Vietnam was now a Japanese colony, and that put it squarely in the crosshairs of US foreign policy after 1941. Germany’s ally, Japan, eventually invaded Vietnam and replaced the French as colonial masters. In 1940, the German army sliced through France like butter. The Vietnamese hated their French masters, the French despised the supposedly inferior natives, and a vigorous anti-French resistance-led by a shadowy figure who burned through one alias after another but eventually settled on “Ho Chi Minh”-had already arisen by the 1930s. And here’s where World War II changed Vietnam forever. The French acted badly, as colonial masters always do: a plantation economy seeking to extract raw materials as cheaply as possible, exploitation of cheap local labor, and vicious suppression of any native bold enough to demand civil or political rights.
Natural resources were the lure, since Vietnam was one of the world’s greatest sources of natural rubber. Vietnam had been a colony of France since 1858, when French troops landed at Da Nang. In fact, as the first episode of the documentary-titled, appropriately enough, “Déjà Vu”-reminded us, what happened in Vietnam in the 1960s owed a great deal to World War II.įollow the logic. We think of Vietnam as a series of 1960s clichés: rock-music anthems, antiwar demonstrations, General William Westmoreland reporting on “light at the end of the tunnel,” and Walter Cronkite asking on camera while reporting during the Tet Offensive, "What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war."
The new PBS documentary miniseries by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about the Vietnam War engraves that point in stone. A wise man once wrote that “the past is prologue,” meaning that everything happening today most probably has its roots in yesterday.
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