The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (75 page)

FRENCH INDOCHINA WAR

Death toll:
393,000

Rank:
88

Type:
colonial rebellion

Broad dividing line:
France vs. Viet Minh

Time frame:
1945–54

Location:
French Indochina

Major state participant:
France

Major quasi-state participants:
Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam

Major non-state participant:
Viet Minh

Who usually gets the most blame:
France

N
GUYEN SINH CUNG WAS BORN IN 1890, THE SON OF A VIETNAMESE
teacher, and he spent his youth bouncing around all of the major centers of Communist thought—university in Paris, Moscow after the revolution, and Shanghai before Chiang Kai-shek cracked down. In 1919, he tried to convince the victorious allies at the Versailles peace conference to free his people from French rule. When that failed, he returned to his homeland to organize an independence movement. Before anything came of that, East Asia was thrown into turmoil by the Japanese occupation of the West’s colonies, but regardless of who was in charge, Nguyen was ready to launch a nationalist resistance; he merely directed the effort against Japan instead. He established a rebel force called the Viet Minh, from which he took his new alias, Ho Chi Minh.

The fall of Japan in August 1945 left Vietnam in limbo. Without any Allied troops to tell them otherwise, Japanese garrisons began to cooperate with the Viet Minh on local administration, and after settling into the colonial capital of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence. Then, in September, Nationalist Chinese forces—the nearest Allies on hand—arrived to take control, but mostly they just looted Hanoi and left the rest of the colony to look after itself. Indochina sank into chaos as discharged troops, released prisoners, deserters, and crime bosses scrambled to grab whatever they could before anyone could stop them. In some regions, the harassed and outnumbered French authorities—recently released from Japanese prisons—reached agreements with Ho Chi Minh’s rebels to restore order. Back in Paris, General Charles de Gaulle of the provisional government announced that France was not going to abandon any of its colonies. As far as he was concerned, independence would never happen.
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When Ho Chi Minh heard this, he turned less cooperative about letting more French troops and officials into Vietnam. With a cease-fire in place, negotiations dragged on, and tensions escalated. In November 1946, the French demanded full control of the port city of Haiphong, but the Viet Minh refused to evacuate. French warships bombarded Viet Minh neighborhoods and blew apart 6,000 civilians. French tanks and aircraft attacked rebel positions in the city. Door-to-door fighting finally cleared the Viet Minh from the city.
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As more troops arrived from Europe, France took firm control of all of the cities in Indochina. The Viet Minh, however, dominated the remote countryside and ambushed any French troops who ventured too far into their territory.

The French tried to deflate the independence movement by reorganizing their colony into autonomous but cooperative vassals. They put local monarchs into each piece of the colony and gave them nominal independence under an umbrella organization called the French Union.

In 1949, the Communist takeover of China finally reached the borders of Vietnam, which gave the rebels access to a major supplier of weapons. The war now shifted to these border regions as the Viet Minh tried to keep in contact with the Red Chinese and the French tried to break this contact. In December 1953, French paratroops seized and fortified Dien Bien Phu (now in Laos), a major station on the Communist supply line, hoping to draw the rebels into an open battle that favored the French. Instead Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap brought the strongpoint under siege. By March 1954, rebel combat troops numbering 70,000 and 100,000 support personnel isolated15,000 entrenched French, and General Giap opened his attacks. After fifty-six days of relentless raiding, sniping, and bombardment wore down the French and squeezed them into a shrinking enclave, Dien Bien Phu surrendered.

This defeat convinced the French government that further fighting was futile. Peace negotiations started shortly afterward and granted independence to French Indochina in the form of four countries—Laos, Cambodia, and a Vietnam divided into two parts, one for the Communists and another for the non-Communists.

That wouldn’t last long.

Death Toll

The French side lost around 93,000 soldiers dead, but the French
people
lost only 20,700 of those. The rest were Indochinese allies (18,700), Indochinese colonials (26,700), African colonials (15,200), and Foreign Legionnaires (11,600). Obviously one of the advantages of having an empire is that you can use the colonials to do most of your fighting for you.

