So Long, Marianne

Indochina — today’s Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam — a territory far-flung and obscure to most in Britain up to the Second World War, remained a consistent focus in Tribune’s international post-war coverage for over three decades. Back in 1950, with nationalist and socialist revolutions and titanic Cold War conflicts rending the continent, Tribune had contended: ‘Indo-China offers the most complex problem of all those which the West has to deal with in South East Asia.’

Occupied by Imperial Japan before Parisian authority was ‘reinstated . . . with the aid of the British’, the postbellum French colony played host to a revolutionary independence struggle by the nationalist Viet Minh, under ‘the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh’. Supportive of contemporary Indian and Burmese independence, Tribune regretted that Britain had been unable in 1945 ‘to give de facto recognition to the Viet Minh Government of Ho Chi Minh, which was at that time by no means Communist’. Thereafter, the French had ‘followed in Indo-China the type of repressive policy which Mr Churchill had wanted for Burma’: dissolving negotiations with the Vietnamese partisans who had resisted the Japanese, and ‘attempt[ing] the destruction of Ho Chi Minh and his followers’.

Critical of France’s vain efforts to re-entrench European rule in Indochina, Tribune saw the popularity of the Viet Minh in the ensuing war as ‘inevitable’:

The harder the French tried to stamp out Ho Chi Minh the more the people rallied to his support. . .. Because Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, many joined the Communist Party [of Vietnam] out of admiration for his heroic defiance of the French.

However, amidst the paper’s fleeting early Cold War dalliance with ‘social-democratic’ anti-communism, this proliferation of Indochinese communism was initially received negatively by Tribune. Its hostility to communism overtaking its commitment to anti-colonialism in Asia, Tribune’s position on the Indochinese war circa 1950 was a shameful one:

In this awkward situation the Labour movement should make up its mind honestly as to where it stands. It cannot like the idea of assisting the French in a colonial policy which would never be tolerated in this country. At the same time it would seem to be a worse evil to allow Communism to sweep to an easy success in an area from which it could threaten the whole of our position in South-East Asia. With reluctance we concede that the only course open to the Labour Government is to support the French in fighting the monster of their own creation.

Fortunately for its overall historical reputation as an anti-imperial publication, Tribune’s position on Indochina would, for various reasons, considerably improve by 1954 — the year of Dien Bien Phu: the Viet Minh’s climactic victory over the French, which Thomas Meaney recently dubbed ‘the Stalingrad of decolonisation’. Having criticised the ‘vice and corruption’ of Paris’ puppet Bao Dai regime in Saigon, Tribune now identified the ongoing ‘battle of Dien Bien Phu’ as ‘preliminary to the more decisive diplomatic battle that will take place at Geneva’, hence ‘why General [Vo Nguyen] Giap . . . ha[d] committed his forces, for the first time in the war, to a pitched battle’.

Eye of the Storm

Aneurin Bevan, out of government and back in Tribune, was a powerful voice in support of ‘national independence for the Indo-Chinese’ against French — and American — imperial pretensions, during the Geneva Conference in 1954: ‘The independence of Indo-China cannot be traded away. Peace cannot be based permanently on colonial exploitation.’ Moreover, Bevan propounded a bold defence of ‘The Right to be Communist’. ‘There are no qualifications to this. If the Indo-Chinese elect to go Communist, they should be allowed to do so.’

With ‘catastrophe’ on the battlefield and demoralisation at home, France eventually acquiesced. Michael Foot celebrated: ‘Peace in Indo-China is the best news which has come to our fear-ridden world since the shadows of the Cold War first overlaid the hopes of 1945.’ Tribune’s relief was palpable, not only at the cessation of hostilities, but also because the frightening spectre of ‘direct, full-scale intervention’ by the US to bolster or supplant the flagging anti-communist French forces — raised repeatedly during negotiations by the ‘Washington war party’ around ‘Vice-President Nixon’ — had not materialised. In April, Bevan had issued ‘A Warning to the United States: BRITAIN WILL NOT FIGHT IN INDO-CHINA.’

