshest plantations, more than one in four rubber workers died. Runaways faced executions by torture, hanging, or stabbing, end quote.

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. Vietnamese peasants and coolly laborers were among the poorest in all Asia, but a commercial middle class grew up in the main towns, especially in Saigon, right, Evans and Rowley. Cambodia was a different story. 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. And so, to get Cambodia up to code, the French imported Vietnamese into Cambodia. They brought indentured Vietnamese laborers to work in Cambodia rubber plantations, rather than trust lazy Cambodians. Vietnamese were also conscripted as middlemen and bureaucrats to run the colonial apparatus. This, too, would not be forgotten by Cambodians down the line. Cambodia lagged far behind Vietnam in development. That went for industry, railways, education, you name it.

Cambodia, notes Becker, did not have a French lisei 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. Since France did little to provide the commerce with a Western-style education, it staved off the arrival of a modern Cambodian nationalist movement until well into the 20th century. Finally, Laos was perhaps the most hands-off of these territories. Quote, French rural disrupted life even less in Laos than it did in Cambodia, right Evans and Rowley. Laos was at that point really a confederation of small principalities, with regionally-based

aristocratic families wielding political power. Peasant life was barely touched. 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. Local militias, some of them made up of scholar warriors,

Some made up of workers-turned-soldiers, staged attacks on the empire's outposts. 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. And this traditional system faced no mass discontent until the middle of the First World War. This scene of desolation was filmed after the Battle of Chateau Chari, where American and French troops won a decisive victory.

What began as a tax revolt of a few hundred peasants in the capital, Phnom Penh, grew into a rebellion. According to historian David Chandler, French police estimated that some 40,000 peasants passed through Penhompen in the early months of 1916, before being ordered back to their villages by the king. 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. 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. Around 1939, as World War II was spreading from Asia to Europe, Soniaqtan 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. 1940 saw the birth of the Khmer Eserak, or the Khmer independence movement. It was supported by the Thai government, which was growing anxious about the Khmer-Esserak, but the threat of Japan. 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. 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 Campocia were Vietnamese. The first watch, the second, the third, dies. 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. At the turn of the century, a club of Vietnamese elites formed the clandestine nationalist party, which advocated violent revolution against the French. 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.

So they remained unable to mobilize many people around their ideas. 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. Having co-founded the French Communist Party, and soon the Indo-Chinese one, after World War I, As world leaders deliberated at the Versailles Conference, Ho appeared as a delegate for Vietnam.

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. The Western leaders ignored him. Soon, Ho would find a much more sympathetic and supportive audience in Moscow.

He was recruited to the Common Turn, the USSR's international network of communist organizers. Despite his globe-trotting, Ho did find time to found the Indo-Chinese Communist Party in 1930. Under Ho's leadership, the party won the mantle of Vietnamese nationalism. 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. 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. 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. 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. But in political terms, the monarchy remained the legitimate authority to most Cambodians. Two different families jockeed for the throne, but that simply made it easier for the French, the actual power in the country, to pick winners and losers.

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. He'd done so, writes Elizabeth Becker, with directives from the common turn in Moscow, that he built a party incorporating the communist movements in Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam. Some, especially in Cambodia, thought Vietnam was trying to dominate its Lausian and Cambodian neighbors. Others in the resistance defended the idea of a single Indo-Chinese 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?

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. 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, Peyton asked for an armistice. The news is carried to Hitler, who received this word of a great nation's fall in a characteristic manner. 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. In Cambodia, writes Shawcross, the French decided that their best protection against nationalism

was to switch royal families once again. 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 Noradam Sianuk, whom the French had selected because of his pliable youthfulness, was crowned. King. 18-year-oldean-Cambodian-Camboderned to begin his career hand-picked by Vichy France to keep order and to justify colonial rule. At the time, Sianuk seemed little more than a carefree Lisei 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. Sun Yachtin 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. 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. 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. 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. Ho Chi Minh, now leading the resistance movement known as the Vietnam, was not fooled by Tokyo's appeals to Asian solidarity. The Viet Minh worked with the allied powers and carried out guerrilla warfare. 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. To help the Vietmen and their leader, Ho Chi-Men, fight the Japanese. The United States supplied the Vietmen with arms and ammunition.

