Well the time did come to read Marr's magnum opus. I scored a brand new hardcover for the bargain price of 33.98 AUD from Amazon U.S. via their AU store. Their pricing algorithm put up a fight but I feel like I came out on top.
This is the first piece of serious history I've tried to read. The effort, skill and care involved in its assembly is obvious even to a non-specialist. The writing is excellent; my only beef was that I felt the footnotes often contained substantive information that could've been inlined in the main text. It would've helped if I'd known more about the specifics of World War II and pre-revolutionary China. I was perplexed that the Vietnamese phrases and titles were translated but not the French; perhaps it's the case that anyone serious about Vietnamese history knows enough to get by, but surely they'd be fluent in Vietnamese. The separate appendix of words with diacritics attached is so archaic now. (The text has apparently been updated for the ebook.) The worst part is the section on French metropole politics which was dull and obscure — as French party politics so often is — and somewhat irrelevant as all sides (Vichy included) agreed on the need to recover their imperial jewel after the war. Overall the book was as good as promised.
The causes of the major famine in 1945 are laid out early on. As I understand it now, and coarsely put, the French ran the colony in a sustainable way (or at least weren't so heavy-handed as to starve the peasantry) but the extraction of resources by the Japanese war machine from 1940 to 1945 put more strain on supply than could be borne. News to me was the narrow avoidance of a second major famine later in 1945 after the Red River dikes failed mid-year; as Marr puts it so well, restoring the dikes was a test of legitimacy that the new revolutionary regime passed, though the river didn't get that high again until 1970.
The latter situation obviously pushed any remaining fence sitters in the North to stand against all occupying powers. The British in the South, there to take the surrender of the Japanese troops and repatriate them, compounded the situation by stifling the flow of rice northward and releasing and arming the French colonists incarcerated by the Japanese after their coup on March 9. (This coup was pivotal — it precipitated the revolution — but undertaken somewhat reluctantly by the Japanese after the liberation of Paris/installation of the de Gaulle regime/imminent cessation of the Japan-France alliance meant they lost trust in the Vichy colonial administrators.) Marr provides some clues as to why things didn't stick in Sài Gòn: the poor communication channels with the North, the competition amongst "Viet Minh" groups that refused to resolve their differences, the attitude of the Japanese governor (Fujio Minoda) after the coup. Inaugural Independence Day (September 2) was a total fiasco in Sài Gòn.
I wish I had known more about the China of the day as the détente between the Nationalist and Communist forces, facilitated by the U.S., as faced by the Vietnamese was complex and fascinating. Marr had good access to senior O.S.S. operatives and provides ample context for the U.S.'s schizophrenic policy toward Indochina. (Roughly Roosevelt was ambiguously keen to move past empires but Truman was more concerned about Cold War imperatives and keeping a deeply wounded France sweet.)
Against this Marr is a bit light on for structural analysis. I wanted to know how the Viet Minh (eventually) got organised over such vast distances — did Hồ Chí Minh learn anything from the Irish? — and why they were so strong so early in (remote) Quảng Ngãi. Similarly the competing (and enduring) power bases of the Hòa Hảo (what a flag) and Cao Đài are inadequately explored, perhaps because they are so far from the epochal events in Hà Nội. The Catholic Church's support of the nascent DRV is not justified beyond an appeal to the broad shoulders of Hồ Chí Minh's charisma. It's still unclear to me how Ngô Đình Diệm and brothers came to power in the South, and Marr leaves us hanging about Bảo Đại (last seen in closeup meeting Hồ Chí Minh in Hà Nội). The role of the party (the Indochinese Communist Party) is sometimes brought to the fore and sometimes omitted; often I was wondering what General Secretary Trường Chinh was up to as events unwound, especially after the big ICP meeting at Tân Trào in August. This may've helped clarify whether the Viet Minh intended to be a broad tent in the longer term (incorporating other independence-seeking political organisations) or was just flushing out the competition. And so on and on.
Marr was fortunate to interview many of the players between 1967 and 1992 and his love for archival work shines through. The colour is sometimes epic, leaving me wondering what happened to this person or that who earnt a sentence or two in one of his footnotes. At various points Marr seemed to be steering me to Stein Tønnesson's The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (1991) and I felt he stopped short on delivering on his promise to cover 1945: the text fades into a zoomed-out Epilogue after Hồ Chí Minh reads the declaration of independence on September 2. I guess Marr knew the best writers and best works always leave the reader wanting more.
Goodreads. Greg Lockhart reviewed it for JSEAS (1996), Mark W. McLeod for the American Historical Review (1997).