Another Bevanite who had written for Tribune and spoken publicly against prospective British participation in a US war in Indochina was Harold Wilson, who, in a speech that would be repeatedly cited against him during his later support (as prime minister) for Washington in Vietnam, proclaimed in 1954:

The Government should not further subordinate British policy to America. A settlement in Asia is imperilled by the lunatic fringe in the American Senate who want a holy crusade against Communism. Not a man, not a gun must be sent from Britain to aid French imperialism in Indo-China. Nor must Britain join or encourage an anti-Communist alliance in Asia. Asia is in revolution and Britain must learn to march on the side of the peoples in that revolution and not on the side of their oppressors.

Peace and independence did, then, seemingly arrive: for the neutral kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, and ‘the greater part of Indochina — called Vietnam’ — divided along the 17th Parallel pending reunification upon ‘free elections throughout the country’. The seeds of future conflict were already visible, however. Journalist Paul Johnson, under the pseudonym Guy Henriques, observed ‘Trouble Brewing in Indochina’ already that November: ‘The national elections agreed at Geneva had been scheduled for eighteen months hence, as [t]he French and their Vietnamese allies realised that if elections were held immediately, the Communists would win an overwhelming victory.’

As Washington’s interest in South Vietnam replaced that of Paris, Johnson presciently impugned whether ‘the elections [would] be held’ at all: ‘The Americans are determined, at all costs, that southern Vietnam shall not fall under Communist rule. They argue that this would alter the whole strategic balance of power in Southeast Asia.’ Instead, by instituting the autocratic Diem regime in South Vietnam, where ‘American diplomats and military “advisers”’ were already ‘extremely active’, the US, Tribune’s columnist predicted, was ‘prepared . . . to restart the Indo-China War’.

In the North, Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong organised a popular socialist government, formalising the effective sovereignty the revolutionary movement had long exercised over much of the country. In Britain, Indochina’s insurgency and its culmination at Dien Bien Phu had electrified radical consciousness surrounding Vietnam, inspiring folksinger Ewan MacColl to compose ‘The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh’ (1954).

For Tribune, too, Vietnam’s revolution had by the later 1950s become a source of inspiration. Following a 1957 delegation of Tribunite MPs to Hanoi, Ian Mikardo reported on their garden audience with the North Vietnamese leadership:

You don’t talk for long to Ho Chi Minh without realising that he is one of the very great men. . .. Ho Chi Minh is the most recent example of the classic revolutionaries — those who defy an Empire’s powers and an Empire’s prisons with a handful of stones and a sling.

The visitors also met with veterans of the anti-colonial guerilla struggle, their ‘individual stories . . . piec[ing] together into an overall picture of an almost incredible survival’:

The memories of those days, and the comradeship forged in the jungle, are still the main motor forces in this country. They give to all the North Vietnamese something of the quiet confidence that exudes from Ho Chi Minh. These people see all around them problems of frightening magnitude. But they reckon they can do the impossible because they’ve done the impossible before.

Tribune’s belated admiration for the North Vietnamese revolution, and for Ho Chi Minh himself, would largely persevere through the devastating ensuing war with the American invaders. In 1969, upon the death of the affectionately named Uncle Ho, the paper mourned his departure thus: ‘Ho Chi Minh — The Man Who Was Both the George Washington and the Abraham Lincoln of His Country’.

Rolling Thunder

Ten years after the Tribunites’ delegation to Hanoi, the worst fears of the publication following the Geneva peace conference had been realised:

The present state of the Vietnam war is almost indescribable. The barbarity of the American air attacks on North Vietnam is without comparison in modern times; the savagery of the ground war in the South continues to grow. . .. The stark horror and shame and tragedy of Vietnam is something which cannot be compared with any other war. There has never been anything like it in the bloody and cruel history of this planet.

A comprehensive recounting of Tribune’s commentary on the Vietnam War would unfortunately exceed the limits of this article, so expansive is the written record in chronological and journalistic scope. The paper carried multiple articles on the conflict almost every week over many years, from the conflict’s gestation amidst ‘the mounting horror of burning monks’, the rise of the National Liberation Front (NLF, also referred to as Viet Cong) insurgency in the South, and the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’, right through to the fall of Saigon. What follows is only a summary of one of the longest and most important chapters in the history of Tribune as an internationalist publication.

