| July 16 |  |
Editor says, President John Nance Garner honours the Atlantic Charter granting the Vietnamese their freedom in 1945. Because in this post we explore a tragedy - an American field doctor saved the life of Ho Chi Minh. Yet his sincere offer of an alliance to Truman was ignored, and he survived to fight another war that would cause the death of sixty thousand US soldiers.
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In 1945, on this day Operation Deer Team parachuted into a jungle headquarters at Tan Trao north of Hanoi where they found copies of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution on the walls and a framed picture of George Washington on the desk.
All men are created equalThe seven OSS men led by Major Allison Kent Thomas were on a mission to help a band of two hundred eilte guerrillas fight the Japanese yet they soon discovered that their leader Nguyen Ai Qoc (pictured) was seriously ill from malaria, dysentary and other tropical diseases. After administering quinine and sulfa drugs, the team medic and an officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank Paul Hoagland soon exclaimed that "this man doesn't have long for this world".
Buried in the field with full military honours, Quoc's deputy eulogised by explaining that their former leader was also known by another name "He who enlightens", in Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh. That man was Vo Nguyen Giap, the ingenius military commander who would mastermind military efforts against the invading Chinese Communists during the nineteen sixties.
In August 1945, one day after Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced surrender, Giap sent a message to President John Nance Garner. He asked the United States to make Vietnam an American protectorate, like the Philippines. The next day, GIap and the Viet Minh took control of Hanoi from the Japanese. Ho marched into Hanoi with Operation Deer Team personnel where Ho broadcast a message to OSS headquarters, speaking English: "National Liberation Committee on VML begs U.S. authorities to inform United Nations the following. We were fighting Japs on the side of the Allies. Now Japs surrendered. We beg the Allies to realize their solemn promise that all nationalities will be given democracy and independence. If the Allies forget their solemn promise and don't give Indochina full independence, we will keep fighting until we get it".
On September 2, 1945 a band marched through Hanoi playing the Star Spangled Banner while OSS officer Colonel Archimedes Patti and Vo Nguyen Giap stood side by side, arms held in salute. The two men are shown in this stance in a photograph in Smith's book on the OSS. Giap declared that day Vietnam Independence Day, and he began his liberation speech with the words, "All men are created equal".
The US President could not agree more and signed up to the idea of a protectorate. It was a done deal, because Garner's vision of America was a beacon of liberty to whom the post-war nations would rally.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© "The Greatest Stories Never Told, 100 tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder & Stupefy", Rick Beyer (2003)Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Beacon of Liberty Source: Wikipedia Labels: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, America, Cold War, Forties. Editor says, Hoagland saved Uncle Ho, but Truman ignored the later communications from him.
~ The US seems to have a bad habit of foreign relations screw-ups in the post WWII period, so this is an interesting change of events. Now all we need is for Castro to be taken seriously...
~ I think I read a short story with this theme a few years back...
~ I don't know...this might have worked out just fine, but with the Communists' victory in China in 1949, we might have ended up fighting a war to protect Vietnam. The Viets and Chinese traditionally loathe each other anyway...
~ Depends on if we throw in our lot with the Callicized folka that were the ruling class of the RVN... okay, _how_ _much_ we throw in our lot with them.
~ I suspect we'd have given Ho the air, because after all "Indochina" was aat that time under French colonial rule and the USA of 1945 might have been disinclined to hand it over to "inferior" Orientals. And if not, our "protectorate" would have become a sore point later, unless Vietnam were eventually granted full independence like the Philippines (which had been promised independence in 1898, after the Spanish-american War, but only got it in 1946.
~ Ho Chi Minh was a Marxist back in his student days in Paris. His massacre of Catholics and landed peasants had nothing to do with his war against the French. A more interesting scenario was independence based on the local Imperial Family BEFORE the Chinese reached the Indo-China border!
~ Nice idea and it really might have worked except 1. Ho's crowd were avowed marxists and avowed nationalists who were racists in their own right, Their plans for their people did not include democracy or liberty or even return to traditonal Confucian values. They had a stalin style agenda which required a lot of innocent blood to be spilled to fuel it. 2. I doubt the French would care for it and the American state department back then and now still sees itself as an agent of Europe with few exceptions such as the 1956 Suez mess. The French planned very much to return to their decadent prostitution and drug dealing days of old for the benefit of the French treasury which meant ever more exploitation of the Vietnamese. America's 'Progressive's having got us into two world wars and about to get us into cleaning up more european messes seem bent on doing more. Personally, I suspect Ho, having lived in the US for a while had more in mind to con us into backing him to his own ends not those of his countrymen.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