In return, the Viet Minh supplied the United States with military intelligence, concerning the Japanese, and helped rescue downed American pilots. 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. All the while in Cambodia, the Vietnamese-led communist movement, along with Khmer nationalist rebels, were coming into their own, as Sianuk continued to play puppet for Japan.

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. In one sweep, writes Becker, the Japanese arrested the French military, police, and native guards, and imprisoned the entire French civilian population. Sianuk 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. 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. 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. 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. Arrangements are now being made for the fourth. 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. Great Britain, Russia, and China will be represented by high-ranking officers. Meantime, the Allied armed forces have been ordered to suspend offensive action. Japan's summer surrender cleared the way for the Vietnam to take Hanoi and depose the Emperor, collaborator, Bao Dai. On September 2nd, 1945, the same day that the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allies,

Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence from France. The day that the United States dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, a final act of Palace, Intrigue reportedly unfolded inside of Cambodia. Allies of the right-wing nationalist, Sunyuk Tan, staged a coup in Phnom Penh. But, Becker reports, Tan's own defense minister, secretly encouraged by King Sianuk, fled to Saigon to warn the French of Tan's plans. In Sianuk's name, the defense minister asked the French to return to Phnom Penh immediately and prevent an association with the Vietnamese.

King Sianuk remained on the throne, and the French granted Cambodia the status of autonomous state within the French Union. End quote. It was a fitting first chapter for Sianuk. 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. In less than a decade, he would repeat the performance to secure an even greater prize. In August 1945, writes historian Marilyn Young, quote, most Vietnamese believed their country was at last independent of all foreign rule and at peace, end quote. With the surrender of Japan and the formation of the Democratic Republic of,

Vietnam, the Vietnam, 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 rights. In an effort to disarm suspicion, that proved futile in the long run. The Communist Party dissolved itself in November 1945, end quote. 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.

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. Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to Harry Trujoo, in February, asking for the U.S. to intervene against the French. Ho brought up that it had actually been Vietnam forces, and not the French, who had fought the Japanese in Indochina. According to Young, quote, it was Ho's last letter to the United States. And like the earlier ones, it was never answered.

So instead, Ho struck out on his own, and spent most of 1946, negotiated. with the French directly. All the while, France began rebuilding its presence in North Vietnam. Guns of a French cruiser, fire on the town, as colonial extremists decide to teach the Vietnamese a lesson. Even after French forces killed an estimated 6,000 people in a November assault on Haiphong, Young writes, still Ho Chi-Men attempted to negotiate. On December 19th, as Vietnam militias in Hanoi attacked French positions,

A near-decade-long war for national liberation lurched into motion. In this type of war, the hunters quickly become the hunted. 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. They controlled the countryside, and they attacked exposed positions, while the French were forced to hide in the better protected cities.

The Vietmen 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. 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. General Von Wyn Zapp, in particular, stood apart.

As Sheehan puts it, Zapp befuddled French commanders during the campaigns of 1949 and 1950. At his northern headquarters, General Vaux-Nuyen-Yap, the tough commander of the Vietnam 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. Zapp managed to trap the enemy on an evacuation route,

along which, quote, 6,000 French colonial troops disappeared. This man who had earned his living as a history teacher at a lycée 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. French." "...sabotage of railroads and communications spreads throughout the countryside." 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. But while a well-organized communist army fought for independence in Vietnam, a more diverse array of forces challenged the French in Cambodia. While the Vietnam did battle against France, Cambodia's king Sianuk signed an agreement formalizing French control over his foreign policy. No one is more desirous of complete independence than I, Sianuk 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 truth. troops. But whatever Sionuk said, Cambodia was noticeably chafing under French rule in the late 1940s. The Khmer Isirak, nationalist brigades, executed raids on French officials and their Cambodian subordinates. More nationalists, like Sonyoktan, now supported by Thailand, had returned to the country from exile, making noise about overthrowing France. With his finger to the wind, Sionuk negotiated control of his foreign and Defense Ministries back from France. As mass protests broke out across Cambodia in 1952, Sianuk sided with the demonstrators and lambasted French colonialism. At the same time,

he dissolved his national legislature. This was Sianuk'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. In 1949, Kang Van Sack, 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 Sarr. Reserved and quiet, Saar was soon joined by fellow Khmer comrades such as Yang Sari and Hussain. All these young students would later become key leaders in the Khmer Rouge. But for now, they were merely students. Journalist Philip Short provides a portrait. The young Cambodians climbed the Eiffel Tower and marveled at the ancient stonework of Notre Dame in the Eil de la Cite.

