March 28, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 50

Other People’s Empires

Churchill, America and Vietnam, 1941-45, by T. O. Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, softbound, illus., 200 pages, $28.95.
Churchill, Eden and Indo-China, 1951-1955, by Nong van Dan. Anthem Press, softbound, 390 pages, $40.00.

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Widely traveled though he was, Churchill never reached South- east Asia. But the region surely troubled him, given the 1941-42 losses to Japan of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma. Still, those colonies were parts of the British Empire. Why then two new books about Churchill and a part of South- east Asia that was never British?

On closer inspection they are really studies of the growing importance of the “Special Relationship” be- tween Britain and the United States—and why French colonies mattered little if they got in the way of that relationship. While Churchill resisted American interference in the British Empire, colonies belonging to others could, if need be, give way to U.S. demands for their independence. Vietnam is the case in point here.

Smith focuses on Churchill’s war- time administration and his relation- ship with Roosevelt, while Nong covers Churchill’s second (technically third) premiership of 1951-55, and his and Eden’s interactions with Truman and Eisenhower. Through the two Churchill premierships, the United States became and remained the dominant military and economic partner. Maintaining the special relationship with a powerful America became one of Churchill’s aims, coloring his views in foreign policy, on occasion to Eden’s despair. Eden’s role grew in the 1950s, culminating when he followed Churchill for a short and disastrous term as prime minister.

Smith, a history professor at Indiana’s Huntington University, argues that Churchill had little concern for the shape of the postwar world despite his micro-management of British participation in World War II. Churchill readily admitted not keeping up with Indochina issues and concerns—he lacked the time, let alone the interest. Eden’s Foreign Office was more concerned and consistent, for they wanted to retain France as a major ally and power, and colonies were still seen as a part of such a role. That the British view mattered became clear in September 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence just as British troops entered the country to take the Japanese surrender. Trying to extricate themselves from a developing civil war, the British suffered nearly a thousand casualties—the Vietnamese and French even more. It was the opening salvo for decades of war.

Nong, a senior research fellow at an economics institute in Hanoi, bases his study of postwar developments on his Cambridge Ph.D dissertation. As a Vietnamese, he has drawn on many domestic sources there as well as British archives. His book is as much a study of the internal policymaking operations of the Foreign Office as a study of Churchill and Eden.

The economically pinched British tried to maintain their colonies in Burma and Malaya in the face of growing nationalism. The deepening French-Vietnamese battle for power was complex and potentially dangerous with the triumph of Communism in China in 1949, the Korean War of 1950-53, and Cold War tensions. The fall of the French base at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 effectively led to the 1955 Geneva agreements to divide Vietnam. Nong provides good coverage of the large cast of characters in this story. An appendix offers a dozen maps, largely drawn from contemporary Foreign Office documents. Documentation includes some 105 pages of often very detailed footnotes and a thirty-page bibliography that includes many Vietnamese sources.

Taken together, these two new studies provide a valuable case study of how a region on the fringe of Churchill’s interest grew to such importance during the Cold War. Plumbing archives and documenting their tracks, the two authors fill an obscure gap in the Churchill story.

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