Long before America's war in Vietnam, General Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force conducted a savage war in the skies over French Indochina, as Vietnam was called during World War II. It was a battle fought largely without publicity, hidden in the shadows of more titanic struggles that captured the headlines of the war: Guadalcanal, Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Normandy, or the Battle of the Bulge. By January 1945, as far as the American public was concerned, the life-and-death struggle in Indochina was literally reduced to funny pages in the strip, "Terry and the Pirates," which ironically credited the Navy for the fighting in the French colony.
The war in Indochina was made more dangerous and tragic by the actions of the Vichy French Indochinese colonial authorities who willingly aided the Japanese war effort militarily as well as economically. As part of a deliberate policy of collaboration with the Axis, the Vichy French government of Marshal Philippe Petain had allowed the Japanese to establish military bases in northern Indochina, or Tonkin, in September 1949, in order to attack the Nationalists in China. Vichy stood aside a year later, in July 1941, when the Japanese moved into southern Indochina.
Indochina's collaboration went even further. In March 1942, four airmen and an army engineer reached Tourane (item 1 on small insert map), now Do Nang, by launch from the Philippines. The four were turned over to the Japanese on the orders of Indochina's governor general, Vice Admiral Jean Decoux. Four of these men toiled for the rest of the war on the "Railroad of Death" in Thailand, made famous by Pierre Boulle's novel, Bridge Over the River Kwai. (Free French Lieutenant Boulle was himself one of Decoux's prisoners after he was captured trying to establish a resistance organization in the colony.) The fifth, a fighter pilot from the l6th Pursuit Squadron, eventually escaped and reached China safely the day the war ended. On May 20, 1942, a Flying Tiger was downed over Lao Kay, French Indochina (item 2 on small insert map). The pilot, Louis Bishop, too was surrendered on the admiral's orders to the Japanese for interrogation. Rumored to have been beheaded, Bishop instead was sent to POW camp in occupied China; he too managed to escape two years later. In June, two British soldiers escaped from a Japanese POW camp on the banks of the Saigon River and reached a French army camp. On Decoux's command, they were returned to the Japanese and beheaded. A year later, in April, 1943, a Dutch POW escaped from a Japanese ship anchored off Cape Saint Jacques and turned himself over to Vichy authorities, seeking their protection. He too was returned on Decoux's orders and executed.
Thereafter the Japanese demanded that all allied prisoners captured by Decoux's forces be surrendered on the spot without the formality of obtaining the admiral's agreement first. At the end of August 1943, enraged at the beginning of a bombing campaign in Tonkin by the 308th Bombardment Group based in China, Decoux accepted the Japanese demands and issued orders to his administrators and military commanders to surrender all captured non-Asiatics to the Japanese on the spot.
Martin Mickelson, 'A History of French Indochina'
