There was a time, p.1
There Was a Time, page 1
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2021 by
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Copyright 2021 © George H. Wittman
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To Joyce and Geraldine
Contents
Author’s Note
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Author’s Note
I was assigned to the Indochina Branch after returning from Europe on my first assignment as an intelligence officer. I was supposed to go directly to the Far East in the summer of 1954 but was assigned to the Vietnam desk and subsequently the newly created Cambodia/Laos desk. About a year later, I went out to the field in covert operations for the Indochina Branch. Not once did I hear from official sources of the extensive contact that Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had had with Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Viet Minh. I learned about that years later. It was a matter never discussed during the 1950s and never taken advantage of in the 1960s. This book is about that period in spring/summer 1945 when the principal American intelligence organization of that time, the OSS, was in close and cooperative contact with Ho Chi Minh, personally, and fighting cadre of the Viet Minh, organizationally. These were the last and very dangerous days of World War II and the battle against the Japanese.
While this story is told in the form of a novel, it nonetheless is based on actual events and exploits of various OSS officers and enlisted men. I have chosen to fictionalize these individuals because so many of them sought in later years to avoid public awareness of their roles in northern Vietnam and their working relationship with Ho Chi Minh and his staff in the field. Similarly, for literary purposes, I have combined the activities of several of the teams and their operational leaders. I have tried to remain true to the action and the situation of the history of the operation. These missions and the events which drove them occurred some 20 years before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that marked the justification for the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam.
There was a time.
George H. Wittman
Preface
After the last remnants of the Battle of the Bulge had been cleared away in the winter of early 1945, and the expectation grew that Berlin would fall by springtime, the attention of the American military command turned toward the Pacific. The priority that the European theater had held was now shifted to destroying the Japanese in Asia. MacArthur had already landed in the Philippines in October 1944 and the Marines were to secure Iwo Jima by March 1945. The United States could then bomb the home islands of Japan with increasing frequency from land bases.
With the alteration of operational priority, military and intelligence assets from Europe were diverted to Asia. DeGaulle’s Free French government, back in power since the fall of Paris in August 1944, was eager to put their stamp on the recovery of their former colony of Indochina, made up of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The status of the Vichy French administration and military forces that had collaborated with the Japanese was now in doubt. If there was to be an American invasion of Vietnam as part of the piecemeal successful advance across the Pacific, DeGaulle’s people wanted to be able to claim they had done something, anything, to encourage anti-Japanese resistance. The future of France as a colonial power in Indochina depended on it.
From the American standpoint the future of Indochina lay in some form of trusteeship, as President Roosevelt had intimated as early as the Cairo and Teheran summit conferences. Politically, the Americans had also recognized a special interest in Vietnam held by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. The British tended to side with French ambitions to regain their old colony on the principle that they intended to return to take over theirs. Needless to say, the result of this was a great deal of behind-the-scenes tension.
Into all this was thrust the newly reinforced American covert intelligence unit of the OSS assigned to Kunming, China. With the arrival of a cadre of experienced behind-the-lines operatives from Europe and a few eager young men trained in Vietnamese, the Americans launched themselves directly into the complicated politics and dangerous operations that marked Vietnam’s northern region during the last six months of World War II.
Northern Vietnam, 1945
* * *
The number of people who died from famine and flood in the Red River area of Tonkin in the disasters of 1944–1945 ranged from 500,000 to one and a half million. It depends on who tells the story. It really doesn’t matter. It was horrific. This monumental tragedy which affected the entire region of northern Vietnam nonetheless became a backdrop to the political and military events during the last months of World War II.
The delta flood plain had been created over the millennium by the yearly monsoons which fed the red-brown wildness that poured down from China to Vietnam. This life blood of the northern part of Vietnam is drawn from the mountains of China’s Yunnan Province. The Song Hong, as the Red River is called in Vietnamese, flows in great rushes south and east aided in its march to the Gulf of Tonkin by its equally ungentle cousins Song Da, the Black River, and Song Lo, the Clear River. Three typhoons welcomed by the furnace of air off the Gobi Desert accompanied the annual south-westerly monsoon season of May to October 1944. The Tonkin harvest of that year was destroyed. The farmers who should have been working to replant for the second harvest the following spring of 1945 had been decimated by the floods that inundated the delta. Even if they had been able to do so, there was little seed to plant. All this devastation and at this point the war’s military action had barely touched this part of Indochina.