at the broad, tree-lined boulevards laid out by Baron Housman in the 1890s with their elegant boutiques, classical facades, and polished Belle Epoch department stores. Into this romantic scenery, Kang Van Sack welcomed the young men. Salath Sarr, Hussein, Yang Sari, and others joined the Khmer Students' Association. They embedded themselves into the Marxist discussion groups, of the French Communist Party. But they also sang the praises of the nationalists back home, like Sun Yachtin. Quote, it was in Paris, not Moscow or Beijing, that in the early 1950s Salath Saar and his companions

laid down the ideological foundations on which the Khmer Rouge nightmare would be built. 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 Sianuk and his domestic opposition, strikes by students in Phnom Penh, protests by the influential Buddhist monks who, short rites, accused the government of complicity with the French, and, of course, the Vietn guerrillas, attacking French positions inside of Cambodia. 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.

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. 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. 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. Under the tutelage from the Vietnamese, the Khmeres who did join up were instructed that their mission was to pressure Sienouk to secede from French rule. How this was to be done was rather unclear, and everyone seemed to dance around the question of armed resistance. When Salazar himself returned to a chaotic penompin 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. 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, and King Sianuk, 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. 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. In all, the United States pours nearly four billion dollars worth of military, financial, and economic assistance into Indochina in an effort to avoid a French and a free world defeat. 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. At the end of 1953, America's aid made up between 70 and 80 percent of the United States. percent 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. In 1954, having swapped out general after general, France's effort was now on its last legs. But General Zapp and the Vietmin 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, and they were being directly supported by the CIA. But he reports that in late 1953, Communist China's intelligence provided the Vietmen with actual plans of the French general Henri Navarre. Quote, Navarist first actions proved he was not only an energetic and daring commander-in-chief,

right Zapp, but also that he was too self-confident. Case in point, Navarre's decision to go ahead with a French occupation of the village Dien Bienfou. The stage is set for a showdown. It comes when the French launch an airborne attack against an obscure northern village named Dien Bienfou. Its chief military asset is an airstrip built for the Japanese in World War II. Despite guidance from Paris to instead hit the view, Vietnam square on, General Navarre pressed ahead with this plan. In November 1953, battalions of soldiers parachuted in to Dien Bufu. General Zapp and his men were shocked

by their good fortune. Quote, we longed to have the enemy remain at Dianbienfou, he writes. They had been hoping for just this kind of concentration of troops to attack. The French military commanders who cling to their concept of defense, defensive forts, Bienn-Bienfou will become the greatest fort of all. Three thousand tons of barbed wire are strung, triple the normal quota for such a defensive position. Units are provided with nine days of rations,

eight days of ammunition, and such special aids to modern warfare as flamethrowers and nighttime infrared sites called sniper scopes. Australian journalist Wilford Burchett, whom we previously encountered on this program in Korea, reported on Den Bienfou. at Ho Chi Minh's side, quote, the countryside, so quiet and passive, especially as seen from

the air, in daytime, boiled with activity at night. From trucks to ox carts, bicycles and human backs, every imaginable form of transport hauled supplies through the jungle and up and down the steep mountains. The bulk of Vietnam supplies now comes from communist China. They're carried across the border 200 miles northeast by a force of 75,000 coolies. 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 Vietnam positions. 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. The app surrounds the French with four divisions. March 13, 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. On May 7th, the French commander on the ground surrendered to the Vietnamese. This win at Dien Bufu could not have been better timed. It placed the Vietnamese in a much stronger position ahead of the negotiations scheduled for Switzerland. The victory, Zapp says, quote, was a bomb dropping. dropped onto the head of the French government before the opening day of the conference in Geneva.