Among the most powerful aspects of Tribune’s war journalism was the reporting from its assorted international correspondents on the ground. British-Kiwi activist Freda Cook, the University of Hanoi’s first foreign English teacher, relayed several accounts throughout 1965 on heartrending family bereavement and determined resistance to US bombing in the North Vietnamese capital, while Tariq Ali’s 1967 ‘Hanoi Diary’ as a fact-finder for the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal featured testimony from civilian victims of US napalm and ‘anti-personnel bombs’, and from Prime Minister Pham Van Dong.

Peggy Duff — one-time Tribune business manager, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and a peace campaigner who Noam Chomsky has claimed ‘should have won the Nobel Peace Prize about twenty times’ — proved one of Tribune’s most prolific Indochina correspondents, writing variously from Saigon, Hanoi, and Vientiane, and covering the Paris peace talks amidst Mai 68. Another CND grandee, Pat Arrowsmith detailed her experiences of bombed villages inside the Cambodian border, and her party’s non-violent ‘direct action’ at the American air force base in Udorn, Thailand.

The paper also maintained rigorous coverage of the Vietnamese battlefront, including ‘[t]he astonishingly brilliant, well-coordinated guerilla offensive’ during the festival of Tet in early 1968, which ‘answered the question about who was pinning down who’. Outlining ‘How the War Was Brought to the Cities’, Duff explained: ‘This was something much more than a NLF and North Vietnamese offensive. It was a popular rising. . .. Even if the present risings are put down things will never be the same again.’

The revelation in 1969 of the previous year’s ‘terrible massacre’ of over 500 civilians at My Lai by US Marines, which ‘no one will ever forgive or forget’, was characterised by Tribune as one ‘which symbolises the whole repugnant story of Vietnam’. The publication consistently situated America’s incessant war crimes in Indochina within the genealogy of fascist barbarism: making routine reference to Nazi blitzkrieg and designating tormented Hanoi ‘the Guernica of the 1960s’.

Labour and Vietnam

Tribune’s relationship with the Wilson government, whose 1964 accession it had celebrated and whose ministerial ranks boasted several 1950s Tribunites, was greatly strained over Vietnam (and much else besides). The popular refrain that Wilson’s efforts ‘kept Britain out of Vietnam’, while narrowly correct, obscures the depth of his government’s complicity with America’s war: rendering consequential rhetorical, diplomatic, and technical services, including army, police, and counterinsurgency training and the logistical use of British Hong Kong. Tribune maintained weekly criticism of the Labour government for its role in legitimating America’s war internationally. Duff announced her 1967 resignation from the Labour Party in its pages: ‘I simply cannot stomach any longer the failure of the Labour government to condemn in any way that continued heavy, daily bombing of towns, cities and villages in Vietnam.’

Its stance was made awkward, however, by its broad unwillingness to enter into an open editorial opposition to the Labour government as such, which many on Britain’s revolutionary left — and several contributors to Tribune’s correspondence pages — beseeched of it. Tariq Ali criticised his friend Michael Foot in 1965 for what he saw as his ‘subtle defence of Harold Wilson week after week’, while similar contention followed Tribune’s opposition to Radical Alliance candidate Richard Gott’s challenge to Labour over Vietnam in January 1966’s Hull by-election (though Gott, a ‘most valued contributor to this paper’, was granted a platform to state his case).

Tribune basically maintained its long-standing (left) Labourism throughout the Vietnam war, continuing to interview Wilson on occasion but supporting initiatives to persuade the Labour ministry to condemn Washington — and thereafter to dissociate the Labour Party from the government’s policy. Following its 1970 electoral ouster, Clive Jenkins looked back unsympathetically upon the defeated administration’s record on Vietnam: ‘The saddest reflection for any member of the British Labour Party must be that the foreign policy of a Labour Government conceivably lengthened one of the unfairest, bitterest and bloodiest wars the world has ever seen.’

Street-Fighting Years

I am convinced that there exists in America today the greatest anti-war movement in history.’ Frank Allaun MP, who had resigned from Wilson’s government over Vietnam, expressed admiration in Tribune for the popular street mobilisation against ‘the Vietnam bloodbath’ developing in the United States. Britain, too, saw anti-war protest in the sixties, which found the greatest expression in the iconic March 1968 ‘Battle of Grosvenor Square’ outside London’s US embassy.