Hanoi, sitting on the right bank of the Red River, was protected by a series of dikes. The capital city of French Indochina was reasonably safe from the floods. Not so the thousands of villages southeast in the lowland of the delta plain. Most of the dikes protecting this rice-growing area had been swamped by the rain-swollen rivers. The sidewalk cafe attached to the magnificent old Metropole Hotel still held its usual collection of French colons and their wives and mistresses. Japanese and French officers sitting in self-imposed segregation from each other talked in hushed tones of the progress of the war these first couple of months of 1945. They tried to ignore the seemingly endless lines of peasants pushed along by police to clear the street for the occasional vehicle. The garbage from the hotel and the many spacious villas in the “European” sector of the city became the principal feeding centers. Sickly farm families roamed the city carrying their small children in baskets and their meager possessions in cloth bags hung at each end of a don ganh, the split bamboo pole which, when balanced on the shoulder, becomes the primary mode of goods carrier for the Vietnamese peasant. These were the ban co, the class of people who had been poor for many generations and who nonetheless made up the backbone of the population.
In the delta itself, those villages that had not been swept away had used this “dry season” to try to rebuild, but they had very little with which to work. The simplest task was a burden for bodies wracked by disease and starvation. The old colonial administration either ignored the plight of the impoverished Tonkinese or were incapable of relieving such a massive catastrophe. The Japanese Army personnel were under strict orders to leave these civil matters to the colonial French authorities. In any case, they and the Vichy French army units found it hard enough to protect their own stores of food supplies from marauding bands. At night, shots could be heard as sentries picked off thieves. In the morning, carts roamed about the city picking up the bodies of dead from the night before.
For the French colons, the poorest of whom were wealthy by comparison to the delta farmers, this was a period of considerable disadvantage, but nothing more. Prices of necessities were sky high but could be obtained. Hanoi’s Vietnamese merchants found ways to acquire supplies, as merchants seem to be able to do in many crises. They paid top prices and passed it on to the customer. It was an economic equation for a political sea change. And the amazing thing was that the supposedly politically sophisticated French colonial administration, then and in the future, never recognized the full impact of what had occurred before their eyes.
* * *
The Japanese had been quick to take advantage of the French capitulation to the Germans in 1940. Tokyo found the new Vichy government most accommodating when it came to Indochina. Their agreement with the collaborationist French allowed the colonial government to remain in administrative control of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The French, in turn, gave the Japanese all they wanted militarily: full transit rights, stationing of Imperial Japanese troops, and access to all required support facilities. Economically, Japan had first call on strategic minerals and agricultural products. Ironically, Japan won the admiration of the indigènes, especially the nationalist Vietnamese, for the humbling of their colonial master. The communists, always politically more acute, were conflicted in their reaction after Germany, Japan’s ally, attacked Soviet Russia. Nonetheless, the Japanese played their Asia solidarity card with finesse and major incidents were avoided. However, the scene changed drastically on March 9, 1945. At 7pm on that day, Ambassador Matsumoto delivered the demand that all French troops be placed under Japanese control. The French were given two hours in which to reply. The Japanese Army moved with speed and precision. Most French units surrendered immediately. Some “for the honor of France” fought briefly; then they surrendered, honor satisfied. These units were treated with “appropriate military courtesy,” disarmed and interned. However, in the north at Lang Son a combined force of Legionnaires, French regular soldiers, and Vietnamese colonial troops held out for two days until they had run out of ammunition and water. The Japanese slaughtered them after their attempt to finally surrender. The same thing happened to the garrison at Dong Dan that had held out for three days. The message had been sent!
Some similar combined forces in the south and central highlands made it to Laos. These small units were harbored by Laotian tribesmen and purposefully ignored by Lao officials. Effectively, these groups of regular military now became partisans. They raided across the border for the next six months, providing the only such military operations against the Japanese in Vietnam originated and commanded by the French during the entire war.
A larger force, again made up of Foreign Legionnaires, regular French, and colonial Vietnamese troopers staged what their commanding officers, Generals Sabattier and Alessandri, called a “fighting retreat.” In fact, this sizeable force of over 6,000-plus horse-drawn artillery gathered together in the region around Son Tay 20 miles northwest of Hanoi. From there they headed toward Dien Bien Phu about 200 miles away by air, but at least 300 or more on foot. They were harassed all along the way, but the Japanese never wanted to commit the size of force necessary to seriously block and defeat Sabattier and his troops. Instead they encouraged tribal hill people by offering bounties for captured or killed soldiers of the Sabattier force. The Japanese forces locally along the route were positioned to ambush and otherwise impede, but there was no sustained Japanese offensive. It really wasn’t needed. The French did not want to fight unless it was to defend themselves. The march through the mountainous terrain often covered by near-impenetrable bamboo forests and dense jungle-like foliage took its toll. Disease, fatigue, and lack of food plagued the fleeing force. They arrived on the plain of Dien Bien Phu with one objective: to contact the Allied headquarters in Kunming, China, and plead with them for help.
