Britain and the Making of Hồ Chí Minh
Britain's history in Vietnam has been one of collusion with French colonialism and US war crimes. But there is another story of workers protesting, raising medical funds and flying the flag of the Viet Cong.
Today, the Vietnamese people celebrate 50 years since the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong) liberated Saigon, coordinating with the city’s popular uprising to remove the US-backed South Vietnamese puppet regime from power to end 150 years of colonialism and create an independent Vietnam.
This independence was a freedom temporarily gained in 1945, when the August Revolution gave birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a new society free of Japanese imperialism and the French Empire, which ruled before the Second World War. But the values of democracy and self-determination fought for in Europe were apparently never intended to apply to Europe’s subjugated. A month later, British forces landed in Vietnam to restore French rule, deploying some of the most vicious methods of killing and terror.
This wasn’t the only moment that Britain intervened in the Vietnamese people’s affairs — indeed, the relationship between Britain and Vietnam’s anti-colonial movement has deep roots.
When Europe’s empires cashed in their rival might to confront each other in the First World War, a young Nguyễn Tất Thành closely followed its impact on emerging anti-colonial struggles while working in London’s kitchens. Appalled by the wasteful indulgence of the imperial core while working at the Carlton Hotel — Winston Churchill’s purported favourite venue — Nguyễn would save any untouched beef or chicken from waste. When he suggested to the head chef that the leftovers could be given to the needy, he called Nguyễn a ‘boy’ and told him to focus on making money.
Nguyễn’s time living alongside London’s working-class didn’t just provide sources of indignation, but was a source of inspiration. Joining the Association of Foreign Labourers, a secret organisation of Asian labourers which supported patriotic struggle in colonised countries, the organisation took part in industrial disruption and solidarity activity with the ongoing Irish struggle for independence from Britain. When the Irish Republican leader and elected politician Terence MacSwiney died after 74 days on hunger strike in a British jail, Nguyễn praised the ‘heroic’ Cork mayor, remarking that ‘a nation which has such citizens will never surrender.’
Like MacSwiney, Nguyễn would find himself imprisoned by the British in 1931. In Victoria Jail, Hong Kong, Nguyễn and Vietnamese Communists had been captured after trying to evade French and Chinese nationalist forces following the suppression of the workers’ and peasants’ uprisings which formed local soviets in the areas of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh. After being arrested in June, Nguyễn was placed in solitary confinement, marked as a ‘dangerous communist’ and charged with deportation to French-controlled territory through a French ship moored in Hong Kong.
What saved Nguyễn and the uprising’s leadership from French hands was opposition to Britain’s colonial foreign policy by a British barrister, Francis Loseby, who expertly proved there was no base for Nguyễn’s arrest. This was rejected by a judge, who ruled that Nguyễn be deported anyway. The case reached London, falling into the hands of Stafford Cripps, a left-leaning Solicitor General. Recognising the embarrassment if the case went to retrial, Cripps cut a deal with Loseby to release Nguyễn so long as he left Hong Kong. Had these interventions not been made, the course of Vietnamese history would have taken a different route. But the British blinked, and three decades on, a grateful Nguyễn — now Hồ Chí Minh — reunited with Loseby by inviting his family to stay at his Hanoi presidential palace.
Passing on the Baton
In recent papers covered by Declassified UK, it has been revealed that while the British government never sent British troops to Vietnam, successive prime ministers did whatever else was possible to aid the US forces in their war, including sending officials from Britain’s Jungle Warfare School in Malaya to South Vietnam to advise on ‘counter-insurgency’. Support had nothing to do with notions of ‘protecting democracy’, since the Foreign Office regarded the US-backed regime in Saigon a ‘a clumsy and heavy-handed dictatorship which is conspicuously lacking in popular appeal’; policy was driven more by fears that regime collapse ‘would be disastrous to British interests and investments in South East Asia’.