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. The Geneva Conference of 1954 would set the table in Indochina for the Geneva Conference of 1954 would set the table in Indochina for the the rest of the 20th century. 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. 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. 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. In 1952, Sionuk visited Washington and met with the Secretary of State and High Priest of the Cold War, John Foster Dulles. Quote, Sianuk felt both snubbed and rebuked by Dulles, writes Shawcross, who lectured Sianuk that French protection was essential if Cambodia was to be saved from the communists. Dulles could not accept Sianuk's contention that French control was what was feeding the communist's basic support. King Sionuk 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. 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. attitude, Dulles' boss, Ike Eisenhower, stated the American point of view on Indochina in a press conference just before the negotiations in Geneva. The president laid out what would become the infamous domino theory regarding communism in Southeast Asia.

You have a row of domino 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 professional ground influences. 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.

It was in this atmosphere that in April 1954, representatives from the U.S., Britain, China, the USSR, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos strode into the imposing Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Again, Geneva plays its part in the world's constant endeavors for peace. 19 delegations from both sides of the Iron Curtain attend a conference on the many far eastern problems.

Mr. Chowin-Lai, Prime Minister of China, arrives. Next is Mr. John Foster Dulles, America's Secretary of State. Mr. Molotov, Russia's foreign minister, and Mr. Gromyko enter the Palais de Nassion. Now, Monsieur Bido, the French foreign minister who will press for Anglo-American help in Indochina. Mr. Anthony Eden, whose memory must surely hearken back to the days before the war when he figured so prominently in this same building when it housed the ill-fated League of Nations. 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. The first thing on the Geneva agenda was, in fact, the issue of post-war Korea. 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. The loose ends of the Korean War, where Americans and Chinese had fought each other directly, deeply influenced the negotiations over Indochina. When meeting Joe N. Lai, the premier of communist China, John Foster Dulles refused to shake

his hand. Meanwhile, North Vietnam's delegate to Geneva, Fem van Deng, arrived with clear and bold demands, listed here by Michael Lawrence. Quote, international recognition of the independence and unity of all three Indochinese states, withdrawal of foreign troops, and locally supervised elections for new governments.

He also insisted that Laoshen and Cambodian communists be seated as official participants in the Geneva meetings. Ultimately, though, the Vietnamese and their communist supporters in Moscow and Beijing were, open to compromise. The Vietnamese, writes Becker, quote, faced strong Chinese and mild or 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. Vietnam itself, much like

Korea a year earlier, would be temporarily cut in half along the 17th parallel. 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. Meanwhile, King Sienuk was finagling his own arrangement out of Geneva. Having played the French puppet for several years, and having received the French puppet for several years, and having received many concessions from them for self-government, the king now saw an opportunity to win. In the first of many legendary acts of canny dealings, Sianuk maneuvered his way into becoming the leader who, quote-unquote, won Cambodia's independence.

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. 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. 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. 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. But in fact, while the Vietnamese had attempted to negotiate for their fellow communists in Cambodia, they were blocked by the king of Cambodia. 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 Sianuk refused to budge. Ultimately, Beijing and Hanoi shrugged it off. 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. In the Green and Bronze Conference Hall at Geneva, the last hours of the Indochina War were played out. Vietnam and French delegates agreed the truth with Vietnam and French representatives. 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. 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.

But of all the Indo-Chinese leaders, she writes, Sianuk 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. Hanoi went to work setting up a government that, assured of its own popularity, expected to unify Vietnam within a few short years. 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. 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. And in Cambodia, as Sianuk commenced parade 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. Having been cut out at Geneva, about half of the Khmer communist movement would now be be sheltered and trained by their Vietnamese comrades in Hanoi. Among those who remained in Cambodia was Salath Saar. He must have earned some degree of respect from the Vietnamese, writes Becker, for Saar was one of the 20 Cambodians selected for secret political work inside the country. As the Vietnamese exited Cambodia, Saar and his Khmer comrades plotted on foot from the north of the country all the way to Preving in the southeast.

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. Now, Salas Tsar 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.