The American headquarters in Kunming for the OSS learned of the emergency message from liaison with 14th Air Force who received the signal. They also found out that word had come from the top, “the real top, in Washington,” that no assistance should be given to this, or any other Vichy French force in Indochina!
Chapter One
The sound of heavy fire reverberated through the stone walls of the church. A small group of men dressed in traditional, working-class, civilian clothes huddled against the protective sides of the ancient walls. Each man was wrapped with bandoliers of ammunition and carried a rifle. Some had German “potato masher” grenades attached to their belts. They had made their way down from the Vosges Mountains to a small town southeast of Nancy as soon as they had heard the Americans were close. The Germans still put up a serious defense as they withdrew in order. This group of maquis eagerly looked forward to greeting their liberators. It had been a long and bloody fight between the elusive maquisards and the relentless Germans. No quarter given—none asked.
The American tanks had to be just a few blocks away. The tallest of the men, speaking French with an unmistakable American accent, shouted above the din of the exploding tank shells that everyone should stay where they were. The old church shook from the impact of the firing on nearby buildings. The tall, gaunt American looked around the doorway to see exactly where the tanks were. They could all hear the rumble and metallic grinding of gears in between the noise of the detonations. One of the maquisards, an older man with a large grey mustache typical of the region, disregarding the advice of the American, dashed around him with a white flag made of a dingy grey scarf. The old man was oblivious to the voices screaming at him as he joyously jumped up and down with the rag attached to his rifle. A Sherman tank turned the corner. The machine gun mounted on the turret sprayed down the street as the gunner swept all moving objects in range. The old man died instantly as the tank rolled on, unmindful of what had just happened. The gunner thought he was taking fire from one of the roofs and directed his weapon upwards. Another tank followed and blew away the entire tile roof. The little town was completely “liberated” within the next 15 minutes.
Slowly townspeople appeared from the rubble of their destroyed homes and the cellars of those left standing. They cheered the infantry that followed the tanks. No one blamed the Americans for what had happened to their town. They were liberated now and that was all that mattered. The American dragged the body of the old man to the side of the road and, with the help of one of the maquisards, carried the corpse back into the church. No one said anything. The rifle with the scarf still attached was laid by the old man’s side. The American untied the scarf and slipped it around the dead man’s neck. They all crossed themselves—even the American, who wasn’t even Catholic. Their war had ended.
* * *
Major John Guthrie was tired, annoyed, and generally in a bad mood. It was nothing new. He had been this way all the way from England, a week of very uncomfortable and unreliable wartime air transport. Of course, it all had begun before that. Trying to convince a moronic American infantry officer he was part of the same army and not a German had been the beginning of the downhill slide. It was his choice swearing and waving of his dog tags in the captain’s face that finally convinced the company commander that John was a bona fide Yank. Eventually the OSS liaison apparatus swung into motion and John finally completed the round trip which had begun six months before with the flight from England and the jump into the Vosges to link up with the French resistance.
It hadn’t been easy to leave his maquisards. It had been only six months, but it was literally a lifetime for some of them. The absurd death of old Emile on the day the Americans finally reached their sector was the worst of all their casualties. He was just so happy he couldn’t keep from rushing out. The maquisards took it in their stride. They held nothing against the American in the tank. It was Emile’s own fault they said, but for John it was a terrible ending for his mission.
Back in England there had been the period of decompression, of debriefings, of after-action reports, of just about everything that no longer seemed to have any meaning. Slowly the fatigue of months with little sleep and constant danger gave way to an overriding sense of irritation—at little things, big things, the war, the OSS, just about everything. It was time for a rest. Some cushy assignment where you didn’t have to think. Paris would have been nice. He deserved it. They’d even agreed with him on that.
Then there was that talk with the pompous bird colonel who actually said, “You know, son, there’s a war on….” He was lucky John hadn’t busted him in the mouth. His experience, the non-combat colonel had said, was needed out in the Pacific Theater, in Indochina ops. There his French knowledge and guerrilla warfare skills would be invaluable. “Bullshit!” was John’s instant reply. It hadn’t mattered. The orders already had been cut. So much for the accolades, the Silver Star, the promotion.