Britain’s old colonial outpost in Hong Kong, which nearly stopped Hồ Chí Minh before he had really begun, played a key role in enabling the US to crank up its aggression at every stage. From there, Britain relayed intelligence to Washington and even launched secret air flights to deliver arms such as napalm and heavy bombs. British intercepts of North Vietnamese military traffic were also handed over for bombing North Vietnam, where 80 percent of the casualties are estimated to have been civilians.
Britain co-chaired the 1954 Geneva Agreement for preventing further conflict in the country. Yet when the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ gave the green light for the US to bomb North Vietnam, a Foreign Office private memo speculated that they ‘did not see how the UN charter could be invoked to justify an attack on North Vietnam’ and that landing 3,500 marines in South Vietnam in 1965 was ‘in contravention of Article 16 and 17 of the [Geneva] agreement’, remarking that ‘we have not yet received any protests on the subject.’
But despite Harold Wilson — then a young left-winger — declaring in 1954 that ‘we must not join with, nor in any way encourage, the anti-Communist crusade in Asia,’ US Secretary of State Dean Rusk thanked Wilson for refusing to criticise US actions in Vietnam in Parliament when pressured to do so by MPs. Later, Wilson would boast that Britain had helped ‘restrain’ other European and Commonwealth countries articulating ‘their own apprehensions’ about the US presence in Vietnam.
Get the Yanks Out Now
While Wilson’s government desperately tried to help US war aims wherever possible, it was incredibly careful to do it in secret to avoid backlash from British public opinion, and from the Tribune Group, whose growing parliamentary significance Wilson felt keenly. On the streets and at trade union meetings, Britain’s anti-Vietnam War movement consistently demanded peace and negotiations, as well as for Britain to end its silence over American actions and fulfil its obligations as a Geneva Agreement signatory.
Though not as famous as the anti-war movement in the US, Britain’s solidarity campaign with Vietnam was arguably broader than its North American counterpart. Major groups included the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, though early actions were often coordinated by local Communist branches, left-led union branches and student societies.
The first concerted opposition to the war against Vietnam in Britain came from organised workers. Ben Rubner, a cabinetmaker and veteran of anti-fascist street politics in London’s East End who had risen to lead the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union (FTATU, now part of the GMB union) played a prominent role in organising demonstrations and led an early solidarity delegation of workers to Vietnam in 1964. Workers in Nottingham led by the young communist Bob Allen had been heavily involved in bicycle-buying campaigns for the Viet Cong and eventually made front page news for hoisting the NLF flag over Nottingham City Hall.
As war drew on, activity grew. During one anti-war protest in 1968 at Sussex University, two students covered an American government official with red paint, resulting in their suspension. On 17 March and 27 October 1968, London thronged with anti-war protesters, with nearly a quarter of a million people attending the October demonstration. On both occasions, protests were directed to Grosvenor Square, the home of the American Embassy, and the latter was met with serious police violence. One protester recalled:
I remember being terrified at being chased down by what seemed like scores of mounted police with truncheons flailing about while the square was blocked off so that none who found themselves on the inside could get out. But the police seemed as frightened as the protesters. I remember also seeing Mick Jagger standing coolly on the steps of a house in the square surveying the chaos.
Though Jagger’s ambiguous lyrics to ‘Street Fighting Man’ were allegedly based on these clashes, the soundtrack to the British movement was less Rolling Stones and more Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Ballad of Hồ Chí Minh’. The song, originally recorded after the Viet Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, found popularity in the 1960s folk revival and would be sung by protesters on the street — and by MacColl and Peggy Seeger at the Hanoi Opera House in 1967.
‘Uncle Ho’ himself enjoyed MacColl’s song for its simplicity and its ‘deep praise’ for Vietnam; later, it was translated by Vietnamese artist Phu An, securing this Salfordian communist’s song enduring popularity in Vietnam today. It also remains popular for trade unionists of all generations to sing after having probably a few too many at labour movement events like the Durham Miners’ Gala — a pleasing reminder that despite the British elite’s dark role in suppressing Vietnam’s aspirations to freedom, a strong current has always existed of British working people who, in opposing the same rulers heroic Vietnam once opposed, still draw inspiration from their victory today.