Tribune occupied a somewhat ambivalent position in relation to the radical protest of those ‘street-fighting years’, down to its hesitancy to declare total hostility to the government and the emphasis more upon a diplomatic road to a peaceful settlement than the militant sloganeering of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC): ‘Victory to the NLF!’ The paper tended to adhere to the stance of Fenner Brockway’s British Council for Peace in Vietnam (BCPV), publicised in its pages in 1965: ‘The purpose of the Council is not to apportion blame but to bring peace. It proposes to contribute constructively to the realisation of a ceasefire and negotiations for a peaceful settlement.’

Brockway elaborated: ‘We want peace, and we want peace which recognises the right of the Vietnamese to self-determination and to freedom from military intervention.’ Tribune articulated a similar position in its 1966 ‘Vietnam Manifesto’, exhorting a ceasefire pending elections in the South and negotiations between all parties, including the US. Bertrand Russell wrote in, criticising Tribune’s ‘Pro-American Manifesto’:

It is an unwarranted concession to the brute force of imperialism for Socialists in the West to bargain with the rights of the oppressed by demanding that the Americans, who perpetrate such terrible war crimes and who have been in occupation of Vietnam for twelve years, should now determine a provisional government. . .. All of us have the duty to struggle for the defeat of America and the victory of the Vietnamese, just as we had that responsibility in support of those resisting Hitler a quarter of a century earlier.

Russell announced the formation of the VSC, of which he was president: ‘The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign is seeking to make clear the basic issues in this struggle and to organise a series of actions in Britain supporting the National Liberation Front and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against the Americans.’

Such cleavages within Britain’s anti–Vietnam War left persisted through the sixties. But Tribune maintained a genial attitude towards the younger radicals who marched on Grosvenor Square, granting their advocates plentiful column inches and defending their right to march against parliamentary and press hysteria — imploring the government to ‘Give Them The Roads!’

This Is the End

Tribune continued its coverage of the Vietnam conflagration — which under Nixon and Kissinger saw Laos and Cambodia too dragged, screaming, into Washington’s ground and air campaign in earnest — until the denouement in 1975, with the collapse of 1973’s Paris Peace Accords and Washington’s face-saving ‘Vietnamisation’ strategy. That March, Duff recognised: ‘The puppet regimes in Phnom Penh and Saigon are in real trouble.’ Tribune greeted the final capitulation of the latter on 30 April with a sombre poem from Pat Arrowsmith, ‘The Day the 30 Years’ War Concluded’, whose final stanzas read:

They came to shore up the ramparts

of their own overfed society;

to prime the purses of the privileged few

who appropriate the wealth of their own country;

to plunder another land

so that their own filth-belching factories and

horrendous war machine kept running.

But in the end they couldn’t do it.

People determined to be free

cannot be pillaged and suppressed for ever.

So they were forced at last to leave,

in an absurd fluster of distraught ambassadors,

a chaos of disintegrating chopper blades.

With ‘the end of the Vietnam war on such massively humiliating terms for America’, Tribune’s later editor Chris Mullin, who had previously corresponded from Lon Nol’s Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, called on Britain to recognise the new revolutionary provisional government in Saigon. He also pondered ‘The Consequences of Compulsory Evacuation’ in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh by the new Khmer Rouge regime, and disturbing second-hand accounts of mass killings; such apprehension would later be shown tragically prescient in his and renowned Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s harrowing reports for Tribune from the ‘Wasteland and Misery’ of a twice-traumatised Cambodia, following the exorcism by Vietnamese forces of the nightmare regime of Pol Pot.

Thankfully, as Mullin recognised back in 1975, the manner of the conclusion of Cambodia’s war stood ‘in marked contrast to that . . . in Vietnam’, where all-Vietnamese reunification and reconstruction offered a hopeful epilogue to a costly three-decade struggle for national freedom and socialist aspiration. Labour’s Stan Newens, ‘the first British MP to visit Vietnam since the triumph of the National Liberation forces’, wrote for Tribune from post-war Saigon, rechristened Ho Chi Minh City:

No socialist could fail to be deeply moved and impressed by this friendly, infinitely courageous and determined people who have won one of the most horrific wars of the twentieth century against the most incredible odds to secure control of their own affairs. Now that peace has, thankfully, at last come to Vietnam, those of us who supported the Vietnamese in the darkest hours of their struggle must launch a new campaign to assist them to build the land that they so richly deserve.