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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Nearly thirty years have passed since the end of the “Vietnam War” or rather the “American War,” as it is known in Vietnam. But the American war in Vietnam originated in the French war to restore colonialism in the power vacuum following the Japanese surrender in August-September 1945. As the following article documents, early U.S. post-war planners seemed to have grasped the iniquitous nature of old-style colonialism only to have forgotten their ideals when confronted with an independent revolutionary movement in the early days of US-Soviet conflict. History has revealed the disastrous consequences of American escalation in Vietnam on the wrong side of history, just as the lessons of history appear seldom to have been learned as, one generation on, America plunges into no less disastrous military adventures in other theaters in pursuit of militant Islam tied to terror.
[1] Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971, Chapter 1 “Background to the Crisis, 1940-50” pp. 1-52.
[2] Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, Major Problems in American Foreign Policy, Vol. II: Since 1914, 4th ed. D.C. Heath and Co., Lexington 1995, pp.189-90.
[3] Archimedes Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America' s Albatross, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980.
[4] Pentagon Papers.
[5] Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, Britain, America and the Politics of the Secret Service, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 305; 343-45.
[6] A.K. Nelson (ed), The State Department Policy Staff papers, 1947-1949 (3 vols. New York), pp. 1ix.
[7] Patti, Why Viet Nam?, p.52.
[8] R.H. Spector, Advice and Support The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam 1941-1960, The Free Press New York London, 1985.
[9] For a focused study of intra-factional struggles between the Viet Minh, Trotskyists, and others in Saigon in 1945, see David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995).
[10] Patti, Why Viet Nam?, p. 272.
[11] OSS Southeast Asia Command.
[12] Patti, Why Viet Nam?, pp. 275-76.
[13] Spector, Advice and Support, p. 68.
[14] In a recent book on the role of the British in Vietnam, Britain in Vietnam: Prelude to Disaster, 1945-6 (Routledge, 2007, chap “Death of an OSS Man”), Peter Neville strikes a more critical position on the OSS role in Saigon, at least as reported by Archimedes Patti in Why Viet Nam? Neville even doubts that Dewey was ordered out of Vietnam suggesting he wished to leave on his own volition.
[15] Death of Major Peter Dewey, October 1945, Pike Collection, Item no. 2360209040
[16] Seymour Topping, “Vietnamese Historian Recalls Untold Story of Tragic Murder of Peter Dewey,” in The OSS Society, Inc, Summer 2005, pp.3-4.
[17] Documents Relating to OSS Activity in French Indochina MLB-2739-B.
[18] Death of Major Peter Dewey, October 1945.
[19] Arthur J. Dommen and George W. Dalley, “The OSS and Laos: The 1945 Raven Mission and American Policy,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 22, no.2, September, 1991, pp.327-46.
[20] Jean Boucher de Crèvecoeur, La Liberation du Laos, 1945-1946, Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre, Vincennes, 1985, pp. 51-60.
[21] de Crèvecoeur, La Liberation, pp.51-60.
[22] Dommen and Dalley, p.342.
[23] Dommen and Dalley (p.346) suggest that knowledge of the “impermissible independence” of the OSS in Laos actually gave pause to President Truman and successors as to the need for firmer presidential control over a successor intelligence organization, namely the CIA. The OSS also fell victim of intra-bureaucratic turf wars in Washington. Abolished by Truman, the OSS was formally closed down in October 1945 with individuals morphing into a Strategic Services Unit coming under the War Department. In July 1947, the CIA was created as America's prime intelligence organization, just as the Cold War was given priority.
See, Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, p.343.
[24] Robert Scheer, “Bush's Vietnam Analogy,” The Nation, 22 November 2006.
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