Though my main area of study is on the pre-war Dutch East Indies I think I can shed some light on this question.

For the people of the Netherlands their colony in the East was an integral part of the national identity. The profits derived from trade through the VOC (Dutch East India company) had been essential for the country holding it's own against other European powerhouses like England, Germany and France after their independance (17th and 19th century). Therefore, during the 19th century where, throughout Europe national ideals were truely formed, the colony of the Dutch East Indies was a major part of the national Dutch identity. The importance of the Indonesian colony was emphasised even more due to the loss of the cape colony to England after the Napolionitic occupation of The Netherlands.

The process of nationalisation also carried over the idea of burgherdom. This term doesn't only mean 'citizenship', as the literal translation would imply, but also an ethical ideal of what it is to be a good citizen. Society strove towards emancipating it's poor and unfortunate and provide them with a path towards being a part of the successful burgherdom. This movement created boardingschools for the poor and needy and so forth.

This ideal of burgherdom was also carried over to the East. The Indonesian people where regarded as being 'culturally challenged' in that all the negative aspects that were atributed to the Indonesians (lazyness, primitivism, prone to submit to baser pleasures) were thought to stem from their cultural upbringing.

So, under the newfangled zealousy of converting these 'culturally disabled' people to proper burghers, the early years of the twentieth century saw a growing strife towards educating these poor people and giving them the oppurtunity of becoming true Dutch burghers. This ethical policy meant that Indonesian kids got education, at the cost of getting removed from their traditional backgrounds and culture. Very literally so, they got to eat Dutch meals and every bit of Indonesian culture of cuisine was forbidden.

A side effect was that some of these educated people started thinking about their own comeuppance and nationalism. The strive to actively subdue a culture tends to really entrench said cultural ideals. Indonesian people had always kind of accepted the Dutch occupation (kind of, there was quite a bit of struggle, but that's not the point), but now people started thinking about what this Indonesian culture was and why the Dutch where trying to subdue it.

So, in the Interwars years some groups started forming of Indonesian dissenters. The Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI or Indonesian Communist Party) and Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI or Indonesian National Party). These parties were regarded as minority parties or rebels by the Dutch governement and they were subdued by having their leaders deported. The main babelesque misunderstanding in this was that the Dutch saw the Indonesian people as members of the Dutch empire and could not understand how these people would not want to be proper Dutch citizens. If only this 'cultural disability' could be fixed, everyone would be happy, would it?

It seems kind of oblivious in retrospect, but the Dutch really thought of the Dutch East Indies as being an integral part of The Netherlands, not as a colony. The Indonesians being -potentially- happy Dutch citizens. So when the war was over Indonesia had only be to be cleansed of some minority rebels, probably engaged by Japanese propaganda or communist ideas, in order to be completely liberated from the foreign oppressor: Japan. The ferocity of the Dutch troops that fought in Indonesia can be explained by a very common fallacy of war: They thought that they were the liberators. The fact that most of the people fighting had know oppression first hand or had actively liberated their own country made it worse, as the 'opponent' took the guise of whatever feeling they would have had towards the German oppressors back home.

So to recap, the 'Ethical policy' was a succes, but not in a way that the Dutch had envisioned, as some people of Indonesia began thinking about their own culture an it's importance. The Japanese occupation formed a power vacuum when it subsided after the war. Indonesian nationalists jumped into that vacuum, to seek independance. Those people were seen as an extension of Japanese oppression and they stood in the way of 'liberating' this Dutch, far-off, provence. Unfortunately the outcome was a bloody war that wasn't necessary at all. It can be explained, though from the perspective of a country that had seen the horrors of oppession first hand and wished to liberate their fellow countrymen (however misguided that idea).

Sources:

Bosma, U, R Raben, and W Willems, De geschiedenis van Indische Nederlanders (Amsterdam, 2006).

Stoler, Ann Laura, 'Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia', Carnal knowledge and imperial power: race and the intimate in colonial rule, in: Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (ed. by), (Berkeley, Los Angeles en London, 2002).

Veur, PW Van der, The lion and the gadfly: Dutch colonialism and the spirit of EFE Douwes Dekker (Leiden, 2006).

Cooper, F, Colonialism in question: Theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley, Los Angeles en London, 2005).

Sas, NCF Van, 'Fin-de-siècle als nieuw begin. Nationalisme in Nederland rond 1900', BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 106 (1991), 595–609.

I'm going to try and answer your question from a French perspective.

You should think people would learn how terrible life is during occupation by another country.

You have access to far more information than the average French person would have between 1945 and 1954. I have looked at some French school books and children's books from the post war era. They are what we, today, would consider to be condescending BUT if you were an average French citizen in 1945 how would you get information about Indochina?

The information that will be presented by the mass media will be biased/censored, showing what France is doing is good for the Vietnamese and that the people fighting the French are the bad guys.

The other thing to keep in mind, relating to French colonies in general, is that these colonies are what enabled France to keep fighting. They lost the mainland but, eventually, were able to regain there colonies in Africa which was super important for them. While the US and UK consider France to have been a minor partner the French didn't and don't see it this way. EVERY COUNTRY WHO WAS ON THE ALLIED SIDE SEE THEMSELVES AN IMPORTANT PARTNER no matter if its Norway, Canada, Poland or France.

The last thing to remember is the racism which was (and is but to a lesser extent) a part of white western European culture. This can be seen, for example, in the French not using Arabic troops to help liberate Paris but instead using Spanish volunteers since they were 'white'. I could bring up other examples from UK/US/Canada/Australia (not sure about New Zealand to be honest) but basically at this time, 1945, there was not a big push for practical real equality despite the lip service given to it in theory.

The book 1945-1947 La France de De Gaulle (Tallandier 1988) states (my translations) that after the deceleration of independence by Hô Chi Minh the 2nd Armoured Division of Leclerc goes to Indochina to reestablish French legality. and that when De Gaulle heard about the deceleration of independence that:

In his eyes it is null and void. Not that the accession to independence of colonized countries seemed to him to be excluded. On the contrary, he sees it as being a mark of the current epoch. But the independence of these countries is only conceived by France after negotiations and with strategic, economic and cultural counterparts. It is therefore unreasonable and inadmissible for this independence to be proclaimed unilaterally. If the "reasonable" attitude was flouted in Syria and Lebanon, the bad policy of Britain was to blame. If it is not better understood in Vietnam, the fault lies with the USA (ibid pp 2851)

Which basically shows that at this point it was still De Gaulle running the show and he was paranoid and distrustful of, what he would consider to be, badly handled decolonization as well as UK/USA/Vietnam.

The other thing the book above makes one aware of is how many OTHER THINGS were happening in France in 1945. A new constitution which was voted in a referendum, reconstruction of destroyed cities, settling the scores with people who had collaborated, return of prisoners of war, black markets and their scandals, return of professional football, new plays/books/movies/songs etcetcetc which all were probably more important and closer to the average French person than what was going on in some Asian country on the other side of the world.