The First Indochina War is usually remembered as a war between France and Vietnam. But that view is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate. France did not mobilize its young men to fight in Indochina (as they did for Algeria). The majority of those who died fighting against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh were not French. They were Vietnamese and African. By its end, it was primarily a civil war between two Vietnamese states (the communist led DRV and the non-communist French-sponsored State of Vietnam) with heavy support from the ‘French Union’ (a more liberal, post-WWII version of the old empire). France sent colonial troops from Africa, Legionnaires, along with the French military proper. Unlike the Algerian War (1954-62), Paris never instituted the draft for Indochina, never willing to send its own men there in large numbers. The Legionnaires came from a variety of countries including Germany. There were even some Americans fighting in Indochina.

Though the DRV’s international diplomacy effort failed in the late 1940s (the communist control of its government having scared off Asian countries like Indonesia), it began to learn how to deploy an effective public diplomacy campaign. To win sympathy for itself, the DRV tried to win defectors from the other side, seeing it as a particularly effective means of delegitimizing France and the State of Vietnam. They then put those defectors to use, writing official propaganda, decrying France and the West, or promoting Marist-Leninism.

Over the course of the war, a few hundred Legionnaires deserted. A handful of French and African troops deserted as well. Most deserted for reasons other than politics (fights, crimes, alcoholism, or feeling mistreated). But some were drawn to communism. Some sympathized with the DRV and believed its propaganda about being a democratic and free society, and others were repelled by France’s attempt to hold onto its empire.

The most famous ‘cross over’ was of not a soldier though. Georges Boudarel, a Marxist and French school teacher in Vietnam, crossed over to the Viet Minh and became a prominent voice in DRV propaganda, helping edit newspapers and radio broadcasts, and propagandizing captured French troops in the DRV POW camps. He was later accused of a torturing and killing French POWS, during the 1991 ‘Boudarel Affair’.

The DRV wanted more Boudarels. They recruited German, Ukranian, and other nationalities from Legionnaire deserters. They were aided by Hoàng Xuân Nhị, a DRV official who sympathized with fascism while a studying in France during WWII. Nhi took a scholarship to study in Berlin and was still there when the war ended. He returned to Vietnam in 1946 and used his German language skills to disperse propaganda targeting German Legionnaires.

They wanted người Việt Nam mới, literally ‘new Vietnamese people’. One could become Vietnamese, marrying a Vietnamese woman, learning the language, and feel part of the revolution. The most famous ‘new Vietnamese’ was a Legionnaire deserter named Nguyễn Văn Thành (formerly Platon Alexandrovich Skrzhinsky!), a Ukrainian soldier who fought in the Soviet Army in WWII, was captured by the Nazis, and end up in France by 1945. He joined the French Foreign Legion, but deserted in 1947 and joined the DRV forces. After Vietnam split in 1954, he moved north. The DRV and Ho Chi Minh held him up as a symbol of Soviet-DRV friendship and used his family (Vietnamese wife and their daughter) in publicity – Ho even holding his young daughter at official events. He and the daughter went back to the USSR and led the Vietnamese desk for Moscow Radio. (more to come)