Estimates of casualties among the Vietnamese are sketchy. Probably 175,000 Viet Minh were killed fighting the French, while 125,000 civilians were killed as well.
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PARTITION OF INDIA

Death toll:
500,000
¹

Rank:
70

Type:
ethnic cleansing

Broad dividing line:
Hindus and Sikhs vs. Muslims

Time frame:
1947

Location and major state participants:
Pakistan, India

Who usually gets the most blame:
Hindus, Muslims, especially Jinnah

T
HE END OF COLONIAL RULE IN INDIA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A TRIUMPH OF
the human spirit. The second most populous political entity on the planet, a free India would liberate one-sixth of the human population. Just as inspiring, the liberation had been accomplished without violence. Mohandas Gandhi had staged massive marches, fasts, boycotts, and strikes to convince the British to leave. This was no replay of the long bloody rebellions that had liberated the Western Hemisphere.

The one small snag in the independence movement was that many of India’s Muslims did not want to be a minority under Hindu control. Their leader, Mohammed Jinnah, demanded a separate country carved out of those regions where Muslims were the majority. Gandhi, on the other hand, was horrified at the idea of a fractured India, and even offered to accept Muslim rule over all Hindus if that would keep India intact. Other Hindu nationalists, however, were just as horrified by Gandhi’s solution.

In the mid-1930s, when the British finally began to consider the idea of eventual independence for India, they had put the actual day a long way off into the vague future, but then the Second World War exhausted Britain into abandoning its empire much sooner. The first plan called for a federation of autonomous states, but just as they were putting the finishing touches on the plan in 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Hindus, casually mentioned that it was subject to change. Feeling they were tricked, the Muslims in Calcutta rioted. Within three days, 5,000 people had been killed in pogroms launched back and forth between Muslims and Hindus in the city. After the riots spread throughout the country, the body count quadrupled. Corpses piling up in the streets snarled traffic.

Tempers eventually cooled long enough to devise a new plan. The Muslim-majority regions of British India were bundled together to form the sovereign country of Pakistan. The frontier provinces abutting Iran and Afghanistan were so thoroughly Muslim that they could be easily assigned to Pakistan, but two inner provinces, Bengal and Punjab, were especially tricky because both religions were equally common and interwoven throughout the area. These provinces would have to be split into Hindu and Muslim majority regions. A British commissioner named Sir Cyril Radcliffe was given the thankless and impossible task of carving out fair boundaries. His main qualification was that he had never been to India and presumably had no bias. He was locked away with socio-ethnic census maps, a pencil with an eraser, and absolute authority to do whatever he wanted. The exact borders weren’t even announced until August 14–15, 1947, the evening of independence.
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Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed to be the final viceroy of India, and he wanted to get it over with. While advisers suggested a gradual timetable with sovereignty progressively handed over one piece at a time, Mountbatten insisted on cutting the subcontinent loose all at once, within a year. Mountbatten did not want to get caught in the civil war that was looming in India.
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Even before independence arrived, mob violence began to purge communities of their minorities, trying to remove any excuse for getting assigned to the wrong country. Hindus angry at Muslims for forcing the split committed the first murders, but the killing soon went in both directions as each side sought revenge for whatever atrocity the other side had just committed.

Millions of Indians tried to escape the violence, which continued even as the day of independence came and went. Columns of refugees fleeing their former homes were often ambushed and slaughtered. Trains often had to run a gauntlet of gunfire from machine guns set up alongside the tracks. If the trains stopped, passengers were dragged off screaming and butchered by the dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands.
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Silent “ghost trains” pulled into stations hauling boxcars loaded only with the dead and dying, moaning in congealed pools of blood.
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Gandhi camped out in Calcutta, fasting in protest over the ethnic violence and growing ever weaker with hunger. His spiritual hold over the Indian people was so great that they obeyed him, and Bengal was spared the worst of the violence.

In November 1947, once all of the people who had been caught on the wrong side of the border were either dead or exiled, the slaughter abruptly stopped. Over those chaotic months, more than 14 million people had fled their homes—7.3 million Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan, 7.2 million Muslims from India.
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For what it’s worth, the fact that a roughly equal number of each were stuck in the wrong country probably means that Radcliffe had drawn the border as fairly as was humanly possible.

However, the partition violence still had one more victim left to claim. In January 1948 a Hindu fanatic assassinated Mohandas Gandhi for betraying his side and caring about the lives of the enemy.
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